Why meerkats

They average about 20 inches 50 centimeters long, including their tail. These extremely social animals live together in burrows, which they dig with their long, sharp claws. Living underground keeps mob members safe from predators and out of the harsh African heat.

These burrows can be 16 feet 5 meters long and contain multiple entrances, tunnels, and rooms. A group will use up to five separate burrows at a time. Meerkats only go outside during the daytime. Each morning, as the sun comes up, the mob emerges and begins looking for food. They use their keen sense of smell to locate their favorite foods, which include beetles , caterpillars, spiders, and scorpions. They'll also eat small reptiles, birds, eggs, fruit, and plants.

Back at the burrow, several babysitters stay behind to watch over newborn pups. This duty rotates to different members of the mob, and a sitter will often go all day without food. The babysitters' main job is to protect pups from meerkats in rival mobs, who will kill the babies if they can.

While the rest of the mob forages for food, one or more meerkats, called a sentry, will find a high point, like a termite mound, and perch on their back legs, scanning the sky and desert for predators like eagles , hawks , and jackals.

A sentry who senses danger will let out a high-pitched squeal, sending the mob scrambling for cover. In fact, higher stress indicators are associated with smaller enclosures and smaller group sizes so it's really important that meerkats are kept in groups so that they can thrive. If meerkats don't have the right environment in which to express their natural behaviour, or if they're kept alone or in the wrong social grouping, they're prone to developing behaviour problems such as pacing, head bobbing, over-grooming and self-mutilation.

Due to the stress of being removed from a group, it would be unsuitable to keep a meerkat in captivity. Meerkats also do not make suitable domesticated animal due to their wild nature and demanding needs.

Typically, the UK household is rarely ever a suitable habitat for one of these explorative creatures. In fact, every day in the wild, meerkats roam territories that can extend for several kilometres and encompass dozens of overnight burrows and hundreds of emergency bolt-holes. Access to this type of environment is essential for their ultimate wellbeing. Of course, this simply cannot be achieved in enclosures such as rodent cages or in any kind of typical household.

Additionally, meerkats can be aggressive and deliver a really nasty bite. Plus, they can especially be aggressive to people they don't know. Of course, these aren't ideal traits for a household pet. As meerkats naturally spend hours every day in the wild digging for food or making new burrows this can become problematic in the home.

As they're deprived of this opportunity it can often lead to carpets, other flooring and skirting boards being destroyed. Furthermore, as scent-marking is an important mode of communication for meerkats, in the home this can mean brown smelly marks on your furniture!

While it's currently legal to own a meerkat as a pet, it's also a legal requirement under the Animal Welfare Act that owners meet all of the needs of the animal in a way that allows for natural behaviours.

We believe this would be impossible to do in a home environment. We're always responding to calls we've received from members of the public concerned about the welfare of meerkats kept as pets or regarding the sale of meerkats in local pet shops in unsuitable conditions. If you are concerned, please contact us. Although we would never recommend a Meerkat as a pet, there're many animals in our care who could be the perfect pet for your family. Whether it's a gerbil, a mouse, a cat or a rat, by rehoming an animal from us you'll be helping to make a significant difference in an animal's life.

Fiercely territorial, meerkats often find themselves having to defend their area against a rival meerkat group, sometimes in a fight to the death, so the earlier they can deal with a bit of rough and tumble, the better. Do we find pudgy meerkat kittens so appealing because they look like human babies? Very probably. Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in , theorised that a large head, round face, podgy body and big eyes are associated in our minds with an infant human baby and triggers care-taking behaviour in us.

When your favourite snack is a scorpion, introducing this to your babies as elevenses can be a pretty risky business, so mama meerkats chop the tails off before giving the scorpion to their offspring. Bit like the first time a child uses chopsticks, but probably not so messy. So the human behaviour demonstrated by meerkats turns out to have very sound environmental, and occasionally bloodthirsty, reasons behind it.

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth have discovered that dogs produce more facial movements, including raising their eyebrows and making their eyes appear bigger puppy dog eyes when a human is paying attention to them.