'World's Smallest Buffalo' Beats the Heat With the Help of a Swimming Hole and an Inner Tube
With the heat dome causing temperatures to soar across the nation this week, everyone has been looking for a way to cool off—humans and animals alike. And that includes zoo animals. When the heat gets really bad, good keepers find ways to help the creatures in their care, such as providing ice blocks for enrichment or putting pools or other water features in their enclosures.
This lowland anoa, a goat-like buffalo living in the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington, certainly likes to wallow in the water when the weather gets warmer. And she’s not above playing with floaties, either.
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In the video, a black lowland anoa is seen wallowing in a watering hole, clearly enjoying the cooling respite from the hot sun. An inner tube floats nearby and the buffalo rests her face on the float as if it’s a pillow. This anoa is named Baby Bean, and she has been part of the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium’s collection of Asian animals for over twenty years.
Related: Video of Water Buffalo Sweetly Snuggling a Small Child Is Touching People's Hearts
The Rarely-Seen Anoa
For Baby Bean, the zoo’s only anoa, life’s pretty sweet. She’s been living in the facility’s Asian Forest Sanctuary for most of the twenty-two years of her life, grazing freely on the vegetation and hanging out with primates like siamangs and gibbons. Unlike many ungulates, the Indonesian anoa is a shy, solitary creature that roams tropical forests and functions as a sort of “gardener” by grazing upon the underbrush and keeping pathways clear for other animals. This grazing not only helps the understory not get choked, allowing for a greater diversity of plants to grow, but as the animal travels and graves, they fertilize the soil with their feces.
The Tiniest Buffalo
Few people are aware of this tiny creature. Anoas stand at only thirty inches tall, and though they look like little goats, they are actually related to buffalo. They aren’t a flashy species, like the Orangutan, the Tiger, or the Elephant, but they are still vital to the health of Southeast Asian rainforests, and as those environments become endangered, so too does the anoa.
Anoas have appeared in ancient art for over 35,000 years, but loss of habitat and overhunting has caused their numbers to dwindle precipitously—there are fewer than 2,500 left in the wild. According to researches, even a moderate amount of hunting can severely damage the population because anoas are slow to breed, only producing one new calf every few years. Further, their fractured habitat means it’s rare for anoas to even be able to find each other and mate.
Baby Bean is lucky to escape the fate of so many of her brethren in the wild. She has no fear of being hunted for her meat or for her horn, which is made into trophies or sometimes used in traditional medicine. (In fact, her horns are often capped with the doggie chew toy called the “Kong” in order to protect surrounding areas—as well as delicate objects like the inflatable inner tube—from getting pierced.)
But the race is on for conservation organizations in Indonesia and beyond to find a path forward for this species. Until then, it’s up to zoos like the one in Point Defiance to let their resident anoa live her best life.
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