In Defense of Zoos

A few weeks ago, a few Korean students came up to me and asked me why our zoo was good.
I talked for a couple minutes while they recorded. But since then, I've been wanting to write a post about it. Most people don't realize all the important things zoos do. Well, some zoos are horrible. But there are so many great zoos that have very important roles in conservation.

(And now I have an excuse to shamelessly dump in a bunch of my zoo photos XD )


Here are three three big benefits zoos can have.

Education and Connection

One of the most basic things zoos do is to just show visitors how amazing, strange, and beautiful animals are. It's one thing to see a giraffe on TV. But when you're face to face with that animal, you get that connection that no TV or computer screen could ever give.


People don't care about protecting things until they feel a connection to them. So helping people to see and love animals is a great way to get them involved in protecting those animals.
Right up there in the same category is education. If a zoo is set up well, they'll have information about those animals for the guests to read. Including information about the threats those animals face, and what you can do to help.
That's most of my job. To talk to people about animals, and help with that "connect and educate" part.


Conservation
What most people don't realize is that good zoos are very important for conservation. On multiple levels.
They can breed and release endangered species (we do that with native frogs and turtles). But for many animals, it's not safe to release them into the wild. For example, tigers, giraffes, rhinos, and many other species are at huge risk of poaching. If we started releasing our tigers and giraffes, they'd just be killed.

We have to make it safe out there for our animals. Once that happens, we can start releasing more animals. We have some rare Mexican gray wolves, and their siblings actually were released to the wild, so it is doable.


We partner up with several different conservation groups which focus on different animals - rhinos, red pandas, giraffes, lions, etc. We do events with those groups and run fundraisers for them.


And finally, researchers can use zoo animals to learn about species that are difficult to study in the wild. For example, snow leopards are notoriously difficult to study in their natural habitat. People can search for months and never even see them. They have excellent camouflage in very remote and hostile mountains, and they do their best to avoid people. So researchers have used the snow leopards at our zoo to study what kinds of smells snow leopards like. It's Calvin Klein perfume, by the way. It's got pheromones in it. Why is this important? Researchers can use those perfumes to lure wild snow leopards to camera traps, which help them get pictures of these animals for identification, range, etc.

Rescue
So, good zoos don't take animals from the wild. The animals we get are born at zoos or similar institutions, and then traded to keep the genetics fresh.
But there is an exception. Rescue animals. We have a lot of them. Our educational section (which unfortunately I don't really have much to do with, because it's awesome) is largely made up of pets that people no longer wanted, or didn't take good care of. We also have a number of injured birds who were hit by cars, or ran into power lines, and can no longer fly. At least one bird was smuggled into the country illegally. All of our bears were orphaned and never learned to care for themselves. And we have a blind sea lion.

So we can also help provide for animals that have nowhere else to go.

So the next time someone tells you that zoos are just animals crammed into cages for people to gawk at, now you can tell them what's really up.