What more can zoo’s do to appeal or make animals more comfortable?
Source: Google
First put yourself in the place of a zoo animal, let's say you were taken from your home, and put in a hotel room. It's an easy assumption to make that people find their rooms a safe, happy area therefore these people thought you'd be happy in a non-personalized bare hotel room. Would you feel better if you were in your own room? You’d be more comfortable and less likely to try and escape if you were comfortable and in result happier. Now put that into perspective and apply it to how animals in zoos feel.
Many animal rights activists have been fighting for a better more ‘natural’ zoo exhibit for the animals for years now. With all the zoo safety issues that have been happening recently, zoo corporations have started to turn to alternative options that might help the animal outbreaks that are becoming more frequent. These more ‘natural’ zoo exhibits have shown to not only make the animals happier, but also benefit humans in terms of discovering and research, leading us to new insight into social behavior of animals in captivity made to seem similar to the wild.
Pulitzer Prize–winning American Journalist, Eric Schmitt, author for The New York Times, describes to us why natural zoos are the way of the future for more than just the sole reason of benefiting the animals’ comfort level.
Reasons to Support
- Animals are Happier
- ''The days of iron bars and concrete floors are gone,'' said Dr. Scott Derrickson, curator of birds at the National Zoo's research center
- Animals have proven to be happier when they are comfortable and feel more at home. The comfort has led to positive increases in things such as “breeding endangered species in captivity.”
- Humans Benefit
- The Audubon Zoo in New Orleans has taken research very seriously recently by even hiring a research director. An example would be how in this zoo they are using their, “five-acre swamp exhibit to study how sunlight affects white alligators and how the animals and their naturally colored brethren develop differently.” Which you wouldn’t be able to do in real life because in the exhibit you can control the amount of sunlight inflicted upon the alligators
- In turn this will make the zoo’s more popular by attracting people by advertising humane and new habitats for animals. We can learn so much more about an animal by just observing it’s actions in a more realistic setting, ones that you cannot view when an animal is in a cage and it’s difficult to see in the wild
- Benefit the Animals- Research
- Researchers are able to observe and aid animals with the food or supply necessary to benefit them
- For example: Researchers observed female cranes in the National Zoo of Washington want to eat more calcium before they laid their eggs because it would make their babies shells harder. So the zoo keepers feed them crushed oyster shells to satisfy their hunger and want for strong-shelled babies.
- As Researchers Learn More they will Apply More to the Animals
- Many studies intend to discover ways to conserve the species in the wild
- Say they want to do a study about the behavior of an ape in an overcrowded area
- That’s very hard to do in the wild, and in the zoo’s now it would be too skewed but in a ‘natural’ looking zoo exhibit the results would be fairly accurate
FUTURE RESEARCH: In my next blog post I plan to explore weather visiting animals in captivity actually benefits humans.
