I follow a few zoos on Facebook. Usually when baby mammals are born at the zoo, the zoos post pictures of the babies on Facebook, and the pictures are usually of the babies being held by people and being hand-raised. I’m wondering why they don’t usually let the parent animals raise their own young.
Do you follow Zooborns? I love Zooborns.
I think that in a lot of cases, the zoo steps in quickly if it doesn’t look like the baby will thrive under mother’s care. And a lot of zoo animals don’t seem to have great maternal instincts. Some are just rare enough that the zoo steps in because hand rearing in some cases gives the best chance.
I believe it also makes it easier for future vet exams or procedures if the animals have some previous comfort with being handled by people.
Even if they aren’t hand raised (which they’ll do to ensure the babies live if there’s the slightest doubt… dead babies are bad PR!) they will do frequent weight & health checks. As said above, it also gets them used to being handled by people, so while they’ll never be a pet (or entirely safe to be around) they are a smidge less wild than they might ordinarily be.
My guess is that in the wild, the animal mother can learn maternal behavior from others in the herd or pack or whatever. In the zoo, there may be no other examples of maternal care from which the animal mother can learn.
Zoos don’t like handrearing (at least for mammals), at least in my experience. Handrearing is a last-ditch resort, when the adult animals are unable to care for or uninterested in their offspring. A lot of places will have a veterinary heath check if at all possible, as **Saje **said, which is possibly where the pictures you’re seeing are from, but I don’t know any modern zoos that routinely handrear animals that are not abandoned. It’s certainly seen as bad practice in the UK.
Humans are *less *successful at rearing most baby animals than their parents- apart from anything else, it can be hard to find accurate data on things like milk composition for a lot of species (though this is improving), and babies fed on an artifical diet often appear to be very prone to random illnesses. Then, even if the animals reach adulthood in good health, they’re often very bad at integrating into groups if they’ve imprinted on humans, this is especially problematic for monkeys and apes, which may never fully integrate, but any social animal will have trouble.
First time mothers will regularly abandon babies (which appears to often happen in the wild as well incidently) though they will often become perfect parents with later young- I worked with some marmosets that abandoned their first set of twins at birth, but then went on to rear another 18 babies over the next 5 years, without a single problem. Handreared mothers (and fathers, in species where they play a large part in baby care) will often never learn to care for their own babies.
Abandoned babies are far from rare, but it makes no sense to increase the rate without a good reason.