animal enrichment
n.— «At one point in the afternoon, an Oakland Zoo employee tossed two boxes covered in camel hair and filled with meat cutlets into the tiger pit, a process called “animal enrichment” that simulates prey. The two tigers, whose names the zoo keeps private to prevent people from taunting them, quickly began tearing the meat from the boxes.» —“S.F. Zoo Tiger Attack” by Carri Sturrock San Francisco Chronicle (California) Dec. 27, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus, a new book shows what’s lost when a language dies: when there...
Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one...