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A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
A piece in Anthropocene magazine pointed me to an interesting study just published at PNAS: Aging populations threaten conservation goals of zoos. It is behind a paywall, so I am reliant on the abstract and what I read at Anthropocene, although that doesn’t change my conclusion.
‘Twas ever thus, and it is good to have the data.
Those data indicate that for “774 mammal populations in European and North American zoo[s] ... the proportion of old individuals has increased continuously, mirrored by a decrease in juveniles and actively reproducing adults”. What this means, of course, is that zoos are not taking seriously their obligation to manage species sustainably, which gives the lie to their supposed dedication to conservation. And that is nothing new.
From the moment the first zoo bred any species for the first time, population management has been the problem that dare not show its face. And “population management” is, of course, the weasel version of euthanasia.
Long ago and far away, I tried to bring some sense to the discussion and failed. But I stand by what I wrote then,1 which is why I am republishing it here now.
In the wild, death is a way of life. Animals succumb to other animal predators, they fall ill, they starve. What Charles Darwin called the ‘checks to increase’ keep numbers down, both by removing animals from the population and by ensuring that few animals survive beyond their reproductive prime. In captivity, most of the checks to population growth are removed. Animals are seldom preyed upon in zoos, although foxes and stoats do account for some.
Schönbrunn’s director once complained to me that one of his biggest problems was urban foxes. It doesn’t much matter when a fox takes a couple of ducks or geese from a farmer, but when the geese are, say, rare red-breasted geese, the fox is more than a nuisance. Zoo animals do contract diseases, but veterinary science comes to their rescue and they are often nursed back to health. And, times of war and siege excepted, no zoo keeper is going to let his charges starve to death. The result is that zoo animals that are breeding, an ever-increasing proportion of the whole, threaten to overwhelm the capacity of zoos to support them. If we are to manage captive populations properly, then having removed all the natural checks and balances, we must replace them with artificial ones.
There are just two ways to regulate an animal population, prevention and removal. Prevention, which is essentially birth control whether it is achieved by physical separation, contraception or sterilisation, might seem morally to be the easier option, but there are good reasons why prevention alone is not the entire answer. First, even if the method is reversible, the reproductive condition of the animals may decline, so that when you want them to breed again they are less capable. Secondly, even the best-laid plans can go awry and random events - an epidemic perhaps, or an error in ‘reversible’ birth control - could destroy the breeding population. Finally, blocking reproduction can destabilise the breeding population. If birth control is effective no new animals join the breeding group, which gets inexorably older and less able to breed. It may even go extinct through old age, as happened with the wild swine population in American zoos, and is threatening to happen again with Siberian tigers.
Prevention, then, has a place in managing of populations, but it cannot be the only tool. A truly effective policy must include the removal of animals that are surplus to the breeding programme. In the early stages of a programme this might entail moving animals to other qualified zoos, and if a reintroduction programme is successful, then the surplus can be released to the wild. But under most circumstances removal of surplus animals means killing them.
Killing healthy animals is simply done, and is far less traumatic than a natural death. An overdose of drugs, a well-placed bullet, both can despatch an animal more quickly and with less pain than ever happens in nature. But because of the public’s misplaced feelings killing surplus animals openly is almost impossible.
It is important to realise that surplus, in this context, does not mean that an animal will be killed because it is hard to manage, or less handsome, or for any other capricious reason. Animals will be surplus to a rational breeding programme if they are from bloodlines that are already over-represented in the population, or if they are too old to reproduce, or if they have already successfully produced their share of offspring. And being surplus to a breeding programme is not what condemns an animal to death, it is only the harsh reality of limited resources that often makes euthanasia the only option.
As with so much else, an investment of more resources can help to alleviate the problem. Obviously if zoos could be expanded so that more animals could live in captivity, the number that would have to be killed would be lower, at least until the new expanded capacity has all been filled. Technology, too, could spare some animals by preserving genes as frozen eggs and sperm and thus freeing space for a greater number of living animals. But even these solutions would ultimately be useless. When the expanded zoo is full, more animals than before will need to be killed to keep populations under control. And while the frozen zoo may preserve living genes, the animals that bore those genes are no longer alive. Euthanasia is an inevitable and essential part of population management.
I hope I have convinced you that to save species requires us to sacrifice individuals. The question is why zoo directors have such a hard time implementing this essential part of good zoo management. Euthanasia goes on all the time, at all good zoos, but it is done on the quiet, as if there were something reprehensible about it. London Zoo, for example, in its annual report buries the figure for culling in a category that counts all animals ‘disposed of ... by presentation, exchange, deposit, sale... as well as culled animals and those killed by vermin or vandals’. In 1983 the total was 1514; of course not all of those were culled, but there is no way to find out how many were. That, I suppose, is why the cull is hidden in that column.
When the sheltered public does find out that euthanasia is going on, there is always a terrible brouhaha. In Detroit, in the autumn of 1982, three tigers were, in the overemotional language of one newspaper writer, ‘sentenced to death’. A housewife, Krescentia Doppelberger, brought a $1 million suit against the zoo and succeeded in deferring the death of the animals. The zoo director, Dr Steve Graham, had explained that the tigers were old, with rotten gums and bad teeth, that one had a dislocated hip and was in so much pain that he used the wall of his cage as a crutch, that another had kidney and liver damage and vomited repeatedly, and that the third also had a bad hip problem. None of this counted with Mrs Doppelberger, who perversely seemed to think that 'because animals cannot speak for themselves’ they can endure more pain.
An almost identical performance took place at Minnesota Zoo outside Minneapolis in March 1984. Again, tigers were due to be destroyed and again there was a public outcry. The worst of this is that Minnesota Zoo is the home of ISIS, which has done so much to explain the need for euthanasia to zoo directors. I find it a dreadful irony that Minnesota Zoo should be prey to the same irrational demands from the public.
London Zoo suffered appalling publicity over one of its elephants, Polé-Polé, who, after years of difficulty, was finally put down in October 1983 with an injection of the drug etorphine. Polé-Polé who as a calf starred in the film An Elephant Called Slowly, was a casualty of London Zoo’s policy not to train animals. She was difficult to handle, neurotic and bad tempered, qualities that are obviously harder to manage in an elephant than in many other species, and the zoo had been criticised about her condition for many years. Rather than admit that it had failed with Polé-Polé, and that both would be better off without one another, the zoo stonewalled. After long delays it was decided to move her to Whipsnade, where she would enjoy more space and the company of other elephants, but when the time for the move came she sat down in her crate and could not be transported. She finally got up, but subsequently walked with a limp, and was anaesthetised to examine her leg. As the effects of the anaesthetic wore off it became clear that Polé-Polé refused to stand up again, which in a four-tonne animal is a disaster. She was therefore given an overdose of etorphine. In finally taking its responsibility for Polé-Polé’s life seriously, London Zoo triggered a storm of protest and probably launched the protest movement that is currently trying to close all zoos in the UK. But the staff there still refuse openly to discuss the important role that euthanasia has in zoo management, judging that the public is ineducable in these matters.
In these three cases there were additional reasons beyond just the requirements of a breeding programme that indicated that the animals in question should be killed. Not only was it probably the best for those individual animals, but it would also free resources in the institutions to care for the species as a whole. But the unobtrusive putting down of animals for the very good reason that they are surplus to needs will necessarily increase as zoos become better at breeding. The problem here, as identified by the professional associations of zoo people, is an uneducated public, but who should be responsible for educating the public?
In the course of my research I talked with scores of zoo directors, all of whom agreed that euthanasia was a valuable management tool. Chatting scientist to scientist, we were able to accept the necessity for controlling populations both by prevention and removal. But few of those zoo directors are willing to come out in the open and tell ordinary people, the ones who visit and support the zoo, why it is necessary. Nor would they allow us to help them by filming euthanasia being carried out. They are scared of the uneducated public, but refuse to contribute to the public’s education. As long as this continues, muddled public outcry will thwart their efforts to preserve species.
We destroy millions of cats and dogs each year, not because they are surplus to planned survival programmes but because they are simply unwanted. Why should zoo animals be any different? Perhaps it is because they have names and personalities, a practice that many zoos are beginning to realise can backfire. Or perhaps the zoo animals are a sort of token to salve our consciences. We feel guilty about the way we treat animals, as food, as pets, and as objects of entertainment, but rather than improve our dealings with animals in general we reserve our loudest objections for the particular animals that, numerically, matter least - those in zoos.
The fact is that if we are serious about saving species then we have to accept euthanasia as an irreplaceable strategy in achieving that end. What is worse, there are bound to be more animals killed at the start of a rational breeding programme as we try and sort out the mess of previous efforts than later when all is working smoothly, and euthanasia is employed only to make up the small deficiencies of birth control. ‘In the long run,’ the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums counsels its members, ‘an honest and open approach to the problem, with assurances that euthanasia would be employed as the last resort, is in the best interest of zoos, the profession and, most im-portantly, the species. Zoos could, in fact, take pride in the fact that they have to kill animals because it is a sign of success.
We have to decide. If we want zoos to be more than menageries, if we want them to harbour self-perpetuating collections of species, then we have to accept that individual animals are subjugate to the species as a whole. We give the species continued life, and to do so we must deprive certain individual animals of life. It is not a pleasant thing to do, but matters of life and death are seldom pleasant.
Jeremy Cherfas (1984). Zoo 2000: a look beyond the bars, British Broadcasting Corporation, London, pp 119–122. ↩
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