Leslie
Kaufman’s May 27, 2012 NY Times article entitled “Zoos’ Bitter Choice: To Save Some Species,
Letting Others Die” raises some interesting questions for zoo professionals.
How do we “conserve animals
effectively” as we “winnow species” in our care in order to devote more
resources to the chosen few – a process Kaufman astutely says is “less like
Noah building an ark and more like Schindler making a list”?
Many people suggest that the
millions of dollars we spend on zoos should, instead, be sent directly to the
wild. According to Dr. Steven
L. Monfort, the director of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, “We as a society have to decide if
it is going to be ethically and morally appropriate to simply display animals
for entertainment purposes.” Dr. Monfort wants zoos to raise more money for the
conservation of animals in the wild and to make that effort as important as
erecting fancier accommodations for their captive collections. Zoos, he said,
should build facilities — not necessarily open to the public — that are large
enough to handle whole herds of animals so that more natural reproductive
behavior can occur. And less emphasis should be placed on animals that are
popular attractions but are doing fine in the wild, like African elephants and
California sea lions, Dr. Monfort said, adding that they should be replaced
with animals in desperate need of rescuing.
But that is going to be a
challenge. If it were not for zoos and those “fancier accommodations”, millions
of dollars in conservation funding would never be raised in the first place.
The fact that zoos can generate the public support, both in attendance and
dollars, is an indicator of what a powerful message zoos can generate.
Many
zoo directors say that a radical reordering is not called for and that each zoo
does valuable work even if conserving just a few species. But Dr. Monfort is
not satisfied. He wants all zoos within the Association of Zoos & Aquariums to aim higher on conservation
efforts. “I am comfortable with raising the standards for zoos so that
eventually it will be harder and harder to be accredited unless you are doing
that,” he said in an interview. “If you can’t keep up, then you probably need
to be dropped off the bottom.”
The best way to teach
respect for and even awe of nature is to allow people to experience it – first
hand. For most of us, who will never visit Africa to see giraffes in the wild,
that experience occurs in the local zoo. It is one thing to see a giraffe on
television, but it is quite another to have a giraffe wrap its long, wet tongue
around a branch as you feed it at your local zoo.
But perhaps we do need to
draw some distinctions and stop treating every non-human animal in the same manner.
A frog, a zebra, and a chimpanzee are very different creatures with very
different needs. Maybe we need to urge northern zoos to stop trying to keep
elephants and urge southern zoos to stop trying to keep polar bears. And maybe
we need to stop all zoos from keeping great apes and whales. If we are going to
keep, breed, and preserve some species, maybe it should be done, as Dr. Monfort
suggests, in special preserves or villages like, for example, the AZA elephant
preserve in Florida. Maybe the biggest question of all is how do we keep pride,
politics, and bureaucracy out of the decision-making
process and do what is right for the animals?
