Cagey over future of zoos
Should we still be supporting the captivity of exotic animals for public entertainment? Ben Heather reports.
For a 50-kilogram cat evolved to wander the Himalayas, the journey to Wellington will be long and arduous.
Two snow leopards will be travelling from the United States in the next few years. They will be in transit for days, if not weeks, by road, plane or ship, in a box barely large enough for pacing. Big-cat experts will travel with them, making them as comfortable as possible, fed and watered. But it won’t be fun.
After clearing quarantine and settling in at Wellington Zoo, the leopards will go on display for the paying public in their new custom-built enclosure, where they are likely to remain until they die.
For many people, confining exotic animals and charging the public to see them is problematic. Animal rights groups, such as Born Free or Peta, say we shouldn’t have zoos at all, and that animals are worse off in captivity. Talks from zoos about breeding programmes and public education are nothing more than conservation-washing of what is, at heart, an entertainment business, they say.
And although zoo attendance in New Zealand is rising, plenty of people still report feeling uncomfortable with confining animals so far from their natural habitats.
For New Zealanders in major cities, we often pay to host these animals. Auckland, Wellington and Hamilton zoos are all owned and subsidised by local councils. Last year, Wellington City Council approved a $3.5 million grant to help Wellington Zoo build the snow leopard enclosure, on top of an annual subsidy covering about 40 per cent of the zoo’s operating costs.
Couldn’t this money be spent elsewhere, perhaps directly on saving New Zealand’s own threatened species? There are, for instance, 48 native birds that are more at risk of extinction than the snow leopard.
Auckland Zoo director Kevin Buley says that, taken globally, many of these concerns have merit. Zoos historically were not interested in caring for animals properly or aiding conservation and, worldwide, many zoos still fall into this category,
‘‘Of the thousands of entities calling themselves zoos, the vast majority should be shut down.’’
But he argues the other types, what he calls ‘‘good’’ rather than ‘‘bad’’ zoos, are more vital than ever. ‘‘We are experiencing the world’s sixth mass extinction. The role of the good zoo in countering that has never been more important.’’
People spoken to for this article agreed most New Zealand zoos, at least the big four metropolitan ones, were doing a decent job, particularly given the funding and space constraints compared to some of their larger peers overseas.
But even if we accept the existence of ‘‘good zoos’’, do we need them?
Telling a story
Ask Wellington Zoo chief executive Karen Fifield why we need snow leopards, and she says it comes down to telling a story about conservation.
‘‘They [zoos] are advocates for conservation. Education is the most important thing that zoos are doing.’’
The argument runs something like this. The public will see the snow leopards and be more likely to care about their brethren in the wild, and wildlife
more generally. This in turn will lead to action on conservation, influencing the products people buy and the environmental policies they support.
Whether this is what happens is open to debate.
Some academics have said there is mixed evidence at best that zoos change people’s attitudes, let alone prompt action.
One 2007 review of studies on the subject found ‘‘very little evidence . . . of any measurable effect of a single informal visit on adults’ conservation knowledge, concern, or ability to do something useful’’.
Otago University Professor Neil Carr, who has studied the business of zoos, says evidence on whether they are changing hearts and minds is still ‘‘difficult to interpret’’.
But Buley disagrees. In the past five years, he says, zoos have both got better at measuring their impact on the public and at developing new ways of connecting with them.
‘‘The overwhelming evidence now is that zoos are inspiring people to action.’’
Lynn Anderson, chief executive at Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch, says zoos can change behaviour directly.
People who come to see the park’s gorillas are told about how the mining of coltan, a key mineral used in mobile phones, is destroying the animals’ habitat. Visitors can then dispose of their old phones right there at the park. ‘‘We have collected thousands and thousands of phones this way.’’
Fifield says influencing behaviour comes down to telling a compelling story. The snow leopards have been selected partly because they fit into a broader story about other threatened Asian species at the zoo, such as the Malaysian sun bear and the Sumatran tiger.
If it works, she says, the cats can help other, less photogenic, threatened species by shifting public attitudes towards conservation more broadly.
‘‘It’s not about saying we are going to get a big cat because people will come and look at it. We are looking at the fit from a conservation perspective, and what stories we can tell with those animals.’’
Making money, saving animals
But animals like snow leopards or primates, socalled ‘‘charismatic animals’’, are also inescapably vital to zoos’ financial survival.
Popular animals mean a bump in visitors. Each new visitor – whether they are educated by their visit or not – means new revenue. Many zoos also allow visitors to pay more to get closer to the animals. This has been a growth area for Wellington Zoo, which sold 5265 ‘‘close encounter’’ tickets in the year to March 2019 (up from 4411 the year before). Charismatic animals demand the highest price, with a cheetah encounter at Wellington Zoo costing $159.
Carr says even the best zoos select some animals ‘‘for entertainment reasons’’. ‘‘They need to have pretty animals to get people through the gate.’’
Being on public display does not directly benefit the animals. Animal rights groups argue it is exploitative. A quick Google search will yield plenty of videos of distressed zoo animals, and taunting spectators.
Buley says this is not what happens at Auckland Zoo, or other good zoos like Wellington, where animals are often healthier and happier than their counterparts in the wild. As well as living a comparatively good life, these animals are raising money to help others in the wild, including less flashy threatened species closer to home.
But while good zoos do usually help fund this sort of ‘‘field conservation’’ for animals in the wild, it usually amounts to only a fraction of their income. In the year to March 2019, Wellington Zoo spent 7.5 per cent of its operating expenditure on field conservation. That figure is considered high, even compared to its ‘‘good’’ zoo peers.
Unlike its council subsidised counterparts in Auckland and Wellington, Orana Park relies almost entirely on ticket sales to survive.
But Anderson says that, while visitors are financially necessary, they do not dictate which animals the zoo hosts.
She uses the example of southern white rhinos. The park has six but will soon have another 10 to help support an Australasian breeding programme.
‘‘We have six and we will have 16. That doesn’t help us get any more visitors.’’
This is what is known as the ‘‘ark’’ argument. That with environmental changes already leading to mass extinction, zoos need to keep animals as ‘‘backup populations’’, either to breed and reintroduce into the wild or, as a last resort, to preserve a last vestige of an otherwise extinct species.
The northern white rhino is already in the latter camp. There are two females left alive, and scientists are now trying to resurrect the species using implanted embryos.
To support this ark and field work you need money, the argument goes, and for a zoo that means animals that will attract visitors.
The ark argument, however, has its critics. Reintroducing zoo-bred species into the wild is a high-risk and expensive strategy, even when it is attempted.
Some, such as the Aspinall Foundation, argue a better way to support endangered species is to do so in the wild, rather than building multimillion-dollar enclosures to house them thousands of kilometres away.
Is it better value to visit snow leopards in Wellington, with some of your money eventually filtering through to the wild population, or donate to a charity that will support them in the wild?
Animal experts
Another argument that zoos use to justify their existence is expertise. Good zoos, particularly big ones like London Zoo, are as much research centres as public animal parks. As preserving species becomes harder, this expertise will be more important than ever.
Last year, Auckland Zoo staff helped save the lives of four ka¯ ka¯ po¯ after an outbreak of a fungal infection killed nine of the critically endangered birds, two of which have since been rereleased into the wild.
Wellington Zoo’s animal hospital, The Nest Te Ko¯ hanga, helps nurse hundreds of animals, most of them native birds, back to health and reintroduce them into the wild.
Without zoos, the argument goes, this expertise would be lost.
The expanding zoo
Carr says that, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t have zoos. ‘‘But until humans find some way to co-exist with the rest of the planet, we are going to need zoos.’’
Buley says it makes less and less sense to talk about wild animals as distinct from zoo animals. While zoos have been getting better at managing animals in captivity, animals living in the wild have never needed more human support.
‘‘In New Zealand the vast majority of native species would go extinct without ongoing human intervention,’’ he says.
‘‘We need to start thinking about the wild as a managed space in the same way as thinking of the zoo as managed space.’’
This means the zoo, whether behind a ticketed turnstile or in a wildlife reserve, is likely here to stay.