More than the years, and in particular as a youngster, few items would get me extra excited than a trip to the zoo. I enjoy animals, biology was always my favourite topic at college and getting close to so quite a few rare and exotic creatures by no means failed to get the hairs on the back of my neck standing up on end. I’ve been a frequent visitor to London Zoo my whole life and I’ve seen it evolve from getting a bit of an embarrassment and it really is close to closure in 1991 to a far much more suitable and animal friendly attraction. But there have been negative experiences as well and I have a few reservations about zoos and the part they play in conservation. As well often have I seen larger mammals pacing the exact same patch of ground in an apparently endless and numbing cycle even when they have what is usually accepted to be a massive enclosure. This is to say nothing of the difficulty in having a picture displaying some natural behaviour without the need of a load of mesh or plate glass receiving in the way a near impossibility.
One especially damaging zoological encounter occurred when on a household vacation in France, sometime in the early 90s. The situations there were extremely poor. There have been significant animals kept in extremely smaller cages and sanitation was much less than sufficient. Even as dallas petting zoo could tell that this was not how things had been supposed to be. There was a period when London Zoo was beginning to get like that with its animals not in the very best condition and its finances in a far worse one particular. But even now that they have successfully turned themselves about it nevertheless doesn’t look quite ideal that there are lions, tigers and gorillas in a modest corner of Regent’s Park. Posters on the underground network at present boast that the zoo has ‘London’s biggest penguin colony’. How numerous penguin colonies does London have?! Must it have any at all? With the very best will in the planet can any inner city sanctuary actually claim to have sufficient space to present a appropriate environment for such animals?
As an aside, to bring points back to photography for a moment, there have been an growing number of controversies about working with captive animals in your function. By all suggests take photographs of captive animals but you have to personal up when you do so and not attempt to palm it off as a shot you got in the field. A single specific scandal was when the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2009 was stripped of his title and prize funds for employing what turned out to be a semi-tame wolf in his now iconic shot. I was particularly saddened by this as it is genuinely a brilliant picture, he just ought to have come clean and stated what it actually was from the starting.
Anyway…..
It can be argued that zoos like Chester, Paignton, Whippsnade and Colchester and safari parks like Longleat and Woburn Abbey have the sort of acreage to be in a position to give an enclosure that can give the animals what they need – room to roam, space to hide, area to interact with other people of their sort or, indeed, to be solitary if that is a lot more acceptable. But then there’s still the question: are we maintaining these animals here for our own entertainment or is there a tangible advantage to them?
There are various higher profile and mainstream organisations that argue zoos, in a perfect globe, would be closed and conservation efforts focused on animals in the wild. The Born Free of charge Foundation argues that zoo-primarily based schemes that aim to breed animals in captivity and then release them into the wild are all but a myth. They say that there have only ever been three animals successfully reintroduced to the wild by British zoos: the partula snail, the British Field Cricket and Przewalski’s horse. Not a single primate or significant cat has ever produced it to the wild from a British zoo. They go on to say that captive breeding programmes only exist to offer zoos themselves with a lot more animals and have little or absolutely nothing to do with growing numbers in the wild.
One of Britain’s most popular conservationists, Chris Packham, takes a slightly different strategy. He is a fantastic believer in zoos, indeed his girlfriend runs one particular, but he believes they should focus their efforts on animals that they basically stand a opportunity of assisting. He argues that pandas, tigers and other mega-fauna are too far gone to be saved. On this front I am inclined to agree in my day job I’m a geneticist and it’s extensively acknowledged that you will need at least 5,000 folks to be interbreeding to ensure the extended term survival of a massive mammalian species less than two,000 and you happen to be in significant trouble. There are significantly less than 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild and there is not a singular breeding population of tigers that massive either, so even if there wasn’t a different tree cut down or animal hunted they only have a slow decline into illness and ill overall health to look forward to. It really is not a complete impossibility although cheetahs, my private favourite, are so genetically equivalent that you can graft skin from 1 animal to an additional with out fear of it getting rejected. This can only be the case if at some point in their past there were only a quite modest quantity of genetically similar animals left. Certainly, looking at the human genome has shown that at some point in pre-history there have been only 20,000 of us left – but then possibly we’re a special case.
Packham goes on to say that these huge, fluffy animals are emblematic of the struggle to conserve the environment and people are additional most likely to participate if there is a thing cute and fluffy to be saved. But the vast majority of the millions spent on conservation goes on just a tiny quantity of species. He argues that the money would be superior spent defending the atmosphere they live in rather than any person species spending these millions on getting up tracts of rain forest would be a improved program that way you protect the environment as a complete and the full range of biodiversity inside it.
On the other hand, there is a quite higher chance that within my lifetime several of the bigger mammals we all know and like will be extinct in the wild and if we don’t have a breeding population in captivity then they basically cease to exist and this, for many, is cause adequate to validate the existence of zoos. It is basically not sufficient to have a few battered old examples in the All-natural History Museum and as excellent as David Attenborough’s documentaries are they cannot compete with seeing an animal in the flesh. It might be the case that we can not teach a captive born animal how to survive on it is personal in the wild, but if we do not at least have a functioning copy of the design then how will we ever make it operate adequately? Zoos also operate to make certain that the populations they have are outbred and retain their hybrid vigour by swapping animals for breeding internationally so if we did ever figure out how to train captive bred animals for life in the wild then we have a stock of animals ready to go. But give me 1 year and a million pounds and I could have that all arranged for you in one freezer’s worth of little tubes.