Hello everyone and welcome to our rhino enclosure here at Edinburgh Zoo! My name is James and I'm here with our lovely Jamie, one of our rhino keepers. 

Can you introduce us to our lovely boys here?

We've got two Indian one horn rhinos here at Edinburgh Zoo. Over on the right we have Qabid, and on the left we have Sanjay. They are four and five years old, and they've been with us for a few years now. 

So with these guys being so big, how do we work with them? Because you can't just suddenly shift them into one part of the enclosure and shift them again!

How do you work with rhinos?

So these guys are one of the species which we don't work in the enclosure with. So I myself work in the "hoofstock" section, we do work in with most of our species but this is one of the exceptions, because as you can see these guys are huge! And being only four and five these guys are still got a lot of growing to do, they can reach a weight of about two and a half tons once they reach full size, and because of that we can't go with them because they don't know their own strength. If you were to go in there and they were to tap you, that would be enough to injure you quite severely! 

So if you look around the enclosure you can see just that behind the lines we've got "slides" everywhere. All of the slides around the enclosure can be operated from the outside, and if we do need to move the rhinos around we can call them - they do respond to their names - or if we are struggling a little food reward is usually just enough to move them where we want them to be! 

So they very much march on their stomachs then!

What sort of food do they love?

These guys are herbivores, so they are what we call a "browser". I don't know if you'll be able to see it or not, but they have got a very pointed flexible lip - which I think Qabid is about to demonstrate - so you can see it just there! That is perfect Qabid, well done! 

So what I mean by "browser" is rather than eating grass, which would be a grazer, these guys have got this flexible lip which is a very adaptable mouthpiece which used to grab onto branches and strip all the leaves. They actually eat the branches as well, so out in the wild they will eat hundreds and hundreds of species of plants all day long. They can clear a very large area of land in a short period of time, and they are very important -  this is one of their natural purposes. Out in the wild they're basically natural landscape gardeners! They'll clear lots of plants, lots of areas, and what this means is all the other plants in the habitat can then grow and thrive as well. 

Here at the zoo unfortunately we don't have 200 odd species of plants! We can give them what we have though, so we cut them browse daily. Not so much during winter, so in winter we give them bamboo. Then during the summer we give them what we call "browse", so this can be parts of trees from all around the park. We've got hundreds of acres here, lots and lots of trees which we can use. Things such as sycamore, willow, hazel... you name it, these guys get it! 

We also get a little bit of a food reward as well, things such as banana and carrot if we're training them. And to box them out they get lots of hay as well, so these guys can easily eat two or three bags of pellets and about two to three bales of hay every single day.

Now it's always the common joke that what zookeepers do most of all, day in day out, is obviously picking poo! Now the types of animals I used to look after, are lots of our smaller animals, whether it be things like our armadillos or our reptiles. But Jamie, you've got back-breaking work to do! So when cleaning out these guys, just how much they produce?

Are they hard to clean out?

They are essentially bottomless pits and all that food does come out the other end! So we can easily be taking out hundreds of kilos every single day! We can take out up to three or four wheelbarrows, so it's very back-breaking cleaning out these guys. 

What's special about their indoor pool? 

They're very lucky these guys, the pool they've got in the bottom house is actually heated to 20 degrees, so these guys have essentially got their own hot tub, so they're very spoiled! 

Jamie thank you very much for talking about our rhinos with us, you've got a lot of work to get back too and have a good day folks!