Toronto Zoo watching its cats after tiger tests positive in N.Y.

The news that a tiger tested positive for COVID-19 at the Bronx Zoo in New York dropped like a bomb at the Toronto Zoo.

Staff traded messages after news broke Sunday night. By Monday morning, new precautions — including wearing masks, gloves and coveralls — had been put in place to protect the facility’s four tigers and its other big cats that include lions, cheetahs, clouded leopards, snow leopards and jaguars.

“It was disturbing,” said Andrew Lentini, the senior director of wildlife at the zoo, when he learned about the coronavirus infecting a tiger. “It wasn’t on my radar at all. We didn’t realize any cat species would be susceptible.”

No one who works at the Toronto Zoo has tested positive for the disease and no animals are exhibiting any symptoms of COVID-19, Lentini said.

The Bronx Zoo’s four-year-old Malayan tiger, Nadia — and six other tigers and lions that have also fallen ill — are believed to have been infected by a zoo employee who wasn’t yet showing symptoms. The first animal started showing symptoms March 27 and all are doing well and expected to recover, said the zoo, which has been closed to the public since March 16 amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in New York.

Lentini said the Toronto Zoo has for years taken precautions against infecting its great apes — western lowland gorillas and Sumatran orangutans — from illnesses such as the flu and the common cold.

Staff have doubled down on those procedures in recent months after the new coronavirus made its way out of China, Lentini said. Anyone entering the zoo is now required to undergo a screening procedure and any contractors who will come near the great apes or big cats will have to gear up with protective equipment.