WHY ANIMALS DO THE THING

…fucking yikes.

The kiwi I’ve seen in other AZA zoos have been kept according to the practices you describe: dark exhibit on a flipped light cycle, in a signed quiet area. What it looks like Zoo Miami is doing is… not good.

Here’s the link to their tweet with a video about the encounter (so it’ll embed):

The video shows a kiwi out of its exhibit: on a table in what looks like a back room with bright overhead fluorescent lighting. The kiwi has no room to move around and no place to hide as people pet it and reach around it to take selfies.

What do you pay to bother the kiwi four days a week - a species which in NZ is apparently illegal to touch without permission from the Department of Conservation? $25.

Obviously it just started and I don’t know anything more about it than what’s online, but even so, this is such a bad look for an AZA zoo, holy shit. I know a bunch of new ambassador animal rules just got promulgated… I wonder if this meets them. I’ll have to go do some reading. Also, USDA is now promulgating new bird rules (it didn’t regulate birds until just recently, only mammals) so this will also have to pass their muster soon.

The guy who runs Miami’s PR, and manages the animal media like the birth of their first kiwi chick in 2019, is known for big media stunts. I’m not surprised by this but I don’t think it’s going to go over well. There’s a lot of pressure on zoos to offer new encounters and programs to help make up for inflation and pandemic losses but this not how to do it.

I’d honestly suggest New Zealanders who are upset about this contact Zoo Miami formally (more than just on twitter) using the contact form on their website, and maybe even the AZA to express concerns about this program animal’s welfare - as well as the lack of cultural awareness at one of their accredited facilities.

Edited to add: a statement from Zoo Miami is supposed to be forthcoming tomorrow. I’ll update once we have it.

One of the reasons I always encourage people to critically assess animal organizations is that, at the end of the day, they’re still businesses run by people and they still have the same problems that businesses in other sectors do. The news article linked below is a really stellar example of that. The rest of this post, and that link, require a big CW for sexual assault mentions, victim blaming, and retaliatory behavior for coming forward about misconduct. It’s really rare that there are news articles that look at issues in the zoo world this deeply, without preconceived politics. I think this is a good article because it uses an acute problem to examine a lot of really systemic issues with the way the field (and especially AZA) handles interpersonal politics.

As I talked about a few days ago when posting my writeup on the need for anonymous reporting within accrediting groups, the zoological field runs on a really hierarchical power structure. Violating that - especially by trying to file a complaint about the conduct of someone higher up the ladder - almost certainly will result in social backlash, and often results in retaliation against you by those affected. This is one of those worst-case scenarios: a researcher was assaulted twice at an industry conference by his boss (who controlled his green card); when he reported it later, AZA straight up was like “lol we don’t have to follow our no-tolerance policy and get her in trouble, she’s a well respected zoo director” even though they’d had multiple reports about her behaving inappropriately when drunk at meetings; then, a number of women involved in the SSP that director was part of worked to ruin the victim’s professional reputation, resulting in him being fired from a research position at another AZA zoo. The victim sued them for retaliation and settled out of court for 2.8 million: I think it’s because what was uncovered during discovery and in depositions was so damning for AZA and the people involved that they’d have been creamed if they’d let the case actually go to a jury trial. (I’ve read all the publicly available trial docs and it’s… so bad.)

The zoo director who assaulted him still has her job as of May 10, 2023, and she had to step down from running the SAFE and SSP programs she was involved in (because she was in a position of power over her victim through them, as he researches that species) … but AZA agreed as part of the settlement to not say anything about that, and to not revoke her AZA membership - which would actually be the appropriate consequence for assaulting someone as per their code of conduct. She was the chair of the AZA ethics committee when the report was filed, and while she was removed from that position when the news of the lawsuit first broke in 2021, the settlement clearly indicates nothing prevents her from resuming that position or taking any other position within AZA other than the two programs she was forced to resign from.

What I find really telling in the whole situation is that AZA has all these really nice words in their policies and code of conduct about dealing with harassment or inappropriate behavior on paper - and felt absolutely no obligation to actually follow through with any of it. An email sent out by the CEO in 2018 acknowledges how often misconduct happens at their meetings, and that they were enacting a no-tolerance policy, and wanted to hear about and investigate anything that might happen. When actually called on that by the victim’s lawyers, they scrambled every which way to get out of the responsibility. We never said that, and if we did, we didn’t mean it, and even so we can’t be held accountable because of this reason we just made up. And then, right before the next annual conference last fall, they changed their code of conduct: they took every single piece of the code of conduct where the victim’s lawyers had found language that meant they were responsible for dealing with problems, and edited it so they can never be held accountable for taking action again.

This article is really worth a read. I’ve been following this case closely for a couple years, and the reporter found a lot of details I wasn’t aware of. The article is unbiased in a way a lot of media about zoos is not, and it provides a lot of receipts for the truly appalling choices made by everyone involved. It also looks at the power imbalances and exploitation that occur when an industry markets itself on the value of research and animal programs… which are run by unpaid staff taking on extra work in addition to their regular jobs. What happens to that research or those programs when human politics can and do often interfere? Well.. the researcher who was the victim here actually identified a huge issue with genetic data getting mixed up in the SSP species he studied! But the women who supported the director who assaulted him tried to ice him out of the program in retaliation… meaning if he hadn’t made a stink and instead had just left, quietly, like so many do? AZA wouldn’t know the extent to which their breeding program was accidentally hybridizing two separate species.

It’s a mess. This is one person, one incident, one issue and all of the fallout. How much more of this is happening that we don’t know about? How much of the work that’s marketed as the value of accreditation is impacted by this type of stuff? We just don’t know.

Y'all regularly send in questions wanting to know how to report concerns you’ve observed at zoos you’ve visited. I’ve been able to point people at the USDA (regulatory) option, but with regard to accrediting groups I haven’t had a good answer. I spent the last six months or so really digging into why there hasn’t been a good answer. What I’ve found is that the majority of zoological accrediting groups in the United States don’t provide any way for the public to report issues they’ve observed at accredited facilities, and none of said organizations have a mechanism for truly supporting / protecting staff who might choose to report issues at their own facilities. Which is. not great.

I wrote a whole Substack post about it a few days ago, arguing that in order to remain credible institutions accrediting groups must facilitate public reporting, anonymous reporting, and commit to enforcing penalties for any retaliation against staff who choose to utilize the option. I’m linking it below for anyone who is interested in all the details. CW at the beginning for animal abuse mentions - I started the piece by discussing a truly egregious welfare situation that occurred last year at a Miami facility, which might have been prevented or at least caught earlier if the two groups that accredit the facility had had a reporting mechanism in place.

What I want to talk about here, though, is specifically why accrediting orgs need to not only have an anonymous reporting option for staff, but why they must ban retaliation and penalize any facility that does it anyway. Whenever something terrible happens at a zoo or sanctuary, people always ask “why didn’t the staff say something?” And the answer is, basically, because taking that risk can get you not just fired, but blacklisted from the field. People literally end up having to choose between their careers and making noise about issues that aren’t being resolved, and that’s absolutely not freaking okay. But I want to explain for you the extent of the issue.

If you’re not industry, something you might be surprised to learn is that most zoo staff don’t have any special reporting options above and beyond what the public does. Most zookeepers and other low-level staff never interact with people from accrediting groups except during an actual inspection - so if there’s a problem, it’s not like they know someone they can back-channel a concern to if they don’t feel safe reporting it publicly. And for the most part, reporting things your facility is doing to an accrediting group will always be considered inappropriate and probably get a keeper in trouble (even if it’s a really valid issue).

The zoological industry runs on a strongly hierarchical system. Staff are expected to “stay within their lanes” and work within the established bureaucracy to resolve issues. Deviating from this, if staff feel like management are suppressing issues or something needs to be addressed urgently, is very heavily frowned upon. Basically, going around management to bring something to an accrediting group (or USDA, or the media) is seen as indicating that your facility has failed to address a problem, or that the individual making the report feels they know more than their superiors. At most places, no matter how extreme an issue may become, there’s never a point at which it would be acceptable for a staff member to reveal a facility’s internal issues to their accrediting body. 

The thing is, attempting to resolve issues through the proper internal channels at a facility doesn’t always work! It can result in an issue being covered up (especially if the company is kinda shady) or suppressed rather than addressed. If staff decide to push the issue, it can really backfire and jeopardize their job, because it’s expected that if management says something is fine, staff need to acquiesce and go along with it.

There have been a couple high-profile examples of this in the last decade: the incident I mention in my Substack where new management at the Miami Seaquarium decided to starve dolphins to coerce them into participating in guest programs, and an issue at the Austin Zoo five-ish years ago where the director was perpetuating serious welfare issues and ignoring staff feedback. In both cases, there’s always the questions of where the accrediting group was. We don’t know anything about what happened with the Seaquarium (it’s been over six months since the USDA report documenting the diet cuts was released and AMMPA and American Humane haven’t said a thing), but I remember hearing that ZAA had no idea what was happening at Austin because nobody had reached out to them about it.

This is why I’m arguing that all zoological accrediting groups need to make visible reporting options and make sure staff feel safe enough to use them! If you’ve got a facility perpetuating or not dealing with major issues, it’s pretty probable that they’re going to be unhappy if their staff reports those issues to any oversight body. That’s not a situation where it’s currently safe to speak up right now - and four out of five zoological accrediting groups in the US don’t have standards prohibiting retaliation against staff for bringing up issues like that! (Surprisingly, it’s not AZA. It’s the sanctuary accrediting group, GFAS). Without any option for internal reporting, issues may not get addressed - which hurts animal welfare - or people risk losing their job, possibly their entire career in the field (which is a huge part of people’s identities!), and their financial stability to advocate for their animals.

Currently, the two accrediting groups that do have reporting options (AZA and GFAS) stay they’ll attempt to keep reports anonymous, but acknowledge it may not be possible to do so. (Which tracks, because zoo jobs are highly specialized and only a few people may be exposed to an issue). However, only GFAS prohibits facilities from retaliating against people who make reports. On top of that, there’s absolutely no transparency about what happens next: GFAS, ZAA, AMMPA and AH have no information about how the process transpires and if someone making a report will get any information back about what happened. AZA straight up says that all accreditation stuff is proprietary (read: confidential) so you just have to trust that they dealt with it appropriately. Just yeet your report into the void and hope the groups doing oversight handle it correctly when there’s no accountability? That’s… not a great look for animal welfare concerns.

I hope the industry chooses to fix this problem. I hope it chooses to invest in transparency and increased credibility. I don’t know what I expect, but I’d like to see these accrediting groups do the right thing.

My full write-up on how accrediting groups in the US handle reporting and concerns (or don’t) is linked below.

I think a better question, unfortunately, is “does any accreditation mean anything?” Followed closely by “how can a member of the public tell what it means?”

AKA you’ve poked to one of my giant projects of indeterminate length that I might, hopefully, maybe, get enough of a conclusion on to start submitting for peer review and publication this year.

Now if you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’re probably thinking wait! Accreditations require standards! So to know what an accreditation means, we could just go read what standards they hold facilities to, right?

…and the answer is yes, but, that won’t give you the whole picture for a lot of reasons. Many standards are performance standards: they say what has to be achieved, but don’t specify how it’s done. That means whether the standard is met is up to a significant amount of interpretation. Maybe the standards are in flux/being updated, and you can’t guarantee that what you can find publicly is what’s currently being used. Most accrediting bodies allow facilities to petition for variances, and there’s no information available about what facilities have ones, for what, and why. On top of that, there’s always questions about enforcement, oversight, consistency, anonymous reporting options, and of course, the risk of nepotism and/or politics impacting how accrediting decisions are made.

Here’s the thing that never gets talked about, but is really important to know: accreditation is branding. Accreditation groups are trade organizations - they are responsible for advocating for the success of the businesses that are members. Being part of specific “accreditations” is like being in a fancy club. Members get certain perks, non-members don’t get those perks, there’s in-groups and out-groups, except it’s all playing out with regards to federal and state level regulation, legislation, government funding, etc. That’s why it’s so political - it isn’t only about guaranteeing a facility’s quality. It’s about guaranteeing that they’re good enough to be part of the club, and will function and act the way the people who run the club want.

So honestly, at this point? All I can confidently say at this point in time is that accreditation by any entity in the zoological or sanctuary world means that X facility aligns with the ethos/zeitgeist of the accrediting body such that they’re willing to stake their brand to it. You can read up on accrediting body to get a sense of what that means - if you do, make sure you look at things like the website and comments they make to the media, because there’s a lot of information about organization culture and ethos in that than in just the published standards.

Give me like, six months (I hope) and I’d be able to answer your question with a lot more specifics, but I’m still in the nitty-gritty of spreadsheets and I don’t want to speak before my analysis is finished.

Short answer: the loss of accreditation was mainly a political thing with a whole heaping pile of industry drama thrown into it. According to public statements by AZA, loss of accreditation was due in part to the embezzlement/misuse of resources by Stalf and Bell, and also to issues with ambassador animal sourcing and use by Jack Hanna’s team. There’s a whole hell of a lot that could be unpacked about that latter bit, but basically, no, it wasn’t based on issues with general animal welfare practices at the entire facility. I’ve got friends in the field who still visit colleagues at Columbus and speak positively about the care the animals get, so I would say you’re fine to go and not worry about it.

You will likely see Columbus become accredited by the Zoological Association of America shortly, which will also be a political decision and not necessarily anything to do with a change in operations or ethos or care standards. Ohio passed a law - the Dangerous Wild Animals Act - in 2012 that prohibits possession of a wide variety of large / dangerous species; exemptions exist for a number of types of entities, including facilities accredited by AZA or ZAA. When Columbus lost their AZA accreditation my first question was what would happen to those species (bears, elephants, hippos, large crocodilians, big cats, non-human primates other than lemurs). It turns out that as long as the zoo was in the middle of a good-faith effort to be accredited they were covered, as far as I know that ended when the appeal failed - I don’t think they can say that trying again to get AZA accreditation by starting the process over next year counts. So you may see a ZAA accreditation spun by the media or anti-zoo entities as ‘Columbus lowering their standards’ or something because all of this is drama forever, but I think that’s what they’d have to do at this point to be in compliance with the law and keep the majority of their animals. (And there’s literally nowhere for that many large, dangerous animals to go within the industry. Welfare aside, you just… can’t dissolve a collection like that easily.)

Oh, that’s an interesting take. I’d say it’s a sign of which zoos a) China thinks are good and b) which nations currently have good relationships with China. 

China is definitely very picky about the facilities they choose to send panda to, and are very involved in the oversight of how their animals are cared for. From what I’ve been told, they send over a specialist to live at the zoo for a while each time a new cub is born. So to that degree, they’re only going to loan pandas to very credible facilities. 

The thing about pandas is that their movement between countries is mostly influenced by geopolitics, and less so by the normal ways animals move between facilities (breeding programs, mutual animal exchanges, etc). A facility can’t just step up and say “hmm we’d like to be part of the giant panda breeding program” - there’s a whole complicated process of getting involved. If China doesn’t like what a zoo - or their country - is doing, they can simply refuse to renew the loan contract for the panda at the end of the original time period and call the animals home. 

That may actually be what’s happening in the US right now, thanks to the current political situation. Of the four zoos with giant pandas in the US right now (San Diego Zoo, National Zoo, Memphis Zoo, and Zoo Atlanta), San Diego has already sent their pandas home to China, and the two at the National Zoo will be returning at the end of 2020. It sounds like San Diego is hoping to be able to work out another agreement to bring pandas back to the zoo from China - they’re not planning on renovating the exhibit even when it’s standing empty - but as far as I know National hasn’t made any similar statement about the future for that exhibit area or species. 

fumblebeefae:

t(2) Africa to, maybe, see a lion. I talked about how some animals can’t be returned to the wild and they said that we should always try release these animals like 10 times before we be sure to keep the animal (but not in cages to the public see, never this). And I’m so tired, man, to see that many biologists, zoologists and people in academia using ARA bullshit. And some of them weren’t even vegans, but equally annoying.

Biology undergrads (which biology is such a broad field so I doubt many of them would be specifically studying zoology) aren’t biologists / zoologists or academics. They’re students in training. There’s always ARA-like bio students but they often end up quickly dropping out. But implying actual zoologists and biologists are majority ARA-idiots that don’t know our own research field or the basic animal-welfare standards we helped to study and implement, is not only so very incorrect and doesn’t even reflect a fraction of what actual zoologists are like, but it so very rude especially coming from a biology student.

The vast majority of zoologists and biologists aren’t anti-zoo. Hello most of us work with our study species via zoos! You really shouldn’t be generalising actual zoologists based on undergrad students of all things. 

I think I can shed some light on why the OP had the experience they did, at least if they’re in the US / Canada. 

Here’s the thing: the anti-zoo groups that run animal sanctuaries in the United States and Canada have spent at least the past decade (probably longer, I just can’t source it) actively confounding what the public understanding of a “sanctuary” is. We’ve talked about it a little on WADTT in the past, but this is a great time to come back to it. 

“Sanctuary” as a concept has been marketed to not just mean somewhere that captive animals are safe and secure, but a non-exploitative setting in which resident animals have respect, dignity, peace, and the rights to self-determination and bodily liberty. It’s often also talked about as a state of mind: animals “being at” or “finding” sanctuary, rather than living “in a sanctuary”. ”Depending on which sanctuary group’s messaging you’re looking at, you’ll actually notice that their definition of “sanctuary” is purposefully designed so that zoos can never meet it. For instance, one elephant group feels that asking animals to ever do anything on a schedule influence by human priorities infringes on their right to self determination - so a zoo animal, who is asked to shift indoors and stay indoors while the outdoor areas are cleaned (even voluntarily), is explicitly not able to have Sanctuary. 

You may be thinking that my definition sounds kind of “far out” and that the sanctuaries you may like or follow don’t adhere to that rhetoric, but if you look at how they talk about the work they do - and why they’re different than zoos, or other places they feel animals are abused in - you’ll start seeing those sentiments reoccur. The most common and easily identifiable claim that sanctuaries don’t exploit animals “like zoos do” because they facilities don’t exist for entertainment or profit; when you look closer, the reasons they believe that zoos are exploitative will be things like the human gaze is fundamentally disrespectful to animals, or that it’s okay to enjoy seeing animals but that being entertained by them is immoral, or that active management of animals in human care is antithetical to that animal’s bodily liberty. As some concrete examples I’ve seen: having tigers in a zoo is bad because they’re exploited, but you can come see them at our sanctuary and it’s ok because we respect them and don’t profit from it; elephants not being able to go wherever they want whenever they want denies them a fundamental right to choose how they spend their day, even if that means that cleaning can’t be done regularly; etc. 

This is also why a lot of people have negative reactions to “bars” and “cages,” but the exact same exhibit without the visual barriers is much more acceptable to a lot of people: anti-zoo marketing from animal rights groups relies heavily on metaphors involving human slavery and incarceration, specifically because that conditions us to project our emotional reactions to those topics onto captive animals. It defies logic - moated exhibits often leave animals with less usable space than if they were built with solid fencing - but it’s been a very successful marketing strategy. Sanctuaries have capitalized on this by using rhetoric that references those analogies, saying they don’t “imprison” their animals in cages (even though they often use much more “cage-like fencing than most zoos) or force them into “slavery” for people’s enjoyment. 

While you might not recognize that sort of rhetoric in this blog post, it’s something people are pretty darn familiar with - a long time ago, I asked blog readers to tell me what their associations are with the word “sanctuary” and a lot of you conveyed some of these sentiments in your response. That’s not a bad thing, but you should recognize that people have put a lot of money into ensuring that you have that sort of strong emotional association with the word. 

So, it’s really not surprising to me that you’d have biology undergrads end up repeating a lot of that rhetoric. It’s something I hear from people in every walk of life, no matter their education level - I even hear it repeated by people employed in the zoo industry who don’t realize they’ve been taught to sort of inherently denigrate their own work. You ran into a bunch of really well meaning, probably passionate kids who grew up in the era of The Dodo’s omnipresence who probably never encountered accurate positive media about zoos or were taught to think critically about the sources they’re getting their animal management and ethics information from. Heck, they could even have college professors currently teaching them that rhetoric is accurate - I’ve run into that a bunch of times, too. They’re just at that point of higher education where they feel like they know everything, right before they’ve learned how to also identify what they don’t know… and so that manifests as total surety about their positions on things, in this case, the difference between zoos and sanctuaries. If you’d met me when I was a sophomore in college, I’d probably have said very similar things for exactly that set of reasons. 

Thanks! I actually have all three, I’m just in different stages of reading / studying them, but I’m posting this ask because I think other people might want the resources.

Zoo Renewal is absolutely incredible - I haven’t finished it yet because it’s definitely a lot to digest, but super valuable. (For those who don’t know it, the full title is “Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto” and it’s a really fascinating look into some of the human politics surrounding zoos). 

The Animal Game: Searching For Wildness at the American Zoo looks at some of the history of imperialism in the early zoo industry with regards to animal acquisition, and I would say more on it if I’d re-read it recently, but even so it has stuck out to me as a really valuable and interesting book.  

If you’ve ever wanted to know about 19th century zoos (or if you were interested in the post about bear pits from a few weeks ago), Savages and Beasts: Birth of the Modern Zoo is a go-to read. Rothfels talks a lot on how zoo design (both animal exhibits and general sensibilities) evolved from where they were then to how zoos are now. 

Absolutely. Or, more to my opinion, they need to change how their PR departments frame the work they do. 

Zoo PR is really great at advertising zoos. What they’re not good at doing - and what is becoming so much more important due to the omnipresence of smartphone technology - is facilitating intimate and authentic engagement with a zoos’ online audience. They’re great at showing you teasers of cute things and selling you the idea of coming to visit the zoo, but that’s not what social media is /for/ anymore and I personally think they really need to pivot. 

There are facilities I absolutely love in person whose social media I can’t stand to engage with because it comes off as super commercial or hyper-edited. If I’m going to a zoos’ FB page, I want to know about the work they do: how they care for their animals, the value of the work they do, the positions they hold on various topics. Some zoos do a pretty good job of communicating that, but a lot don’t. (And for the most part, what does get repeated on topics I want to see are semi-identical talking points reiterated from messaging pushed by accrediting groups, which makes things feel very cookie-cutter). 

Let me tell you, there are so many things I learn at conferences that leave my jaw on the floor. They’re stories of conservation and research and really incredible work with their animals that I’d kill to tell… but the zoo has decided to not talk about them, or only talk about them in person. I’ve heard various reasons for that: sometimes the PR people don’t think it’s important and just want to focus on cute animals, sometimes the zoo is afraid they’ll make themselves an animal rights target for talking about details regarding charismatic megafauna… but it all brings the same result, that those stories don’t get told. 

One of the reason a lot of animal sanctuaries are so successful on social media (even the ones with well-known problems!) is because they’re so open and transparent. If you’re taking videos of your animal care every day and posting content where you go into detail about the social interactions between your animals constantly, your audience has so much more of an intimate understanding of the work you do. Businesses and social movements are successful in this era when they ascribe to philosophies of radical transparency and accountability, and so that puts pressure on other areas where ethics are a major concern (like animal care!) to do the same. The current zoological industry in the United States isn’t there yet. As much as there’s a push for transparency, it’s only transparency to a degree - there’s still this sense within the field that since zoos are the experts they don’t need to share everything they do or their reasons for doing it with the public, and that there are things about animal care the public “shouldn’t” see. This isn’t because they’re doing shady things out of the public eye - it’s just tradition, and “that’s how we’ve always done it.” I find it extremely frustrating, because where people fall in love with the work they do is when I do get to tell them those intimate, inside stories that maybe aren’t so grande but genuinely do show how much those animals are cared for. That’s why I fell in love with the field. 

In a world where people spend so much of their time online, the zoo industry can’t afford to continue only utilizing their PR and social media as marketing tools that bring people to the physical facility. There’s a huge potential audience online of people who, as all the reader interaction on this blog has taught me, desperately want to support zoos but may not be able to actually visit one. By not giving the online audience a similarly authentic experience with the zoo online to what they’d get in person, zoos shoot themselves in the foot: if, like what I do on this blog, you give people that option for intimate access they will engage and they’ll do it with so much passion. Current PR tactics work okay for bringing people into the facilities, but I feel they’re not very successful at reaching younger internet generations who value authenticity, intimacy, and transparency in the entities they support. Sure, we’ll watch a cute animal video as it scrolls by - but how much does that cute, fluffy video encourage us to actually click through, get engaged, and truly care?

So yeah, it’s a field that does incredibly good work and is astoundingly bad as a whole at actually telling people about most of it. 

The Oregon Zoo is a good zoo. I am more familiar with their elephant program than any other part of the zoo, and I can personally vouch for the dedication and professionalism of their elephant keepers. The main group putting out the information you’ve come across, on the other hand - Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants - is run by armchair experts who specialize in pseudoscience and have aligned with PETA and other major anti-zoo groups to attack all of the elephant programs in United States. I am comfortable putting both of those statements in such declarative phrasing because I put in a lot of effort in 2018 get first-hand information from both sides: I’ve attended conferences put on by FOZE as well as the Elephant Manager’s Association, and I’ve toured the Oregon Zoo elephant barn as part of a different conference. What you’ve encountered is a combination of animal liberation activism and the zoo industry’s obnoxious tendency to never address the past because it might make them look bad. To explain that, let me touch on a few different things. 

The recent death of the zoo’s five-year-old elephant calf, Lily, was absolutely horrible (and another one of those topics I wasn’t able to face blogging about yet). She was killed by a virus commonly referred to as EEHV: it’s a type of herpes virus that attacks epithelium cells, and it’s very deadly to both captive and wild elephants. The problem is that almost all adult Asian elephants carry multiple strains of EEHV with no symptoms, similar to how humans can go decades with the strain of herpes that causes cold sores without ever having an outbreak. There’s no way to keep baby elephants from being exposed to EEHV if you want them to live around other elephants, and it’s thought that young elephants are more likely to die from it when they’re exposed to it later in life. It’s a genuinely awful disease. By the time you can see clinical signs (lesions in the mouth or on other mucous membranes) the baby probably has like 48 hours to live, and they die from massive internal hemorrhage. Because it’s such a horrible, awful way to have to watch an animal die - and because it’s killing a lot of wild Asian elephants - the zoo industry does a ton of research on EEHV. We still don’t have a cure, but we’ve learned how to detect an active viral infection early through blood tests, and starting treatment as soon as that’s detected is crucial to helping baby elephants survive it. From what I know, the Oregon Zoo is rigorous about testing for any signs of EEHV … and even with all the treatment they were able to provide, the vet staff weren’t able to save Lily. Losing an elephant is always a devastating loss. A baby is worse. Losing a calf that way is… unimaginably hard to bear. But to the people focused on attacking the Oregon Zoo because they’re fundamentally against having any elephants in captive settings for any reason, it was simply another angle they could exploit. 

Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants may have started as a grassroots group of citizen activists concerned about the treatment of a specific bull at the zoo (Packy), but they’re now a national presence that is networked with PETA, HSUS, Born Free USA, and other major animal liberation / anti-zoo advocacy groups. They get free communications strategy support from Care2, a petition platform that makes money by selling the email addresses of people who sign their petitions to group that include PETA for use in future marketing campaigns. They’re working in concert with multiple other anti-zoo-elephant groups, such as Elephant Guardians for Los Angeles (the group trying to remove Billy from the LA Zoo), and have the explicit backing of at least one of the sanctuaries that would profit from elephant exhibits closing. The problem with this? Is that it’s spearheaded by people who believe they have telepathic connections with elephants and can “see sadness” on their faces. They have exactly zero scientific background in animal welfare or management topics, nor any actual husbandry experience with exotic animals of any kind. FOZE frequently repeats incorrect or outdated information - I can’t tell if it’s because they literally don’t read the scientific literature and stay up on actual management protocols, or if it’s just convenient for them to misrepresent things to further their agenda. Many of their supporters are the type will happily go take selfies free-contact with orphaned elephants while on travel while simultaneously preaching that people should only ever be allowed to have the privilege of experiencing elephants if they can pay to see them in wild. They want to shut all the conservation work down, end all the research on captive elephants that will help preserve wild elephants, and put all the current zoo elephants out into sanctuaries where they’ll live out the rest of their lives with minimal management or enrichment. They’re about to sponsor a vigil to “remember the victims” of AZA’s elephant program - because they believe that a group of activists, backed by a couple of elephant behaviorists with name recognition, know more than all the keepers and veterinarians and researchers who have been working directly with elephants and studying them for decades.

So here’s the truth of the matter: yes, the Oregon Zoo used to manage their elephants in some pretty awful ways. So did every other zoo in the country. There was no data available fifty to one-hundred years ago that told anyone they should do anything different with their elephants. Zoo animal management has improved so massively in the last couple of decades, and nowhere more than with elephants. Zoos did what they thought was necessary to keep both staff and elephants alive when they were first brought into American zoos, and it has taken a huge amount of research and pioneering new styles of elephant care to reach where we are today. It’s not like that’s ending any time soon - we know we can still always continue to improve. The AZA recently approved a really large grant for researchers involved with multiple institutions to continue studying how to improve elephant welfare in captive settings. However, the zoo world is stuck in this genuinely stupid mentality where admitting care used to be sub-par would somehow mean they’re not the experts now. And because they can’t admit as a community that they used to treat elephants in ways we now know were harmful, they can’t tell the public about how they’ve grown and changed. (This is a massive frustration for me. I attended an professional elephant management conference and was floored by the stories of change and growth and innovation I kept hearing… and nobody is willing to message about them to the public because it’s “too risky.”) Never being willing to admit their faults or be critical of their own history means it’s really easy for groups like FOZE to use old history against them: if the zoo won’t say “yeah, we learned that practice of, say, separating babies at birth was shitty and we stopped” you can keep telling stories about that shitty practice from 30 years ago and people won’t know the difference. 

So that’s what is happening with the Oregon Zoo. They’re stuck in a position where they can only play defense against the allegations being lobbed at them by AR groups, and they won’t actually defend themselves and correct the misinformation because they’d have to admit any previous fault in order to do it. Zoos do such an abominable job about telling the public about what’s being done to improve elephant care in zoos that Oregon can’t even market the quality of their program based on their groundbreaking research and innovations to elephant care. It’s so frustrating, because it makes it almost impossible for the public to make an educated choice: if the zoo choosing to only post cute videos and the anti-zoo people are the ones posting about behavior and biology and ethics, who seems more credible? Zoo politics are dumb, and the way zoos are currently dealing with politics regarding their industry is really hurting their credibility in the eyes of even the people who love them - your question is a great example of that. 

You can feel free to keep loving the Oregon Zoo. They do good work. The elephant staff are dedicated and professional, they conduct continual research to improve the quality of life for their elephants, and they are trailblazing a new style of elephant care that has nothing in common with the problematic historical practices you’re hearing about. 

Editing to add: for anyone interested, here’s a presentation from some of the Oregon Zoo’s researchers about how they studied and quantified the welfare of their elephants during the transition to the new exhibit. 

UPDATE: I was asked by someone at the zoo to emphasize that they do actually talk about the evolution of elephant management practices at the zoo, and that the statement I made in this post were opinion. Please read the full correction here. 

Hey, all. I’m sorry I haven’t continued with the big cat research write-ups as promised. 

As you might have seen on the news recently, an intern was killed by a lion over the weekend at a facility in North Carolina. It’s not yet known how the lion escaped his secure lock-out while his enclosure was being cleaned, but he did, and after multiple tranquilizers failed he had to be shot in order for them to retrieve the intern’s body. It made all the incident data I’ve spent the last few months studying far too real - I’ve not only visited that facility, but also interviewed them for my research - and I’m not in much of a mood to keep writing about big cats right now. 

I’m not going to blog about the incident until the entire investigation by the USDA is complete, and I haven’t linked a news article here on purpose. I can’t deal with the amount of theories and nasty implications being bandied about from all sectors right now, before the family and the facility have even had time to deal with the immediate trauma much less even mourn. I don’t know anything more than what is being reported about the incident. Nothing about what happened or why is public yet. What I can tell you is that I know how seriously that facility takes their safety protocols and how much personal responsibility the leadership feels for keeping their people safe. 

I expected the animal rights world to attack them when I heard what had happened: they’re a small, unaccredited USDA-licensed facility, and they’re in one of the four states left without laws regulating big cat ownership. Regardless of the fact that the facility is not a “pet” ownership situation and the fact that most of their big cats are rescues, placed with them by the USDA in 2004 after a seizure, they’re not AZA and PETA / HSUS already had the state targeted for legislative action in 2019. Now the people at the facility, already dealing with the aftermath of a horrible incident, will be brutally excoriated in public to advance a legislative agenda - and the poor intern’s family won’t be able to mourn in peace, because their child’s death will be a talking point. What’s worse, AR groups are bringing back their federal version of the bill (which my big cat research proves is based on claims that are flat out false) and so they’ll likely take this incident and all the horrible details loudly to D.C.

What I didn’t expect is for other zoos to throw them under the bus, too. I’ve seen at least two statements so far, both from Zoo Miami’s communications director, intimating that the incident happened because the facility felt it was cost-prohibitive to build appropriate enclosures for the lion… while simultaneously using a TV interview about the incident to promote AZA’s brand in contrast. This is the same guy who told the media “it’s an accident and accidents happen” when a zookeeper was injured by a tiger at his facility in 2016. I’m appalled and outraged to the point that I can’t stop shaking. Everyone in the zoo field knows that something like this could happen to us, or our friends and coworkers and loved ones, no matter what accreditation your facility holds. It did happen to an AZA-institution, two years ago, in Palm Beach. You don’t shit on people after they’ve gone through something like that. You support them. The smaller facilities showed up to publicly support the Palm Beach staff after their tragedy, because no matter what inter-industry politics are going on at the time, that’s what you do. It doesn’t look like that’s what is going to happen this time, because the inter-industry politics are now too pervasive to be set aside. I’m not proud to be part of the industry, today. 

I’ll go back to regular blogging and answering asks for now, and we’ll return to the big cat data at some point in the future. Thanks for bearing with me. 

FYI, when talking about the incident in NC, I was informed by a friend of the intern who was killed that they went by Alex and preferred they/them pronouns. 

It was cancelled in March / April of 2016 at approximately the same time that the ex-CEO Joel Manby decided to stop orca breeding. I can’t confirm that he cancelled the expansion because of he breeding ban - he could have planned to nix it anyways even before being pretty much bullied into making that management choice (which is a complicated story in and of itself) - but it seems likely he didn’t want to invest $100 million on a major renovation of all the orca habitats at all the facilities now that the plan was to just let that population die off. It’s hard to find an official statement on the choice from Manby, because apparently he only addressed it directly through a grainy youtube video. I attended his speech at the AZA conference that year in San Diego, and while he addressed the partnership with HSUS and the breeding ban, he never brought up the the cancellation of the Blue World Expansion. Here’s his entire statement on the topic from the video:

“This is what I think a lot of people don’t realize: our habitats are the largest of their kind in the world, or among the largest. They way exceed any government standard. And we felt that instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand the size, since they are already very large compared to others, we want to focus our time, our effort, and our money on enhancing the existing facilities and taking some of the best from the Blue World and putting it into our existing facilities, and the taking that money and putting it into our other animals and our rescue operations.” 

I can’t tell you how anyone at the higher levels of the company felt about the ending of the Blue World project, or if there was more nuance that went into the choice than what is presented in that quote, but I can confidently report that the general response to Manby’s choices in 2016 among park staff both at SeaWorld facilities and throughout a lot of the rest of the zoo industry was shock, horror, and a massive sense of betrayal. Because that renovation - which would have had so many more features than just “more space”, such as a shallow area with a rubbing beach and a fast-current area - would have been such an incredible positive change in the welfare of the current resident whales. Sure, there might not be more babies, but there are still whales at SeaWorld that could live at least another 40 years. Manby’s choice that the current habitats were good enough because they were “the biggest” deprived those orcas of everything the expansion was intended to provide for future generations.

Now, here’s the thing: the current pool complexes were built in the 1980′s, when there had only been orcas in captive settings for fifteen years. I can’t emphasize enough how little we knew - even that recently - about the needs of orcas compared to what we do now. If you thought old dolphin pools talked about in my previous post were bad, we need to talk about how people originally tried to keep killer whales, and why the pools built in the 1980′s were cutting edge at the time.

There have been dolphins in captive settings in the United States since the 1860′s, but the first killer whale to ever be in human care was captured in the 1964. Before Moby Doll was accidentally caught instead of killed, and the Vancouver Aquarium decided to keep him, general public opinion was that orcas were legitimate monsters and there was huge amount of support for killing them en mass. Husbandry knowledge with regards to orcas literally had to start from scratch, because nothing was known about orcas: Moby Doll’s caretakers originally incorrectly determined he was female, and had no idea what killer whales ate (although they at least figured out fairly quickly that it probably wasn’t people, as most people thought) so he didn’t take food for the first two months. Moby Doll was kept in a makeshift sea pen at a shipyard, died from serious health issues that nobody knew enough about orcas to diagnose, and it wasn’t figured out he was male until after his death. When you hear people talking about how much research has been done on killer whales in captive settings in the past couple decades, and how much has been learned about how to better house and care for orcas, remember the above - the (lack of) knowledge the field started with just half a century ago.

SeaWorld San Diego got their first orca in late 1965, less than two years after Moby Doll was captured. The tank considered appropriate for housing the first Shamu, due to the sheer lack of knowledge about what orcas needed at the time, looked like this:

SeaWorld Orlando opened in 1973 with a much larger orca tank, and in 1975 the San Diego facility also built a new, larger tank for their orcas. These are the pools that still exist today, currently in use for bottlenose dolphin shows. I don’t have any information on why the choice to expand was made - it seems probable it was relevant to both animal welfare and expansion of the captive orca population, but I can’t confirm that. The photo below is the San Diego dolphin stadium during the period when it used to house orcas.

By the 1980′s, SeaWorld facilities were yet again building larger orca tanks. I can’t find any reliable sources for the dimensions of both sets of pools, but here’s an image of the whales in the current San Diego show pool (as close to the same angle as I could find) to for visual comparison with the 1975 one above.

Here’s the satellite view from Google Maps, showing the comparative size of the two San Diego complexes - current orca pools on the bottom left, dolphin pools / old orca pools on the upper right. That’s a pretty decent amount of space increase. The blob-shaped pool off to the right of the current orca pool complex is the underwater viewing area added in the 90′s, which I believe was also the first orca space to have rockwork built into it from the beginning.

The rockwork in the underwater viewing areas was removed in the early 2010′s after Dawn Brancheau’s death to allow the installation of rising floors that would have enhanced trainer safety during waterworks. The test floor, which would have been installed in all orca pools at all parks had it been successful, was was apparently removed due to mechanical issues and the larger project scrapped due to the court ban on waterworks at SeaWorld facilities.

So that’s how SeaWorld’s orca habitats got to where they are: they started with an almost-literal swimming pool for the first Shamu in 1965, expanding to multiple-pool complexes that hold millions of gallons of water. But those exhibits were built when we had less than 20 years of experience with the husbandry, medical, and behavioral needs of orcas - and the most recent of them is now almost 30 years old. Three decades may not be much when compared to terrestrial animals that have been in zoo settings for centuries, but for whales, it’s more than half of the entire time we’ve had to study them (and the most recent decades of reseach have benefited from massive technological advances).

Whether or not they was supported by the SeaWorld board and stakeholders at the time, Manby’s choices during his tenure as CEO will live on in infamy. SeaWorld facilities haven’t really seen the “other animal” expansions he promised when he nixed the Blue World project: they’ve gotten multiple new rides and roller-coasters costing tens of millions of dollars, but no new zoological exhibits; construction that has occurred has appeared to be mostly aesthetic improvement of existing habitats, and even planned animal areas within the new ride attractions have never come to fruition. Under his leadership, skilled, tenured animal department staffers - even curators - were laid off in quantity, which staff felt was done with no care for how it impacted department function or animal welfare. By the time he left his position in February of 2018, he was pretty openly reviled by many in the zoo industry, but especially the animal care staff at his own parks.

Here’s the design schematic and artist renderings of what the Blue World expansion would have looked like, if it had come to fruition.

This ask is in regards to the elderly wolf euthanized at the Calgary Zoo that a disgruntled employee is portraying to the media as being motivated by wanting to bring in new, attractive, younger animals. 

It’s infuriating, and it’s all too common in the media these days. As much as anti-captivity activists would like to believe that everyone who works in a zoo setting is some power-hungry animal abuser who gets off on torturing “poor wild animals,” the truth is that zoo people genuinely do love their animals. In many cases, they care more for their well-being than they do about their own lives. 

These people ride out natural disasters, hunkered down in hurricane shelters or camping in break rooms during blizzards - away from their own family and pets - to make sure zoo animals have continued care. Houston Zoo people waded through waist-high water to get on site after Harvey. The owner of Safari West hid from the police when they forced everyone to evacuate during the North Bay fires and quite literally saved his entire facility and all of his animals by staying up all night fighting fires with a garden hose - while his house burned to the ground just next door. 

Being a zookeeper is not a job you can subsist easily on. Imagine committing to the typical millennial struggle for the next thirty years, willingly, because your job is worth it. Most zookeepers have roommates for most of their careers, and work two or three jobs just to be able to continue caring for their charges. To be able to advance in their careers, they’re expected for at least the first decade to be willing to drop their entire life - loved ones, significant others, social lives, medical needs - and pick up and move across the country whenever an opportunity arises. Not being willing to move for a job is considered “not committed enough” by most management, and so move they do. They don’t take regular vacations - the few times they have time off, they’re going on continuing education courses or research projects or conservation trips. Most zookeepers, after a decade in the field, have chronic injuries or health issues stemming from constant hard physical labor. A life of being a zookeeper literally destroys your body, but the people who stick it through do it because those animals are their goddamn life. 

Zoo staff are covered in tattoos of their animals, especially the pawprints and the faces of the animals they’ve lost, but also the ones they raised and the ones who helped them fall in love with the job despite all the back-breaking labor and below-subsistence wages. You might not see them - they’re generally required to be hidden while they’re on the job - but they carry these imprints of the lives they’ve fostered with them forever. 

So, sure, tell me again that zoos kill their animals when they’re old / inconvenient / not aesthetically pleasing anymore. Put it in the paper one. more. time. And then imagine what reading that, hearing that refrain again and again and again does to the people who gave their lives to the animal who has just been lost. 

As to the story about why the wolf was euthanized, it’s fake news. As The Dodo is reporting - I’m not linking it because I will not give them traffic - the story broke after what appears to be a disgruntled employee contacted the animal rights-based, anti-zoo organization ZooCheck. Kali was almost 14 - she had long outlived the normal 5-6 year lifespan for the wild wolf, and was pretty elderly by even captive standards. Here’s what the zoo tweeted:

“Degenerative problems:” a phrase which here means age related health issues. Think about an elderly dog - they can get arthritis, or develop cataracts, or stop being able to really absorb nutrition from their food, or develop doggy dementia… all of these things can and do happen to elderly wild canids as well. Yes, a few wolves can live a couple years longer than Kali did, but that’s an extreme - not the norm - and it is always accompanied by age-related health issues. I don’t know exactly what issues Kali was dealing with, but I can assure you that the zoo staff had been tracking her welfare for a long time before making the hard choice that it was time to let her go. The Calgary Zoo is AZA-accredited, and having just spent a week at their mid-year conference, I can tell you one session was a comprehensive four-hour class on assessing welfare and quality of life specifically just for geriatric animals. 

ZooCheck and The Dodo appear to be playing this off as a situation where the animal was euthanized to bring in new animals, and I can tell you that AZA zoos do not do that - no matter how the story is spun when it reaches the outside world, there will always be more behind a euthanasia decision than is released to the public. I have personally seen many facilities care for geriatric animals long past when AR groups like to claim they’ll be “hidden in the back” or “euthanized because they’re no long attractive to look at” - hell, I’ve even participated in their care. Yes, the zoo director did say that Kali had been having some social issues for a while. Yes, the zoo had acquired another group of wolves that were not yet on display. That doesn’t mean that they killed Kali so they could put the new animals out on display. 

For one, any new animals at any zoo have to go through a lengthy quarantine process to make sure they’re not going to bring any sort of disease or parasite into the collection, and the process of transferring animals between facilities is lengthy, involves a lot of paperwork, and is often weather dependent, so animal moves are often planned quite far in advance of when the animals will actually be on exhibit to the public. I can’t speak for the zoo here, but it’s entirely possible the transfer was arranged when it became clear Kali’s quality of life was declining. And for two, even if the zoo was planning on moving the new group of wolves into the exhibit while Kali was alive, that doesn’t mean they’d have to kill her. “Social issues” doesn’t mean they couldn’t try to introduce the animals, or rotate them through the space (remember, many zoo exhibits have multiple outdoor areas, even if they’re not all visible to guests), or find Kali another off-exhibit area to live in. With the arthritis and joint issues even ZooCheck acknowledges she had, it’s entirely plausible she was also have issues navigating the terrain of the exhibit and needed to be moved to a location that was more appropriate for an elderly animal. (It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that the person who contacted animal rights groups is not likely to have actually worked with Kali - her keepers are grieving, not trying to cause sensationalist media that slams their zoo. And if you’re not working with an animal directly, even if you work for the same facility, you’re not likely to have access to all the details about medical issues or management choices for it.) I haven’t had a chance to check in with anyone from Calgary, but I can tell you from personal experience that there are plenty of entirely good reasons that what ZooCheck and The Dodo are choosing to frame as a callous and immoral situation could have occurred.

And, of course, ZooCheck and The Dodo are saying that Kali should have gone to a sanctuary instead, which is pretty much their MO at this point. They recommended The Wild Animal Sanctuary (a mega-sanctuary in Colorado). Let’s look at that. The fastest route between the Calgary Zoo and TWAS is over a 16-hour drive. That doesn’t count the fact that animal transport vehicles might drive slower than normal cars for the sake of their passengers, or that drivers might need to stop for a break (or overnight, if there’s only one drive), or that border crossings take time. Overall, it’s probably an estimated 24 hours of travel? That’s a lot of stress on an old animal. Not to mention that, if they did move Kali, she might have to go through quarantine for weeks before leaving the zoo as well as on the other end of the trip, and she’d be taken away from everything familiar and all the staff she knew and trusted. ZooCheck and The Dodo are just flat out wrong that that’s an acceptable management choice for a geriatric animal. (It seems to be something both the organizations support, though, since they’re also both advocating for an elderly elephant from the Edmonton Zoo be moved to the PAWS sanctuary in California - even though experts have determined the multiple-day transport would probably kill her).

As to your question, I’m not too worried about the zoo being shut down over this - Calgary was accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in 2013, which speaks to a lot about the way their facility cares for animals and also the connections it is likely to have with their local government and regulatory bodies. Now, ZooCheck does have a history of helping other groups attack Canadian zoos (they were involved in the seizure of the Toronto Zoo elephants), but hopefully there’s really not enough to this story to give them any actual clout. AZA zoos keep records - it’s part of the accreditation standards they’re required to fulfill. If the local agencies really thought there was anything untoward about this story, they could always ask to see the welfare assessments for Kali, the veterinary reports, and (when available) her necropsy findings.