When ‘conservation’ is not in the animal’s best interest

ANNE JOHNSTONE
March 19 2009

Pandas are cute. Those big eyes, the large head and that round furry body elicit our instincts for cuddliness. There's even a posh word for it: neoteny. That's the scientific shorthand for a collection of childlike characteristics that give certain species a headstart in the race for public attention. It certainly worked on my little brother. When we were kids, he was completely fixated on Chi Chi, the giant panda who had just arrived at London Zoo and went on to become one of the first global animal celebrities.

Just now Edinburgh Zoo, which celebrated its 100th birthday yesterday, is involved in the lengthy, delicate, complex diplomacy that invariably precedes the loan from the Chinese government of a breeding pair of giant pandas. The initiative recently received the blessing of the Prime Minister.

The zoo - the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, to give it its Sunday name - stresses in its publicity the importance of captive breeding programmes in saving the species from extinction. (We are told that any offspring will be returned to China for possible release into the wild and the deal includes support for panda conservation projects.) There are currently around 130 giant pandas living in captivity and just 1500 living free, which qualifies them for the Red List of most endangered species.

But here's a much more important statistic as far as Edinburgh Zoo is concerned: in San Diego, where Hung Mei, the first panda born in captivity in the west, was delivered in 1999 - more stuffed pandas are sold in a week than there are real pandas in the world. Not to mention panda T-shirts, panda ties, panda puzzles and panda backpacks. What's being billed as a small step for panda conservation is, in fact, a potentially giant leap for the marketing potential of Edinburgh Zoo.

This is especially important as the final surviving polar bear, Mercedes, is shortly due to be moved to the zoo's other site, the Highland Wildlife Park near Aviemore. Edinburgh's elephants disappeared years ago, after it was realised that in captivity they live less long and are prone to psychotic behaviour.

Such changes are symptomatic of the way many of the world's better zoos are cleaning up their acts. In Britain, they've come a long way since King John supposedly established a zoo in the Tower of London around 1200 and the first African elephant was brought to England for Henry III. Once sad places, where animals were paraded and made to perform tricks for public entertainment, zoos appeared to be on the way out in the 1980s because of the emergence of safari parks and a general expansion in other forms of leisure entertainment.

More recently, there has been a period of recovery. Now zoos talk in terms of role reversal: where they once took animals from the wild, they are now in the business of saving endangered species and sometimes even restocking areas where they are extinct, as happened with Glasgow's famous Pere David deer, whose descendants now graze beside China's Yellow Sea.

As endangered animals are pressured into ever smaller areas and it becomes progressively harder to define anywhere as truly "wild", humans have inherited the task of managing what's left of nature, and zoos claim a role in this. So for cages, read "enclosures". It's a good line and it seems to work. Edinburgh's visitor numbers were up by 10% last year and Chester, Britain's top wildlife attraction, is planning a £225m expansion. Visits to British zoos have doubled since 2002. For consumers of wildlife, read springboards for conservation.

Is it true? When the anti-zoo charity, the Born Free Foundation, commissioned an independent poll into how much of a zoo's income people thought was dedicated to conservation, most put the figure at between 25% and 40%. The reality is that even supposedly "good zoos", such as Edinburgh, commit less than 7%. (The figure of £4.7m quoted by the zoo yesterday includes education and research. In 2007, from an income of £10m, just £208,000 went on projects in the wild.) This puts into context the zoo's argument that bringing in popular animals, such as pandas, boosts ticket sales and raises more money for conservation.

I have marginally more sympathy for the argument that in our highly urbanised society, zoos offer children a unique opportunity to see, feel and smell real animals. And sometimes research on animals in captivity must have a useful spin-off for projects in the wild. But the "animal ark" argument is surely unsustainable. Yes, there is a crisis. Some species won't survive without help but captive breeding programmes and gene banks are only half of the story because, after the flood, Noah freed his menagerie, didn't he? Implicit in the animal ark argument is the notion that at some future date the descendants of animals bred in captivity will repopulate the "wild", whatever that means by then.

But the animal ark is already holed below the waterline - first, because species chosen tend to be the big, cute ones like pandas and chimps, and, secondly, because removing these animals from their native habitat to breed them has the effect of removing the final bulwark against the destruction of that habitat.

Only a small minority of species at Edinburgh are on the Red List. Instead, we should be putting our energy and resources directly into protecting these animals in situ and trying to learn more about the symbiotic relationship between them and their particular eco-system.

Ironically, I have more respect for zoos which are honest enough to admit that what they are offering is basically a fun day out. Of course, for the animals, it's just another miserable day in. Even new-style enclosures without bars bear no relation to roaming free in their natural habitat.

Those wonderful wildlife documentaries on television make the same point. Life in the Masai Mara can be nasty, brutish and short but there's something of a sordid peep show about our relationship with animals incarcerated in zoos.

Those into neoteny may have enjoyed the sight of Edinburgh Zoo's lemurs consuming birthday cake yesterday. Just don't call it conservation.

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