Over the years, and specially as a youngster, few issues would get me more excited than a trip to the zoo. I love animals, biology was constantly my favourite topic at school and being close to so many rare and exotic creatures never ever failed to get the hairs on the back of my neck standing up on end. I’ve been a normal visitor to London Zoo my complete life and I’ve noticed it evolve from becoming a bit of an embarrassment and it really is close to closure in 1991 to a far additional suitable and animal friendly attraction. But there have been damaging experiences also and I have a few reservations about zoos and the part they play in conservation. As well typically have I observed larger mammals pacing the exact same patch of ground in an apparently endless and numbing cycle even when they have what is commonly accepted to be a big enclosure. This is to say absolutely nothing of the difficulty in getting a picture displaying some organic behaviour without the need of a load of mesh or plate glass finding in the way a close to impossibility.
A single especially unfavorable zoological practical experience occurred when on a family vacation in France, sometime in the early 90s. The conditions there had been very poor. There were big animals kept in very small cages and sanitation was significantly less than adequate. Even as a kid I could tell that this was not how issues have been supposed to be. There was a period when London Zoo was beginning to get like that with its animals not in the best condition and its finances in a far worse one. But even now that they have successfully turned themselves around it still does not appear pretty suitable that there are lions, tigers and gorillas in a small corner of Regent’s Park. Posters on the underground network at the moment boast that the zoo has ‘London’s most significant penguin colony’. How many penguin colonies does London have?! Need to it have any at all? With zooaventuras.mx in the planet can any inner city sanctuary genuinely claim to have adequate space to supply a appropriate environment for such animals?
As an aside, to bring items back to photography for a moment, there have been an escalating number of controversies about working with captive animals in your work. By all signifies take images of captive animals but you have to personal up when you do so and not try to palm it off as a shot you got in the field. One particular particular scandal was when the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2009 was stripped of his title and prize income for using what turned out to be a semi-tame wolf in his now iconic shot. I was especially saddened by this as it is genuinely a brilliant image, he just must have come clean and mentioned 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 capable to supply an enclosure that can give the animals what they need – area to roam, space to hide, room to interact with other people of their sort or, certainly, to be solitary if that is a lot more suitable. But then there is still the query: are we maintaining these animals here for our own entertainment or is there a tangible benefit to them?
There are a number of higher profile and mainstream organisations that argue zoos, in a perfect planet, would be closed and conservation efforts focused on animals in the wild. The Born Totally free Foundation argues that zoo-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 big cat has ever made it to the wild from a British zoo. They go on to say that captive breeding programmes only exist to present zoos themselves with additional animals and have little or nothing at all to do with growing numbers in the wild.
1 of Britain’s most popular conservationists, Chris Packham, takes a slightly diverse approach. He is a fantastic believer in zoos, indeed his girlfriend runs one, but he believes they really should concentrate their efforts on animals that they truly stand a opportunity of helping. 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 am a geneticist and it really is broadly acknowledged that you want at least 5,000 individuals to be interbreeding to ensure the long term survival of a big mammalian species much less than 2,000 and you are in critical problems. There are much less than 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild and there isn’t a singular breeding population of tigers that large either, so even if there wasn’t another tree cut down or animal hunted they only have a slow decline into disease and ill overall health to appear forward to. It’s not a complete impossibility even though cheetahs, my private favourite, are so genetically related that you can graft skin from 1 animal to yet another without worry of it getting rejected. This can only be the case if at some point in their past there have been only a extremely compact number of genetically related animals left. Certainly, searching at the human genome has shown that at some point in pre-history there were only 20,000 of us left – but then possibly we’re a particular case.
Packham goes on to say that these substantial, fluffy animals are emblematic of the struggle to conserve the environment and individuals are additional likely to participate if there is one 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 income would be greater spent safeguarding the environment they reside in rather than any person species spending those millions on shopping for up tracts of rain forest would be a greater plan that way you safeguard the environment as a complete and the full variety of biodiversity within it.
On the other hand, there is a incredibly high possibility that inside my lifetime several of the larger mammals we all know and adore will be extinct in the wild and if we don’t have a breeding population in captivity then they merely cease to exist and this, for quite a few, is purpose sufficient to validate the existence of zoos. It is basically not sufficient to have a handful of battered old examples in the Natural History Museum and as excellent as David Attenborough’s documentaries are they cannot compete with seeing an animal in the flesh. It may perhaps be the case that we cannot teach a captive born animal how to survive on it’s personal in the wild, but if we never at least have a operating copy of the design then how will we ever make it perform effectively? Zoos also operate to guarantee that the populations they have are outbred and keep 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 prepared to go. But give me 1 year and a million pounds and I could have that all arranged for you in a single freezer’s worth of small tubes.