All caged up despite zoo closure
Animals in limbo in Buenos Aires as relocation plan backfires
BUENOS AIRES: The roars of lions, snorts of rhinos and trumpets of elephants still blend with the cacophony of honking buses and screeching cars passing nearby in one of the most heavily congested areas of Argentina’s capital.
A year after the 140-year-old Buenos Aires zoo closed its doors and was transformed into a park, hundreds of animals remain behind bars and in a noisy limbo.
Developers last July promised to relocate most of the zoo’s 1,500 animals to sanctuaries in Argentina and abroad, but they had made no firm arrangements to do so. And a new master plan announced on Tuesday still doesn’t specify how they will accomplish it.
Many of the animals are so zootrained that experts fear they would die if moved, even to wild animal preserves.
Conservationists also complain that the remaining animals still live in antiquated enclosures widely considered inhumane by modern standards – and say the city government’s new plan gives few specifics of how improvements will be made.
“It’s gone from bad to worse,” said Claudio Bertonatti, a former Buenos Aires zoo director and consultant for the Fundacion Azara non-governmental organization. “Everything is set for Noah’s Ark to be shipwrecked.”
The zoo was inaugurated in 1875 on what was then a quiet patch on the outskirts of Buenos Aires but is now an urban zone of busy avenues with bleating buses near the animal cages.
The first director decided that the animals should be housed in buildings that reflected their countries of origin. A replica of a Hindu temple was built for the Asian elephants. Giraffes were housed in an Islamicinspired structure, the red panda in a Chinese pagoda. Many of those buildings remain on the 18ha site, but are in need of repair.
When Mayor Horacio Rodriguez Larreta announced its closure last year, he said the animals were a “treasure” that couldn’t remain in captivity near the noise and pollution.
Since then, some condors have been freed and about 360 other animals rescued from trafficking have been sent to other institutions.
But not a single animal owned by the city has been transferred.
City officials say the process has proved more difficult than they thought at first. Legislation had to be enacted to set standards and authorise the transfers. They only recently hired a conservationist manager to study which animals can be moved and arrange it. But it’s not yet clear how many can stand a move, or who might take them.
“We knew that this was going to take time,” Rodriguez Larreta said on Tuesday at a press conference in front of a pond where pink flamingoes swam at the former zoo.
“Speeding up the process will just put them at risk, so we’re going to take all the time that’s necessary,” he said, adding that some might have to remain in their enclosures because the risk of transferring them is too high. — AP