Baby Anteater Would Much Rather Nap Than Forage For Ants

Baby anteater learns how to eat ants with the help of his favorite teddy bear ❤️

Transcript

00:00Goliath was found at the side of the road.

00:03Absolutely adorable, two months old.

00:05Sadly, his mother was hit by a car.

00:08We went and picked him up to rehabilitate Goliath.

00:12He was very shy in the beginning.

00:16Initially, when we were walking him through the jungle,

00:18in between his milk feeds, he would just cling on to us.

00:21He wouldn't want to come off at all.

00:24And gradually, over time, he grew the confidence to come off us.

00:34We were feeding him on goat's milk.

00:37He was really crazy about the milk.

00:42We were taking him out to try and encourage him to discover the world of ants and termites.

00:47He was not interested at all.

00:50He was actually quite scared of termites and ants when they crawled on him.

00:53He would try and brush them off.

00:56We would have to try and act like his mother and forage ourselves

00:59in order to encourage him to get interested in what he should be.

01:05Eventually, he got the hang of it and he started foraging himself.

01:14He was still a baby and he still needed that physical contact.

01:18So we tried to encourage him to cling on to a stuffed toy

01:21in order to protect ourselves, but also to make it a bit more natural for him in his rehabilitation.

01:29We always kept the milk in his life, even though he wasn't reliant on it.

01:34It was a good way to bring him home at night.

01:38We would have these zoomies, his ninja moves, where he would go into this really playful mood

01:43and you could really see his personality come shining through.

01:46It was really sweet.

01:52It was an amazing transformation for him to be so scared and so clingy

01:56to actually developing this goofy personality.

02:00It was a great way for him to be able to express himself.

02:04To actually developing this goofy personality where he'd feel comfortable enough to play in the jungle

02:10and lie and sunbathe and go to sleep in his natural surroundings.

02:15We decided to take that next step in his rehabilitation

02:19because we were struggling to keep up with him in the forest.

02:26We traveled through the night

02:29to this beautiful reserve.

02:31He was very scared at first because it's a completely new environment for him,

02:35but he soon very quickly settled in.

02:41It took just a few hours for him to realize that he was in ant and termite heaven.

02:48You can only compare it to sending your kids off to school.

02:52It's an incredibly bittersweet moment to see them go through that.

02:56It's an incredibly bittersweet moment to see them go off.

03:02He just knew what to do.

03:05It was an incredibly rewarding thing to see him develop into the antis he is now.