Adrienne Watson - Research Paper - WIldlife Conservation

 Adrienne Watson

Wildlife Conservation and the Possible Negative Effects of Zoos

  When I was a kid, I went to the zoo all the time with my family. I loved animals as a kid. During the summer I would beg my father to take me to the zoo every other weekend. When I was in high school I got a summer job working at the zoo. Seeing the animals every day is a lot different than seeing them once a month. It is more apparent when watching the birds that the animals do nt have anything to do. They literally just sit in one place while people gawk and stare.

   Aside from taking care of captive animals, many zoos also contribute to the care of their wild counterparts. The Toledo Zoo, in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy, is helping to restore butterfly habitats in Ohio, and the Bronx Zoo has channeled more than $3 million toward conservation projects in central Africa. Some zoos also take in abandoned animals raised as pets that wouldn't otherwise have a home. Leo the Snow Leopard was adopted by the Bronx Zoo after his mother was killed by hunters.

   Zoos are considered a great teaching tool where children and adults can learn a lot about wild animals. There are displays in front of the enclosures explaining the animal’s origins and behavior. In reality, most people only spend a few seconds at each display, waiting for the animals to do something “exciting,” but they gain little, if any, true understanding of the animals. Zoo animals have to spend day after day, week after week, year after year in the exact same enclosure. This makes their lives very monotonous. Zoos however, hardly teach you anything about how wild animals live and behave in nature. Confining animals in artificial and often small enclosures inside zoos is stressful and causes them harm.

  Anyone who has ever visited a zoo knows that many captive animals spend most of their time sleeping or doing nothing. When they are not sleeping, they are likely to be pacing back and forth, back and forth, along a single line. If they are not doing that, they are probably practicing unnatural behavior, such as vomiting and re-swallowing their food, eating their feces, being abnormally aggressive, or excessively grooming themselves. In the wild, animals spend most of their time searching for it, capturing it, and eating it. In zoos, food is provided once a day, requires no capturing and is placed on the floor in a pan that requires no searching. The animal gobbles down the chow in 5 minutes, leaving the rest of the day for the animal to be bored.

  Government and zoo-association inspectors regularly scrutinize zoos, and any institution that repeatedly let its animals starve or become injured would be closed down. Now, at last, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and zoo professionals also expect zoos to provide for animals' psychological well-being. “The key term is behavioral enrichment. That is, zoos are obligated to enrich an animal's environment in ways that permit it to engage in a variety of activities, which mimic those that would be performed in the wild. Behavioral enrichment assumes many. A few droplets of animal or plant scent essences can be placed around an exhibit. Cats commonly rub against a scented object until they replace the foreign smell with their own. Playing cassettes of natural sounds, including prey sounds, also elicits natural behavior. Instead of leaving a pan of food in the center of the exhibit, keepers can divided the same food into four meals, and hide it around the enclosure. Chimpanzees and bears, for example, love to pry or lick out raisins, blackberries, honey, or peanut butter stuffed into crannies or into holes drilled in logs. Gorillas can even use twigs to extract these treats, as they would in the wild. The caracal, an African cat that can leap as high as 15 feet in the air to catch its prey, is happy to jump for its dinner when keepers hang food high in its exhibit. “Live goldfish were introduced to some monkeys at the San Diego Zoo to practice not only natural feeding behavior but also natural social learning” (Keone 8). When the fish were introduced, an adult male monkey captured them using a technique he had probably learned in the wild. The monkey's offspring in the same enclosure learned his fishing method by watching him, and the technique spread to a group in a second enclosure. Live deer will probably not be put into the tigers' exhibit anytime soon. But I think observing an animal behaving as they would in the wild is much more interesting and a better learning experience than an animal doing nothing.

  Animals in zoos are bored creatures that spend their days shuffling, swaying and pacing back and forth. Should the Los Angeles Zoo feed live fish to some of its carnivorous animals so they can exercise their natural hunting behavior? If we feed live fish to bears, where do we draw the line? Would we also feed live rabbits or sheep to tigers? In addition, captive animals do not get to choose their mates, and they are sometimes artificially inseminated so that their babies can be sold or traded to other zoos.

  Some animals perform better in captivity than others. Even in optimal conditions, experts say it is incredibly difficult to provide for the needs of captive elephants. Wild elephants wander as much as 30 miles a day in very large groups, grazing on leaves and stopping to splash in the occasional watering hole. In most zoos, the elephants are lucky to get a few acres and a roommate or two. Animals are unable to thrive in small enclosures, especially with unnatural weather and climates. The lone elephant at the Edmonton Zoo is locked inside a barn when the zoo is closed and during Edmonton’s frigid winter months, which means she spends most of her time indoors, without much room to move. One fifth of elephants live alone or with one companion. Many zoos ignore minimum group sizes of regional zoo association guidelines. “The American Zoo and Aquarium Association recommend that breeding facilities keep herds of 6 to 12 elephants” (Rees 5). The British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums recommends having at least four cows in an enclosure. Recently, Europe and North America have made progress with some zoos no longer keeping elephants and with others investing in improved facilities and forming larger herds. Even zoos that are capable of supporting a large herd usually only house females. Bull elephants become increasingly difficult to handle as they mature and pose the greatest hazards. Many zoos struggle to maintain adult male elephants, which in captivity are a lethal danger to their keepers, to themselves and other elephants. Yet elephants are endangered in the wild, and their survival may soon depend on captive breeding, which requires captive adult males.

   Many zoos, like those in the United States, are supposed to at least meet the minimum requirements spelled out in documents like the Animal Welfare Act. But standards are not always adequate or strictly enforced. “Should we send animals for which we have no space to zoos in the developing world? If we refuse on the grounds that those zoos are not subject to rigorous U.S. standards of animal care, how can we expect citizens in those countries to support conservation of endangered local species that they have never seen” (Diamond 10). There are already many species that survive only because self-sustaining captive populations were established before the animals became extinct in the wild. Those species include our own California condor, our black-footed ferret, and our Guam rail, as well as the Arabian oryx, the Przewalski's horse, and the Pere David's deer. Their survival in captivity has bought time during which conservation biologists can try to find, improve, and protect suitable habitat for the species to reestablish a wild population.

  Thousands of tourists, Americans included, pay to pet young lions in South African animal parks each year.  At face value this does not seem like such a bad thing. The cubs seem to be cared for, get access to veterinary care and tourists enjoy a cuddle and a cool picture that they can later post on all the social media. They are especially social when young, making them prime petting material for smiling tourists and their cameras. What they do not know is the demand they create for the cuddly, cute animals often leads to their cruel deaths once they become too mature to be trusted around humans. The businesses breed the lions to have a steady supply of cubs for their customers to pet. But once they mature, they become too dangerous to be around the tourists and they become a burden to the zoos. Lions eat meat. Meat is expensive.  They rarely land up in reputable zoos around the world and they also do not repopulate wilderness areas as the guides would have you believe. The older lions are sent to these farms, where for prices up to $100,000 you can go into an enclosure and shoot a lion. Raised in captivity, they usually do not run when they see people. Most of the tourists who pay to play with cubs believe that they're helping the animals. But whenever you pet a lion cub, you are directly enriching the canned lion hunting industry.

  The concept of re-introduction is plagued with serious difficulties. Species threatened by poaching will never be safe in the wild until attitudes change and the culture of poaching is eradicated. Even if the above problems can be overcome, there are still difficulties with the process of re-introduction. Captive bred animals have often missed out on valuable lessons their parents would have taught them and therefore often do not have the instincts or knowledge to survive in the wild. The Arabian Oryx, the California condor, and the Przewalski's horse have already been reintroduced to the wild. Reintroductions are being planned for many other endangered species, as soon as sufficient numbers have been bred in captivity and sufficient wild habitat can be secured. When most of the surviving individuals of a species are descendants of only a few fathers or mothers, they are likely to be siblings or cousins. There are only seventeen sexually mature Asian bull elephants in accredited North American zoos, which leave a narrow genetic base to guard against inbreeding. Inbreeding often leads to infertility, higher risk of disease and other genetic problems. Many animals, like elephants, are difficult to maintain and breed in captivity. Every capture of a wild individual to increase the diversity of the captive population but also causes a big reduction in the wild population. The time to start serious captive breeding programs is when the warning signs are already clear but long before the wild population is in danger of extinction.

  Until recently zoos were viewed primarily as places to display animals to a curious public. These days their main function is to contribute to the well-being and future of their residents. The first and last question now asked when zoos face any decision about animals is: "What is best for the animals?" Should the zoo be maintaining macaques, which may soon be endangered, and will need captive breeding colonies? Macaques often harbor a herpes-B virus potentially fatal to human. In some macaque colonies almost all individuals harbor the virus. Once infected, a person stands a good chance of dying. Faced with those odds, some zoos have already gotten rid of their macaques. A generation ago, bears and other wild animals were seldom seen in populated areas. Now, encounters between citizens and wildlife are as common on residential neighborhoods as in Yellowstone National Park. In New Jersey, bears are now so common that officials scheduled the first bear hunt in more than thirty years last December despite protests from animal rights activists. Across the western part of the U.S., mountain lion attacks have joggers avoiding suburban parks, while in Beverly Hills, countless residents who have lost a dog to coyotes.  Some animals are adjusting to human habitats. In a perfect world, these problems would not exist and neither would zoos. No animals would be threatened with extinction. All people would live near vast, untamed natural habitats and have daily opportunities to observe and learn to appreciate animals.

   Animals should be observed in their natural habitat, where they are living the live that they were meant to live. If we can't afford to visit them, we can learn about these amazing wild animals by watching wildlife documentaries, television programs or by reading about them on the internet or in books. Using the money for conservation programs in the wild, by creating more protected reserves, will not only allow the animals to live in their natural habitat, it also helps balance ecosystems. We cannot do much about zoos that only care about money, but we can help and support those zoos that actually want to make a difference and improve the quality of life for the animals. It really depends a lot on what zoo you are talking about. It also depends on whether you are referring to the well-being of a single animal living in a zoo or an animal, thousands of miles away, benefiting from the zoo's research and conservation efforts. If you had the communicative power of Dr. Doolittle, Leo the snow leopard would likely tell you that zoos are great; however Maggie the elephant might respond by slapping you with her trunk.

                                                          Works Cited

“Back to the Wild”. 60 Minutes. CBS, New York. 15 March 2015. Television.

“The Lion Whisperer”. 60 Minutes. CBS, New York. 30 November. Television.

Conway, William. “ Elephants in Captivity”. National Geographic. 5 May 2013.

Diamond, Jared. "Playing God At The Zoo." Discover pp. 78-85. Web. 10 May 2015.

  Koene, Paul. "Behavioral Ecology Of Captive Species: Using Behavioral Adaptations To Assess And Enhance Welfare Of Nonhuman Zoo Animals." Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science pp. 360-380. Web. 6 May 2015.

  Maple, Terry L. "Elevating The Priority Of Zoo Animal Welfare: The Chief Executive As An Agent Of Reform." Zoo Biology pp. 1-7. Web. 13 May 2015.

Rees, Paul A. "The Sizes Of Elephant Groups In Zoos: Implications For Elephant Welfare." Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science pp. 44-60. Web. 6 May 2015.