One of the most popular zoo animals at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm isn't an animal... are at least, not a real one. It's the artificial zebra carcass located in their African vulture exhibit. At feed time, the keepers reassemble the fake dead equid (who definitely looks like he'd seen better days, apart from being fake and dead), toss the birds' diet inside, and let the assembled vultures and storks go to town on it. I've seen similar models at other zoos - sometimes as a carcass, sometimes as a skeleton, with birds perched on horns and snaking tidbits out from between the ribs.
Do the vultures themselves care? Probably insofar as it offers a feeding challenge and an opportunity to express some natural feeding behaviors. You could probably achieve the same effect with any number of puzzle feeders, boomer balls, and firehose toys. So yeah, you could probably come to the conclusion that this is largely done for the visitors.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. A zoo should be just as focused on conservation as it is education. A major aspect of education is letting visitors see animals behave as thy would in the wild, and that's what this does... even if the fiberglass is a little chipped these days.
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