*kvr*
Jaguar
Oh the zoo, oh the zoo....the zoo.. Where do I start? What mixed feelings I have. What interest and curiosity, fascination. What disappointment.
My trip to the zoo today was sparked by a research project I completed with two classmates for our biology class on the clouded leopard. That is a story unto itself. In brief, it turned out, the Woodland Park Zoo had a clouded leopard on display (though the particular leopard in the zoo was technically a different species from the one we did our project on -- though only recently “discovered” as a new species through morphological and molecular evidence in 2006, before 2006 the two species of clouded leopards were considered to be subspecies). Since we are required to do an oral presentation for our class with visuals, it seemed appropriate to try and get a real life visual of a real life cat so closely related to the one in our project. So, a trip to the zoo, home of so many uneasy feelings for me, was in order.
And what a trip! What an interesting, educational, and exhilarating trip. But my excitement did not stem from seeing so many animals, so distantly related geographically and genetically, all in one place, with enclosures planned to maximize potential viewings of the animal. Oh no, my excitement stemmed from being able to apply recently learned information about captive clouded leopard behavior to what we saw. Amazing. Utterly amazing, the connections between what we read in peer reviewed journals and what we saw at the zoo. First it must be stated that if you think we know a lot about our world, you are wrong. We know, in fact, very little. We have a lot of ideas, a lot of general things are known about a lot of different things, but when it comes down to specifics, the nitty gritty, the fact is, not a lot of research has been done. Think about it, 50 years ago we were still putting gorillas and chimps in concrete enclosures and feeding them hamburgers (gorillas are vegetarians). Before Goodall and Fossey, virtually nothing was known about their behavior. Seriously. We’ve had animals in captivity for much longer than we’ve been studying them in the wild. There’s nothing glamorous about crawling around on your hands and knees looking for scat you can collect and analyze, or by painstakingly measuring paw prints and comparing them to try and estimate a population. Studying animals in the wild is hard, often repetitive and boring, work. And it requires money, a one way flow of money because it doesn’t entertain, or provide something useful for humans. It’s just knowledge. Empty knowledge. And when these animals don’t do well in captivity, we don’t know why. We don’t even know what their needs are in the wild.
Please join me for a tour of a zoo. On your left you’ll see the jaguar enclosure. We don’t tell you, but we named this majestic animal Junior. Never mind his pacing in the back, despite his seemingly large enclosure (it's actually state of the art - one of the best). There’s a little bit of information about the jaguar to your right, but it’s mostly just a big picture of a jaguar swimming with a big printed Q & A about jaguars swimming (yes, they swim) and a little bit of information about how their habitat is threatened. Did you want to know more? Well, there isn’t any more information here. But there is a pretend tent set up of a field research station (this actually was pretty cool). Just snap some photos and move on. We’ve cleverly placed a covered, heated rock right next to the viewing window, so when it rains and the jaguar wants to rest, he’ll come right up to you.
Moving along, you might end up in the Tropical Rainforest, where you’ll see a pair of keel billed toucans. One of them will be singing, grabbing bits of fruit, partially swallowing them, and feeding these pieces to the other, but you won’t know why. There’s no information other than a plaque with pictures of other toucans and a couple of sentences about their sleeping patterns. You won’t know that this is actually a male and female courting each other. That the zookeepers are hoping they mate, and that they haven’t gone near the nesting box.
But let’s not get distracted. We’ve come here to see animals. That’s why we paid $15 to get in here. Not to read boring words, but to see real life exotic animals up close. Otherwise we’d just stay home and watch a movie. So let’s go look at the gorillas. In the Eastern enclosure, you’ll see three adults and a baby. Everybody loves babies, so let’s just focus on what’s important: the name of the baby! And you can walk right up to the baby and his mama. Ignore the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any material for them to make their bedding out of, and that the area immediately in front of the viewing glass is the only covered portion of this rainy day exhibit.
At one point you realize you’ve been hearing a loud roaring. You leave to seek out the source of this sound. You find the Sumatran Tiger. He is pacing around his enclosure built like an echoing amphitheater, with high rocks to create a large distance between you and the animal, and electric wiring around the top. The tiger quiets down and stops his pacing when everyone has left besides you. He sits quietly, peacefully even, at the top of his enclosure in the den area. You remember reading about captive animals’ stress levels when in hearing, seeing, or smelling range of their predators. Ignore the fact that you’ve been hearing this roaring at many other enclosures.
Finally, at long last, we reach our destination. The clouded leopard. Beautiful, endangered, with canines like the saber toothed tiger, our mid sized, incredibly shy feline. Very little is known about them. She’s sleeping, on a rock in the back. We can barely see her except for an outline of her back and some spots. We peer in. The enclosure is small. Not more than nine feet high (less?). She shifts her position in her slumber. Her tail moves. It’s like a rat’s. Long, skinny, naked, tapered. Like a rat’s? But clouded leopards have long thick tails. And then we realize: she’s fur plucking. Typical stress related behavior common in captive animals (particularly predators). But perhaps there is an explanation. Perhaps she’s got a fungus. We hear the tiger roar. A natural predator of the clouded leopard. So we go and find a keeper. It’s 20 minutes to closing, and he seems annoyed at our keeping him from whatever he was doing. But he tells us that her bare tail is in fact stress related. That her stress/hormone levels are not monitored, and that she’s being medicated and doing better. The fur’s growing back. Ok. The fur’s growing back. Go back to the clouded leopard. She might wake from her sleep, might stir and move, might give us a glimpse of her nocturnal self during daylight hours. We sit, we stare. We notice her fur is greasy, matted. The zoo is closing, but we don’t care. She’s breathing heavily. We wait. For an hour. Maybe more. And then she moves. We see the back of her head lift up, her shoulders move as she puts her weight on her front paws. She turns to us, yawns. Yawns again. Licks herself, and we catch another glimpse of her horrible tail. And then she curls back up, in a slightly different position, her tail wrapped around her. Success!
As we wander around the zoo, now an hour after it’s closed, it’s quiet. Peaceful. Animals that were hidden before have come out. The brother sloth bears are playing. Silently, their large lips curled in expression, interacting with each other. The tiger is silent. We walk by and see him quietly in his den, watching out over the quiet zoo grounds. We want to stay longer, to quietly observe as animals only should be observed. Not loudly pointed at and mocked. We quietly wander in our blissful awe, until we are spotted and we pretend we’ve been lost.
(please note that this is more of a criticism of people who go to zoos, and thus shape what the zoo has to offer, rather than the zoo itself. while I do have some ethical questions about zoos in general, I understand that there are limitations to what zoos can provide to their animals because of finances and a physical lack of space. And furthermore, if zoos provide the animals with enclosures that are more habitat-like, zoo goers will be less likely to see the animals, zoos will lose even more money, and ultimately, the animals will suffer. That's not to say that I think zoos are ok...it's just complicated!)
Jaguar
Oh the zoo, oh the zoo....the zoo.. Where do I start? What mixed feelings I have. What interest and curiosity, fascination. What disappointment.
My trip to the zoo today was sparked by a research project I completed with two classmates for our biology class on the clouded leopard. That is a story unto itself. In brief, it turned out, the Woodland Park Zoo had a clouded leopard on display (though the particular leopard in the zoo was technically a different species from the one we did our project on -- though only recently “discovered” as a new species through morphological and molecular evidence in 2006, before 2006 the two species of clouded leopards were considered to be subspecies). Since we are required to do an oral presentation for our class with visuals, it seemed appropriate to try and get a real life visual of a real life cat so closely related to the one in our project. So, a trip to the zoo, home of so many uneasy feelings for me, was in order.
And what a trip! What an interesting, educational, and exhilarating trip. But my excitement did not stem from seeing so many animals, so distantly related geographically and genetically, all in one place, with enclosures planned to maximize potential viewings of the animal. Oh no, my excitement stemmed from being able to apply recently learned information about captive clouded leopard behavior to what we saw. Amazing. Utterly amazing, the connections between what we read in peer reviewed journals and what we saw at the zoo. First it must be stated that if you think we know a lot about our world, you are wrong. We know, in fact, very little. We have a lot of ideas, a lot of general things are known about a lot of different things, but when it comes down to specifics, the nitty gritty, the fact is, not a lot of research has been done. Think about it, 50 years ago we were still putting gorillas and chimps in concrete enclosures and feeding them hamburgers (gorillas are vegetarians). Before Goodall and Fossey, virtually nothing was known about their behavior. Seriously. We’ve had animals in captivity for much longer than we’ve been studying them in the wild. There’s nothing glamorous about crawling around on your hands and knees looking for scat you can collect and analyze, or by painstakingly measuring paw prints and comparing them to try and estimate a population. Studying animals in the wild is hard, often repetitive and boring, work. And it requires money, a one way flow of money because it doesn’t entertain, or provide something useful for humans. It’s just knowledge. Empty knowledge. And when these animals don’t do well in captivity, we don’t know why. We don’t even know what their needs are in the wild.
Please join me for a tour of a zoo. On your left you’ll see the jaguar enclosure. We don’t tell you, but we named this majestic animal Junior. Never mind his pacing in the back, despite his seemingly large enclosure (it's actually state of the art - one of the best). There’s a little bit of information about the jaguar to your right, but it’s mostly just a big picture of a jaguar swimming with a big printed Q & A about jaguars swimming (yes, they swim) and a little bit of information about how their habitat is threatened. Did you want to know more? Well, there isn’t any more information here. But there is a pretend tent set up of a field research station (this actually was pretty cool). Just snap some photos and move on. We’ve cleverly placed a covered, heated rock right next to the viewing window, so when it rains and the jaguar wants to rest, he’ll come right up to you.
Moving along, you might end up in the Tropical Rainforest, where you’ll see a pair of keel billed toucans. One of them will be singing, grabbing bits of fruit, partially swallowing them, and feeding these pieces to the other, but you won’t know why. There’s no information other than a plaque with pictures of other toucans and a couple of sentences about their sleeping patterns. You won’t know that this is actually a male and female courting each other. That the zookeepers are hoping they mate, and that they haven’t gone near the nesting box.
But let’s not get distracted. We’ve come here to see animals. That’s why we paid $15 to get in here. Not to read boring words, but to see real life exotic animals up close. Otherwise we’d just stay home and watch a movie. So let’s go look at the gorillas. In the Eastern enclosure, you’ll see three adults and a baby. Everybody loves babies, so let’s just focus on what’s important: the name of the baby! And you can walk right up to the baby and his mama. Ignore the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any material for them to make their bedding out of, and that the area immediately in front of the viewing glass is the only covered portion of this rainy day exhibit.
At one point you realize you’ve been hearing a loud roaring. You leave to seek out the source of this sound. You find the Sumatran Tiger. He is pacing around his enclosure built like an echoing amphitheater, with high rocks to create a large distance between you and the animal, and electric wiring around the top. The tiger quiets down and stops his pacing when everyone has left besides you. He sits quietly, peacefully even, at the top of his enclosure in the den area. You remember reading about captive animals’ stress levels when in hearing, seeing, or smelling range of their predators. Ignore the fact that you’ve been hearing this roaring at many other enclosures.
Finally, at long last, we reach our destination. The clouded leopard. Beautiful, endangered, with canines like the saber toothed tiger, our mid sized, incredibly shy feline. Very little is known about them. She’s sleeping, on a rock in the back. We can barely see her except for an outline of her back and some spots. We peer in. The enclosure is small. Not more than nine feet high (less?). She shifts her position in her slumber. Her tail moves. It’s like a rat’s. Long, skinny, naked, tapered. Like a rat’s? But clouded leopards have long thick tails. And then we realize: she’s fur plucking. Typical stress related behavior common in captive animals (particularly predators). But perhaps there is an explanation. Perhaps she’s got a fungus. We hear the tiger roar. A natural predator of the clouded leopard. So we go and find a keeper. It’s 20 minutes to closing, and he seems annoyed at our keeping him from whatever he was doing. But he tells us that her bare tail is in fact stress related. That her stress/hormone levels are not monitored, and that she’s being medicated and doing better. The fur’s growing back. Ok. The fur’s growing back. Go back to the clouded leopard. She might wake from her sleep, might stir and move, might give us a glimpse of her nocturnal self during daylight hours. We sit, we stare. We notice her fur is greasy, matted. The zoo is closing, but we don’t care. She’s breathing heavily. We wait. For an hour. Maybe more. And then she moves. We see the back of her head lift up, her shoulders move as she puts her weight on her front paws. She turns to us, yawns. Yawns again. Licks herself, and we catch another glimpse of her horrible tail. And then she curls back up, in a slightly different position, her tail wrapped around her. Success!
As we wander around the zoo, now an hour after it’s closed, it’s quiet. Peaceful. Animals that were hidden before have come out. The brother sloth bears are playing. Silently, their large lips curled in expression, interacting with each other. The tiger is silent. We walk by and see him quietly in his den, watching out over the quiet zoo grounds. We want to stay longer, to quietly observe as animals only should be observed. Not loudly pointed at and mocked. We quietly wander in our blissful awe, until we are spotted and we pretend we’ve been lost.
(please note that this is more of a criticism of people who go to zoos, and thus shape what the zoo has to offer, rather than the zoo itself. while I do have some ethical questions about zoos in general, I understand that there are limitations to what zoos can provide to their animals because of finances and a physical lack of space. And furthermore, if zoos provide the animals with enclosures that are more habitat-like, zoo goers will be less likely to see the animals, zoos will lose even more money, and ultimately, the animals will suffer. That's not to say that I think zoos are ok...it's just complicated!)