American Zoo Grazian, David
2015, 20150901, 2015-09-01
eBook
Orangutans swing from Kevlar-lined fire hoses. Giraffes feast on celebratory birthday cakes topped with carrots instead of candles. Hi-tech dinosaur robots growl among steel trees, while owls watch ...animated cartoons on old television sets. InAmerican Zoo, sociologist David Grazian takes us on a safari through the contemporary zoo, alive with its many contradictions and strange wonders.
Trading in his tweed jacket for a zoo uniform and a pair of muddy work boots, Grazian introduces us to zookeepers and animal rights activists, parents and toddlers, and the other human primates that make up the zoo's social world. He shows that in a major shift away from their unfortunate pasts, American zoos today emphasize naturalistic exhibits teeming with lush and immersive landscapes, breeding programs for endangered animals, and enrichment activities for their captive creatures. In doing so, zoos blur the imaginary boundaries we regularly use to separate culture from nature, humans from animals, and civilization from the wild. At the same time, zoos manage a wilderness of competing priorities-animal care, education, scientific research, and recreation-all while attempting to serve as centers for conservation in the wake of the current environmental and climate-change crisis. The world of the zoo reflects how we project our own prejudices and desires onto the animal kingdom, and invest nature with meaning and sentiment.
A revealing portrayal of comic animals, delighted children, and feisty zookeepers,American Zoois a remarkable close-up exploration of a classic cultural attraction.
In the first English-language history of the Berlin zoo, Gary Bruce traces the fascinating story of one of Germany's most popular cultural institutions, from its 19th century displays of "exotic" ...peoples to Nazi attempts to breed back long-extinct European cattle. As an institution with broad public reach, the zoo for more than 150 years shaped German views not only of the animal world, but of the human world far beyond Germany's borders.
This book is a phenomenological investigation of the zoo visit experience. Why Do We Go to the Zoo is rooted in Husserlian phenomenology and focuses on the communicative interactions between humans ...and animals in the zoo setting. The book also provides the student examples of how to do phenomenology.
Achieving and maintaining high standards of animal welfare is critical to the success of a modern zoo. Research has shown that an animal's welfare is highly dependent on how various individual animal ...factors (e.g., species traits, genetics, temperament and previous experience) interact with environmental features (e.g., social grouping, enclosure design and sensory environment). One prominent feature of the zoo environment is the presence of visitors. Visitor contact can be unpredictable and intense, particularly in terms of auditory and visual interaction. Depending on an animal's perception of this interaction, visitors can have either negative, neutral or positive impacts on zoo animal behaviour and welfare. This paper reviews the literature on the implications and potential opportunities of human-zoo animal interactions on animal behaviour and welfare, with the aim of stimulating interest, understanding and exploration of this important subject. The literature to date presents a mixed range of findings on the topic. It is possible this variation in the responses of zoo animals to visitors may be due to species-specific differences, the nature and intensity of the visitor interactions, enclosure design, and individual animal characteristics. Analysing these studies and better understanding animal preferences and motivations can provide insight into what animals find negatively and positively reinforcing in terms of visitor contact in a specific zoo setting. This understanding can then be applied to either safeguard welfare in cases where visitors can have a negative impact, or, conversely, it can be applied to highlight opportunities to encourage animal-visitor interaction in situations where animals experience positive emotions associated with visitor interaction.
Researchers have been studying primates in zoos for more than half a century. There are numerous benefits to conducting research with zoo collections, such as access to a variety of species, ease of ...sample collection, and the potential to manipulate some research variables. While much of the primate research conducted in zoos is behavioral, there also is a tradition of research focused on reproduction and endocrinology, especially in North America. The contributions to this special issue exemplify how this tradition continues today through a collection of articles on basic and applied research on reproduction and using physiological measures of health and welfare that could be beneficial across primate taxa. As is the case for primatological research in zoos more broadly, the articles in this special issue reflect a taxonomic bias for great apes despite the high species diversity found across zoo collections. Given this bias as well as the threat of extinction faced by many species, there remains a pressing need to increase primatology in zoos through research dedicated to both conservation in the wild and wellbeing in human care.
Juliane Simmchen
Angewandte Chemie International Edition,
May 16, 2022, Volume:
61, Issue:
21
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
“I chose chemistry as a career because in contrast to languages and other things, it is really hard to have chemistry as a hobby … When I want to treat myself to something, I take some particles to ...the SEM and look for some that resemble animals, or symbols, the nano‐zoo …” Find out more about Juliane Simmchen in her Introducing … Profile.
•New holistic conceptual framework in caring for captive wild animals 24/7 across lifespan is proposed.•Considers individual’s life cycle needs and preferences influenced by a range of variations.•An ...animal welfare assessment tool with 14 welfare criteria is proposed.•Highlights importance of habitat management and use of technologies.
We have an ethical responsibility to provide captive animals with environments that allow them to experience good welfare. Husbandry activities are often scheduled for the convenience of care staff working within the constraints of the facility, rather than considering the biological and psychological requirements of the animals themselves. The animal welfare 24/7 across the lifespan concept provides a holistic framework to map features of the animal’s life cycle, taking into account their natural history, in relation to variations in the captive environment, across day and night, weekdays, weekends, and seasons. In order for animals to have the opportunity to thrive, we argue the need to consider their lifetime experience, integrated into the environments we provide, and with their perspective in mind. Here, we propose a welfare assessment tool based upon 14 criteria, to allow care staff to determine if their animals’ welfare needs are met. We conclude that animal habitat management will be enhanced with the use of integrated technologies that provide the animals with more opportunities to engineer their own environments, providing them with complexity, choice and control.
One way in which zoos attempt to fulfill their goal of conservation is by educating visitors about the importance of protecting wildlife. Research has only begun to examine the effectiveness of zoos ...in place-based learning, and there has been much debate about how such informal learning is defined and measured. Free-choice learning research has demonstrated that educational outcomes are often indirect, constructed by the visitor as much as they are influenced by the zoo's educational staff. This constructivist definition of education includes emotional dimensions and personal meaning-making that occur in the social context of visiting, as well as any structured interpretive material provided on signs and through live presentations. This paper presents an examination of how the zoo is experienced by the visitor, through surveys and through observations of how visitors watch animals and incorporate those viewings into their social experience. Results from surveys of 206 zoo visitors show that support for protecting both individual animals and species is associated with learning, with wanting to know more, and with a feeling of connection to the animal. An analysis of 1,900 overheard visitor conversations suggests that zoo animals are used to facilitate topical interaction among social groups and to explore the connections that people share with nonhuman animals. The authors propose that these perceived positive connections may be related to support for conservation initiatives, and conclude that a visit to the zoo appears to be a positive emotional experience that leaves visitors interested in learning more about animals, irrespective of their reading the exhibit labels. Zoo Biol 28:377-397, 2009.
(3) surveyed LCMV in natural (low-prevalence) house mouse populations. With origin tracing, most current data are consistent with the hypothesis that LCMV lineage I (sensu; 4) originates in the range ...of Mus musculus domesticus mice, whereas LCMV lineage II originates in the range of M. m. musculus mice. Presence of MBF mice in zoos breaks origin tracing of wild mouse pathogens because domesticated mice are crosses of 3 wild subspecies; origins of strains used to mass-produce animal food are unregulated.
The United Nations Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 is a key initiative within global efforts to halt and eventually reverse the loss of biodiversity. The very first target of this plan ...states that “by 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably.” Zoos and aquariums worldwide, attracting more than 700 million visits every year, could potentially make a positive contribution to this target. However, a global evaluation of the educational impacts of visits to zoos and aquariums is entirely lacking in the existing literature. To address this gap, we conducted a large‐scale impact evaluation study. We used a pre‐ and postvisit repeated‐measures survey design to evaluate biodiversity literacy—understanding of biodiversity and knowledge of actions to help protect it—of zoo and aquarium visitors worldwide. Ours was the largest and most international study of zoo and aquarium visitors ever conducted. In total, 5661 visitors to 26 zoos and aquariums from 19 countries around the globe participated in the study. Aggregate biodiversity understanding and knowledge of actions to help protect biodiversity both significantly increased over the course of zoo and aquarium visits. There was an increase from previsit (69.8%) to postvisit (75.1%) in respondents demonstrating at least some positive evidence of biodiversity understanding. Similarly, there was an increase from previsit (50.5%) to postvisit (58.8%) in respondents who could identify actions to help protect biodiversity that could be achieved at an individual level. Our results are the most compelling evidence to date that zoo and aquarium visits contribute to increasing the number of people who understand biodiversity and know actions they can take to help protect biodiversity.
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