The Elephant Sanctuary, Hohenwald, Tennessee

The Right and Wrong Ways to Zoo It

Brisbane Times
June 20, 2007
By David Hancocks

First, a confession: I don't like zoos. For more than 30 years I've been directing and planning them; thinking, researching and writing about them; pleading for them to try to meet their potential. It has often been like pushing water up a rope.

Nonetheless, I believe we need zoos. Just not the typical zoos we have today. As modern life is increasingly separated from contact with the natural world, our need for good zoos becomes more urgent. We need zoos that can create a greater sense of compassion in the community, a stronger commitment to care, a fuller understanding of our place in nature.

A handful of the world's zoos are committed to these goals. Most, however, lack intellectual or scientific leadership, have no useful philosophy, refuse fundamental change and focus principally on attendance figures.

What is most needed are better attitudes. The first and most important would be to put the needs of the animals above all others, using nature as the yardstick to assess their quality of life, rather than just zoo standards, which have never been enough.

For example, as greater knowledge emerges about wild elephants and their extraordinary social, psychological, behavioural and emotional complexity, more wildlife scientists are declaring that urban zoos cannot provide satisfactory conditions for these beings. Several progressive US zoos have agreed and have closed or are phasing out their elephant exhibits. But most zoos have responded defensively, saying the scientists understand only wild elephants, not zoo elephants, as if they were different species.

Many zoos hold regressive views. When Guy Cooper was hired as chief executive of Taronga Zoo in 1998, one of his first declarations was to reintroduce elephant rides, an ambition that mirrors perfectly the 19th-century zoo construct.

In the mid-1970s, in Seattle, I worked with a team designing the world's first zoo plan that put animals in spaces that looked and felt like natural habitats. Our goal was to give maximum opportunity for animals to engage in natural behaviours in large and complex natural landscapes. I thought zoos would love this innovation.

With rare exception they hated it. After many years some began to copy the superficial look of the idea. Today, zoos boast about their green revolution. The new zoos, sans cages, make visitors feel better, but it is all deception. The animals typically have no contact with living plants, separated from them by electric wires. Many "natural" features are made of disguised, unyielding concrete. The restricted dusty spaces the animals inhabit are often of no better quality than the old cages. Good zoos promote animal needs; in mediocre zoos they are the first to be compromised.

The simplistic aim of too many zoos is to attract hordes of visitors, to whom they offer non-organic, non-free-range food items, and entertain them by revealing little more than the size, shape, and colour of the animals.

Zoos often claim, however, to be conservation centres. But "conservation" for most zoos just means "breeding", which is merely basic zoo business: zoos must breed their animals to preserve their collections. Hardly any animals born in zoos are introduced to the wild.

They nonetheless loudly position themselves as leaders in wildlife conservation. In truth, government and non-government agencies are most successful in restoring habitat and reintroducing wild species. Zoos play an occasional minor role - and want all the glory.

Interestingly, if zoos saw animal welfare as their central goal, they might become more effective conservation leaders. The exhibits, interpretation strategies, education programs, husbandry and collection would all be quite different in a zoo focused upon welfare.

Taronga and Melbourne zoos, for example, recently imported elephants from Thailand (at incredible expense) for "conservation" reasons. A zoo devoted to welfare would not do this. Indeed, it would not contain elephants at all. Certainly, Taronga's $50 million elephant exhibit would not be confining five elephants in a mere quarter of a hectare if animal wellbeing was its central concern.

With new attitudes and intelligent philosophies, zoos could make wonderful contributions to society. They could help lead visitors to a greater awareness and comprehension of nature, revealing complex interdependencies, and showing why a healthy relationship with the natural world is our best guide for a more complete and satisfying journey through life.

Perhaps with such changes, zoos truly could enliven the minds, enrich the hearts and feed the souls of those millions who visit them each year, hungry for a clearer understanding and better connection with that other world of nature.

David Hancocks is an architect and former director of Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle (1975-84), the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, (1989-97), and Werribee Open Range Zoo, Victoria (1998-2003). His most recent book is A Different Nature: the Paradoxical World of Zoos.