Steve and Carla Macaluso are hoping that as their zoo’s newest leopard grows up, one thing won’t change: its color.
The Macalusos say Maccumu, or Mackie for short, is a rare silver-colored African leopard. He’s not an albino, but has a recessive gene that makes his color unlike any other.
“I’ve been to zoos all over the country, and he’s the only one I’ve seen,” Carla Macaluso said.
Steve Macaluso said usually when leopards are born with that color they either die or turn black, but Maccumu hasn’t shown any signs of losing the silver coat or getting spots since he was born Oct. 8. The Macalusos have had him at their Charlotte Metro Zoo for about three weeks after getting him from someone out West who didn’t want to be identified.
But Alan Shoemaker, an international expert on leopards at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, S.C., said the key for the leopard is waiting until it grows up. “If you handle a lot of animals, you’ll see abnormal color patterns. It happens,” he said.
One problem, he said, is trying to tell whether it really is an African leopard because there are so many different types of leopards in captivity. “There’s no way to track where the parents came from. It’s like trying to track a dog’s parents at the pound,” said Shoemaker, who keeps a registry of leopards born to zoos.
The Charlotte Metro Zoo has seven other adult leopards, weighing 150 to 200 pounds when full grown.
Right now, Maccumu is a strapping 4 pounds and gets a steady diet of dog-milk formula. After a couple weeks, he’ll get “turkey shakes,” and when he’s about 8 to 10 weeks old, he’ll start eating ground turkey. At 3 months, he’ll eat meat like the other big cats at the zoo. The Macalusos had a couple thousand pounds of Cornish hen thawing on a recent day to feed the cats.
“A lot of food is given to us,” Steve Macaluso said. “Deer hunters, stuff from freezers that has freezer burn on it. Cattle that’s died.”
But it’s still not cheap feeding all the cats. He said places like the N.C. Zoological Park in Asheboro use an institutional type feed that costs about 70 cents a pound. The meat he buys doesn’t cost that much.
Right now, Maccumu hangs out in the Macalusos’ house with a young tiger named Tony and a young lion called Chloe. The lion and tiger will grow faster and larger, but the leopard will be able to out-leap them when full grown.
Steve Macaluso says all of the big cats are expensive to keep and don’t generally make good pets, even ones that have been raised around humans. He shows a nasty scar on one hand where a big cat that he’d played with for years gashed him on a freak occasion when a wolf’s bark spooked it.
Carla Macaluso added, “You can never domesticate any kind of wild animal.”
While they’re young and cuddly, they look like neat little play things. But once they’ve grown up, people often are stuck with a wild animal they can’t handle. Steve said you can look on the Internet and find baby lions for $500 and tigers for $1,000.
He said his zoo won’t sell an animal to anyone who’s not licensed as a zoo owner or breeder. But he said there is a large network of private operations like his across the country that handle exotic animals.
He often trades animals, or sends a male of one breed to have offspring that both zoos can share.
The zoo also has two new Syrian bears that aren’t even a year old and some other new additions that are on display on weekends during the winter months. The Macalusos want to add cheetahs to their collection, but that breed is under more strict regulations so they have to team up with another zoo before they can get any.
Steve Macaluso also said he’s planning to make the Charlotte Metro Zoo a nonprofit operation, which would allow him to bring in more donations. The zoo opened in Rowan County in June 1996.
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