I remember a line by Al Jaffee (of* Mad); *I have paraphrased it somewhat:
“What! Give up this terror-ridden jungle for a life of ease and security? Are you out of your mind?”
Two or three people have mentioned this, and it’s quite true. But Edinburgh Zoo no longer has any elephants, and hasn’t had for 25 years!
But there are some at Blair Drummond, a safari park an hour’s drive away near Stirling.
The zoo is a charity and any profits are either used for improving the zoo*, or funding several conservation and research projects around the world. They also have modern research facilities for studying several species. I think they’re an organisation worth supporting and just upgraded my annual membership to a life membership…
- usually the animal enclosures and collection although visitor facilities have also been improved.
What, pray tell, do you think zoos do? Several examples have been given in this thread where zoos have helped increase the numbers of endangered animals by doing exactly that. Here’s the rub - rescuing, breeding (and associated feeding, housing, medical care, etc) and reintroducing all cost money. Big money. Zoos offset part of that cost by displaying animals and charging people to see them.
In your worldview, who pays for all this?
The National Zoo has had a lot of money poured in and never-ending renovations, but the quality has gone down considerably from when I was a kid. They got pandas, but that’s about it.
I used to love going there; they used to have giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and polar bears. They even got rid of my favorite exhibit, the lowly capybaras (I like them because they were just in a roped pen outside the elephant house, and they were friendly). I understand the elephants needed a better space (which is why the giraffes and hippos were removed), but frankly elephants just aren’t that exotic or interesting.
Please everyone read this: or just google
Elephant Whisperer, Lawrence Anthony
http://delightmakers.com/news/wild-elephants-gather-inexplicably-mourn-death-of-elephant-whisperer/
Well in my world people are a little more respectful in the way they address other folks, but maybe this will give you an idea
http://www.elephants.com/ donors, contributors, philanthropist, and educating the children to really appreciate animals and nature
This isn’t. It’s a message board.
My regards to good King Friday and Lady Elaine!
You’d need a hella big monitor to get anything approaching the visceral impact of how massive an elephant is in person.
Sorry. It’s an overwhelmingly and unfortunately common misconception that video is an adequate proxy for actually being there.
I love manhandling my children up to see them. Because modern enclosure design means that the animals get to do what the animals actually do. Which, in the case of cats, is sleep. My two-year-old loves the fact that the big tiger she’s looking at from my shoulders sleeps all the time just like her own Andy-kitty.
Not decreasing, but the definition of “display” is definitely different from the old days. And that’s all for the good.
Reality is not televised, or staged, or stuffed and put on display. Zoos are apparently starting to recognize this.
Fact, especially for children.
When my son, who was just almost two at the time, first saw an elephant he didn’ t even recognize it. We were standing 20 feet away when I pointed it out to him, and he looked right through it. Scanned around, trying to find what I was pointing at. He simply had no concept how LARGE an elephant actutally is.
After what seemed like forever, his eyes finally locked on it and he realized what he waas looking at. One of my favorite memories is the look of awe when it struck him, and how he whispered "…elephant…:
I was amazed at how tall giraffes are. Lion heads are gigantic. Monkeys and apes (especially apes) emote. Bird feathers iridesce.
No, there is nothing like seeing a live animal.
Hi. My name is Siam Sam, and I have not endorsed this message.
That’s exactly what I always thought. But when I said this to a zookeeper in San Antonio, he shrugged and said, “I hear that a lot. But to tell the truth, that means a lot more to YOU than it does to the animals.”
His point was, in the wild, a lion sleeps about 20 hours a day. So, while an observer may be disappointed to see a zoo lion snoring on a concrete floor in a cage, the lion really couldn’t care less. He’s asleep! What does he care what his surroundings look like?
Along the same lines, the San Antonio Zoo gave their cheetahs a big grassy enclosure to run around in. Know how often they run? Never! A cheetah in the Serengeti doesn’t run 70 mph because it’s fun- he runs because, if he doesn’t catch a gazelle, he may starve. In a zoo, a well-fed cheetah will generally lie around doing nothing. He can lie around doing nothing in a small pen as easily as in a large, naturalistic-looking enclosure.
A pretty enclosure makes human spectators feel good, but the animals frequently couldn’t care less.
I find that a little hard to believe or, perhaps, just overstated. A lion may spend much of its time sleeping but it may cope better if it has places to sleep with varying levels of privacy or shelter. A more natural environment can give more mental stimulation (nooks and niches to poke its nose into, soil to scratch at, etc). Do you think a house cat does just as well in a 6’x6’ bare room with a litter box as it would in a 20’x20’ room with cat trees, tunnels, plants and other stuff to roam around in and jump up on?
At least in some zoos, they make an attempt to create an environment that is behaviorally similar to the animal’s natural environment – that is, where animals will have behavioral opportunities and incentives similar to their natural environment.
The late Professor Hal Markowitz of San Fransisco State U. spent much of his career developing things like this. One example I remember reading about: For medium-size cats (servals or civits or whatever), one thing they did was construct a meat-ball shooter. Instead of just throwing a steak to the cats, they made meat-balls and shot them into the air over the cat’s enclosure. The cat had to lunge for it and catch it. I think it was arranged so if the cat didn’t catch it, the meat-ball would fall someplace where the cat couldn’t get it – so it really had to leap for it. (ETA: This was all meant to simulate chasing and catching birds.)
At the old Cal Academy of Sciences Aquarium (and maybe the new one for all I know; haven’t been there) they had those two Pacific White-Sided Dolphins living in that fish-tank for umpty-ump years. Markowitz and some of his students did some work with them too, trying to cobble up some kind of a decent behavioral environment for them.
Some books he wrote:
Behavioral Enrichment in the Zoo (1981).
Enriching Animal Lives (2011). Excerpt from overview at Amazon:
The bigger question is, what does a wild lion or cheetah do all day in the Serengeti? Does it crave intellectual stimulation? Does it seek out new adventures? Does it go off exploring regularly Or does it hunt/eat when it needs to and seek out a shady spot to snooze in the rest of the time?t
The Los Angeles Zoo has a nifty ramp where you can walk up and be at eye-level with the giraffes. At that point, it becomes amazing how big their heads (and eyes!) are.
(In long-ago days, the L.A. Zoo had a rhino enclosure with an entirely inadequate protective fence. The rhinos were in a sunken paddock…but the fence was only knee-high to the humans outside it. An idiotic – or merely clumsy – person could easily have stepped right over the low wall and right onto a rhino’s back. That could have been…dramatic.)
The Kansas City Zoo has a neat thing for the cheetahs, it’s basically a toy/target on a motorized pulley system. They fire it up and the bait zips around the perimeter of the habitat. Amazing to see how fast a cheetah can get up to speed…it’s almost instantaneous.
Jacksonville (FL) Zoo had something like that…you cold buy bunches of leaves to feed them. I had forgotten how big their eyes were though; yes, they’re huge as well! KC is going to have a giraffe exhibit like Jacksonville’s in the next few years.
While I doubt it goes on incredible journeys and performs cinema worthy stunts, I would assume that it sniffs around and explores its immediate environment. If for no other reason than because it’s currently living there and probably wants to be aware of what’s around it.
“Hunting” is a large part of its stimulation. Locating prey, tracking it, being aware of other animals, the actual kill, defending its kill from scavengers, etc. In the absence of that, other things should substitute to the best of their ability.
I would guess they spend time studying pathways they can use when being chased by other animals to escape. Also paths where they could drive a prey animal and then chase them down and kill them.
I once saw a documentary where some prey animal like a gopher spent a lot of time running an escape path until she seemed to know it very well. Then one day she was chased by some hunter animal and used that path to save her life. I was impressed by that. Seemed like a very clever thing to do with her downtime.
Wild bottlenosed dolphins study Euclidean geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.
Did you see that article a few days ago, that somebody has figured out how “fairy rings” are created? (Something like crop circles, except they appear underwater in the sand.) It isn’t aliens after all. It’s the dolphins doing their geometry in the sand, like Archimedes.