I wanted to post a little bit about our recent trip to the Alaska Zoo, which is in Anchorage on O'Malley Street. I had heard it wasn't a great zoo, so my expectations were not high, and I figured Henry would enjoy it, in any case. I was pleasantly surprised by how many animals were easily seen and the fact that most of them were Alaskan natives who had been "rescued" from injuries, etc.. We got to see many critters that you just never see up close, such as wolverines, lynx (lynxes?), wolves, a snowy owl, river otter. This was good because we got to see how they really look and move. Henry got to see them and seemed to think they were really neat. When children grow up loving animals and learning about them, they tend to want to protect them when they grow up, so that's really, I think, the primary reason for zoos.
On the other hand, I got the feeling that many of the cages and enclosures were too small and not close enough to the animals' natural ecosystem. A couple of the animals showed signs of stress, I thought (though admittedly I don't know a lot about such signs), such as the brown bear who kept obsessively pacing back and forth along one small stretch of fence and the porcupine who had a big bald patch on his back. The caribou did not have any grass left growing in their enclosure. I realize it takes a LOT of money to run a zoo well, and there were many opportunities throughout the park for folks to contribute as much or as little as they wanted. This is great! I hope people will continue to contribute and help this zoo improve and grow. What a great resource and learning opportunity!
Thanks for sharing this. Zoo's have two main purposes. One is the educate the public and the other is captive breeding. As we humans destroy the habitats, many animals are going extinct because there just isn't any place left for some animals to live. About 30 years ago, zoos started a very stringent captive breeding program to keep the gene pool of the animals in zoos strong. Many species of animals that are in zoos are the only representatives of their species in the world, they no longer can exist in the wild. They keep detailed pedagrees for each animal and only breed animals that aren't related. The purpose of this is three fold: so the gene pool of a given species doesn't get compromised by breeding closely related individuals. And to keep a viable population of a species that maybe can be returned to the 'wild' some day in the future. The third reason is to have a captive bred population to decrease the wild animal trade. Zoo's usually no longer take wild caught animals.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, captivity is no replacement for living free and many animals do show signs of stress. The pacing bear is a classic. Zoo funding is usually by the city it is located in and is one of the things that regularly gets cut when budgets are tight. Many zoos have lots of volunteers working with the animals with a professional zoo keeper as their supervisor. Most zoos try to keep their animals 'content'- an animal is unlikely to breed if it is unhappy, but zoo keepers genuinely care about the animals they are responsible for. they try enrichment where they give the animals something to occupy their time with, rather than pace. Large carnivores require more room than most zoos can give them. It is a problem to keep them from being stressed and/or bored. There are lots of things that have been tried-many of them sucessful, but some animals are so zoo conditioned that they can't really respond.
If the animals at that zoo have been injured prior to being 'admitted' to the zoo it is possible your porcupine had a skin injury that does not permit his quills to grow back. This could happen if he was hit by a car and dragged, pulling the skin off that part of the body...leaving only scar tissue.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080530/sc_nm/zoos_dc
ReplyDeleteThis is a url link to a news article I thought might interest zoo-goers. It was retrieved 6/2/08, from Yahoo. If you cannot follow the link, please copy and paste the url into your browser window.