It’s Pumpkin Smashing Season At Zoos Across The Country

ACROSS AMERICA — Animals at zoos across the country are getting a taste of Halloween — literally — as hey’re given pumpkins in a seasonal enrichment activity that’s both fun and serious.

As it usually happens at these October events at zoos across the country, pumpkins are left in animals’ enclosures, and they’re free to do whatever they want with them. They may eat them — pumpkins are rich in fiber and beneficial nutrients — or they may smash or toss them around like balls.

Animals known to be tool users analyze them. Snakes may find a hallowed out jack-o-lantern an interesting hiding place. The whole idea is to provide mental stimulation for the animals.

Enrichment activities like this give animals a creative outlet for physical and mental exercise and keep an animal’s life interesting. That’s as important to their welfare as nutrition and veterinary care, according to the National Zoo.

Zoos have been giving pumpkins to animals almost as long as they’ve existed, according to Ron Evans, formerly the curator of primates at the Cincinnati Zoo and now the general curator at Kentucky’s Louisville Zoo.

The Cincinnati Zoo popularized pumpkin smashing in the 1990s as a way for the staff to talk about its animals, particularly those species that are endangered. Evans said.

“It gives us the opportunity to talk about conservation issues or whatever else we want to tag on to it when people are there,” Evans told The Guardian in 2015.

Now, Halloween-themed events are common at zoos across the country.

The Cincinnati Zoo holds HallZOOween that will conclude with pumpkins smashed to smithereens. The Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Arizona, holds a Smash Bash and the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle holds a two-day Pumpkin Bash. Kids in costume get in free and can go trick-or-treating s they see their favorite animals crushing, stomping and smashing gourds in the “Pumpkin Palooza.”

Sometimes, zoos bring out the ghoul — although the significance of the sugar-free Jell-O and spaghetti the Cincinnati Zoo and Detroit Zoo staff, respectively, put inside pumpkins to resemble brains was more for zoo patrons than the animals.

Fiona, the princess of the zoo hippopotamus world, swallowed her pumpkin whole. Elephants at the Portland Zoo smashed 650-or-so-pound pumpkins with their massive feet, then delicately picked through the gourd’s guts to find the meat.

Here’s a video of some gorillas at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago eating and playing with pumpkins:

Events like this are also a good way for local pumpkin patches to get rid of gourds without adding to the volume of wasted food in landfills, where it emits harmful greenhouse gasses.

Overall, U.S. pumpkin growers produce more than 1 billion pounds of pumpkins every year, but only 15 percent of the crop is used in pumpkin-based food products, according to the Agriculture Department.

“Driving around after Halloween, you see people with pumpkins on top of their garbage cans. All of this will go to a landfill and become methane gas,” Kay McKeen, the executive director of SCARCE, an environmental education organization based in Illinois, told National Geographic last fall.

Landfills contribute 14 percent of U.S. methane emissions every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

What the heck, we’re all primates, why not smash a few pumpkins yourself? The Department of Energy offers an idea for some Halloween hijinks that may remind you of your youth: a neighborhood pumpkin-smashing party.