Cats are going to cat, no matter where they are. You see this in videos posted from sanctuaries, too, which many people feel are the “opposite” of a zoo environment.
Watching / interacting with / messing with people is absolutely enriching for many zoo animals. People make loud noises and do weird things when you pounce close to them! I can’t add videos to a post with one video clip already, but I’ve got two that come to mind when thinking about cats actively interacting at windows.
The first was with Sophia, the elderly jaguar at Happy Hollow Zoo who unfortunately recently just passed. A couple of years ago I was hanging out there with a friend and he’s a huge cat person too, so we just camped out at her window for a while. She was alternating being up on a perch watching and patrolling and didn’t pay us much attention. But then this family with little kids came over, and they had the kids turn their back to the windows for a photo. She immediately ran up, bounced up behind the kids and pawed and mock-bit at the air. They screamed, everyone reacted, and then she just… decided that was enough and trotted back up to her perch to watch from afar. I could literally see her making the choice to go over, seeing something more interesting than two quietly adoring adults had showed up.
Second was last fall, with the lioness Ashoka at Zoo Boise. I was there for the Halloween event and obviously it was a busy day. I’d snagged some photos of her and the male earlier in the day before the hordes had arrived and, again, she didn’t care very much about me and my camera. So mid-afternoon I found myself back at the window again, with a gaggle of kiddos alongside me and her a good ten feet away, and I looked down to check my phone. BAM there’s lion paws in front of my face. And shame on me for depriving her, I didn’t do anything interesting like scream or jump or flinch. She gave up after a couple seconds and went down to paw at the kiddos… and was really interested in their treat buckets. My guess is maybe they looked like stuff she’d get enrichment in sometimes? But as little kiddos will do, after they got over the screaming, they took turns pulling little trinkets out of the baskets to show her, or tilting the buckets so she could see inside. And she was really into it!
Now, I’m not saying there isn’t some instinctual drive to stalk little loud running creatures, but even beyond that, kiddos are just good enrichment for big cats (when safely protected behind an appropriate barrier).
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