“When countries are becoming increasingly urbanized, zoos make people more aware of the wider environment. They may watch David Attenborough, but that’s no comparison to actually seeing a tiger up close.”
Here’s one of those “meanwhile” moments-of-irony that slipped by in the recent wave of news headlines about the Australian bushfires.
Early last month Sydney, Australia’s first major new zoo in more that 100 years opened in a city now under siege from some of the worst fire conditions in centuries.
The zoo’s opening touched off renewed debate over those who say the world has outgrown zoos, just as we’ve — thankfully — outgrown circuses with live, performing exotic animals, thanks to access to the Internet and the growing popularity of David Attenborough-style nature programs — and those who insist zoos are the last line of defence in the fast looming sixth mass extinction.
Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild, one argument goes — and it’s hard to disagree if, like I did, you happened to grow up in a big city and the local zoo was the only way you could see for yourself that exotic animals like polar bears and West African mona monkeys are real, they actually exist. “The city is not a concrete jungle,” the zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris said. “It is a human zoo.”
The argument that zoos are an excellent place to study the habits of human beings is less convincing, unless by studying the habits of human beings they mean the often shocking behaviour of zoo visitors, which is not what they mean at all. Science can learn about as much about human behaviour from a caged animal as animals might learn from studying prison inmates on death row.
“People forget the good that zoos do” is a common refrain, but that argument would be more convincing if zoos concentrated more on the preservation side of things — they don’t, for the most part — and less on profiting from tired parents looking to distract their hyperactive toddlers for an afternoon with some safe, family-friendly entertainment that doesn’t involve a Game Boy or video screen.
Here’s the comedian David Sedaris: “A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.”
Leave it to Michael J. Fox — a Hollywood actor — to put things in their proper perspective. “Zoos are becoming facsimiles or perhaps caricatures of how animals once were in their natural habitat,” he has said. “If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.”
Zoos have evolved significantly since they first appeared, unlike, some might argue, Homo sapiens.
Their original purpose, BBC’s Gary Nunn noted recently, was braggadocio, a way for the wealthy and well-to-do to showcase their wealth and influence through private collections of exotica. At first, there was a half-hearted nod toward scientific research but it was only a matter of time before their true raison d’être revealed itself, as tourist attractions the public would pay to see. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that conservation emerged as a priority.
©Daniel Brachlow-Pixabay
While it’s true that zoo enclosures have improved markedly over the past 50 years — the new zoo in Sydney is a good example — but detractors remain unconvinced, where they aren’t overtly hostile.
Sydney Zoo is 40kms (25 miles) from Sydney’s city centre. Even before the catastrophic bushfires that ravaged New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, at a terrible cost to the local, indigenous wildlife, Sydney Zoo was promoted as being home to Australia’s largest collection of not just iconic Australian species like the koala and kangaroo but less glamorous reptiles and birds.
From the start, Sydney Zoo invested in climate control technology, because it’s situated inland from the coast where temperatures were hotter even without the bushfires. The enclosures are designed to keep visitors and animal exhibits alike cool. Many enclosures include air conditioned “back-of-house” spaces which allows animals to rest comfortably, away from the heat and out of view of prying spectators. Some of those enclosures also feature self-explanatory “misting stations” and plenty of shade.
Detractors insist we don’t need more zoos; research studies at the University of Colorado show that confined animals in claustrophobic zoo enclosures experience an inordinate amount of boredom, stress and even fear. Zoo enclosures, obviously, reflect a tiny percentage of a wild animal’s natural range and territory.
Life spans are an unreliable indicator of how well wild species fare in captivity. Studies have shown that elephants in zoos have significantly shorter life spans than elephants in the wild.
Predators, lions for example, often live longer in captivity than they do in the wild. That may be because predators in the wild have the additional stress of hunting for their own food and staving off competition from other predators, and even their own kind.
The better zoos are designed to promote conservation, education and animal welfare. The accreditation group World Association of Zoos and Aquariums recommends that member zoos commit 10% or more of their operational expenditures to wider conservation projects.
Australia’s 103-year-old Taronga Zoo has promoted animal welfare as a core element of its mission since its inception: Nick Boyle, Taronga’s director of animal welfare, conservation and science, cites seven amphibians and reptile species he says would be extinct by now if not for the zoo’s intervention, such as the Lister’s gecko, Bellinger River turtle and Booroolong frog.
As wild habitat shrinks and animal species face extinction, the zoo debate is likely to get more heated. As it stands, though, one thing is abundantly clear. For all the talk about zoos connecting people in cities to the welfare of animals living in the wild, there’s can little evidence that zoos educate in any meaningful way. The primary market for zoos remains bored parents with hyperactive children in tow.
“We don’t need more zoos,” Marc Bekoff, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, told BBC. “The lessons zoos teach? That it’s OK to keep animals in cages.”
©Gerd Altmann-Pixabay