Sailing with Noah: Stories from the World of Zoos

Chapter 17 - Zoos of the Future

Zoos of the Future The world around us is changing fast and, when it comes to wildlife, it is not changing for the better. The IUCN publishes the international list of threatened and endangered species (called the Red List), and a quick look at their list will tell you this: 18 percent of the world’s remaining mammals and 11 percent of the world’s remaining birds are threatened with extinction. As Bill Conway recently summarized, “Almost all large animals are in trouble; storks and cranes, pythons and crocodiles, great apes (in fact, most of the primates ), elephants and rhinoceroses. Ninety percent of black rhinoceroses have been killed in the past eighteen years and one-third of the world’s 266 turtle species are now threatened with extinction.” Amphibians are disappearing worldwide. Add to that reports of acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming , the destruction of the world’s rain forests, and phytoplankton blooms and coral bleaching in our oceans, and you get the picture of a world on the precipice of environmental disaster. In his essay, “The Changing Role of Zoos in the 21st Century,” Bill Conway quotes Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, who once said, “When the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is in sight.” The problem, according to Conway, is that the “outside” world of wildlife and nature, which the world’s zoos represent to millions of visitors every year, is clearly changing faster than the “internal” zoo response. In other words, zoos have got to start doing things differently. And they have to start 267 17 now. We have been overtaken by the magnitude and speed of extinction. If we do not respond, the zoo of the future will be little more than a living museum . In 2004 a small group of zoo professionals from around the world gathered in London to think about precisely this problem, “How can zoos transform themselves so that they’ll be able to respond, in a fundamental way, to massive global extinctions?” The conclusion of this conference was that zoos must redefine themselves in a completely different way—in the words of one zoo professional, they must become in situ conservation organizations. This means that the fundamental role of zoos, their reason for being, must become the preservation of animals in the wild. Much like Conservation International (CI) and the World Wildlife Fund, our zoos must become protectors of wildlife and wild places. But there are fundamental differences between CI and WWF and zoos. Zoos have a whole different set of strengths and assets than international conservation organizations (of course, they also have some problems that the major international organizations don’t have). Zoos have several things that make them unique. First, zoo professionals are the world’s experts on breeding small populations of endangered species. No other class of research or conservation organizations, universities, in fact, nobody else, has that skill set. Second, we have living things. We have an incredible variety of living things—everything from anteaters to amphibians, birds to butterflies, conger eels to capybara—I could go through the entire alphabet, but you get the idea. That is a resource no one else has. Third, zoos are already used to collaboration. We cooperate in the management of all of the animals that are in Species Survival Plans (SSPs), we collaborate on research projects, and we collaborate on field efforts like those of the Madagascar Fauna Group. Fourth, we have visitors. WWF and CI don’t get the more than three million visitors a year that the Saint Louis Zoo does. That is a huge, albeit largely untapped, resource. So these are, I think, our major strengths. We hold over ten thousand different species of animals from all parts of the world, many of them rare or endangered ; we host more visitors annually than all major professional sports combined; and we have unique expertise in the management of animals, unique capabilities for research on exotic species, and a high potential for developing conservation collaborations. In the end, I believe that zoos hold extraordinary promise, perhaps the greatest promise of any type of conservation organization, for preserving wild things in wild places, providing a safety net for charismatic species in danger of extinction, and mobilizing the interests and passion of the general public for worldwide conservation. 268 Sailing with Noah Zoos of...