Two wild cats got a new life

Two lynx born and raised in a small room made of concrete at the University of Oslo was going to be killed when the department for animal testing was shut down. It was no cruel testing going on, but the animals welfare was not good enough.  They escaped death and was given a new home in a wilderness park further north in Norway. Where they now live happy days compared with their conditions before. That is in a huge enclosure consisting of more or less the same type of nature they would have in the wild.

The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) is a wild cat native to European and Siberian forests. It’s bigger than other lynxes, and is also known as the European lynx. It is the only wild cat in Scandinavia, and the wild population has grown in Norway during the last decade. According the Red list of threatened species the Lynx have been released in several areas of Europe in an effort to reintroduce this elusive predator including Switzerland, Slovenia, Italy, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany and France.

I visited the two wild cats about a month ago, at the same time I visited the wolves and the wolverine I have written about on this blog recently. The people working there told me that this sping was the first time they had seen the wild cats climbing trees since they arrived a few year ago. In the beginning they were terrified of the nature because trees and open space was new to them. The mother and daughter are now living more like wild animals. They have little chance of hunting of course, but are served moose and reindeers killed by train or cars, or other kind of meats.

I wrote an article about them in the newspaper Nationen, who have a short version on the web. There are more photos in my web gallery and here is a link.