By Laura Geggel, Senior
Writer | July 16, 2018 03:37pm ET
Nine animals have died since an
escaped jaguar attacked them at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans on Saturday
(July 14). But the jaguar didn't actually eat the animals — including red
foxes, alpacas and an emu — so why did it attack so many?
The answer? The 3-year-old
male jaguar likely
went into a mode known as "surplus killing," in which a predator kills
more prey than it can possibly eat at one time, said Howard Quigley, executive
director of the jaguar program at Panthera, a global wildcat-conservation
organization, who isn't involved with the jaguar at the Audubon Zoo.
"It just means that they go
into a kind of excess killing mode," Quigley told Live Science.
"There's evidence of mountain lions getting into sheep pens and killing 20
or 30 sheep. When they get the fight reaction, they go and make the kill, and
if there's another accessible prey, they go and make the kill again." [On the
Lam: 10 of the Greatest Animal Escape Artists]
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