海角社区官网

This viewing gallery is the first thing visitors see upon entering the zoo’s Wildlife Health and Science Centre, the newest building on-site. Recently, it has hosted a warthog’s tusk repair, a goat’s hoof trim and a reproductive exam for a fertility-challenged orangutan. The massive window is a nod to transparency, but also an attempt to expose the 鈥渉idden zoo鈥澨�� to take what used to be the unseen, interior workings of the institution and flip them inside-out.

The 海角社区官网Zoo’s physical transformation is part of an even bigger philosophical one: a flipping inside-out of the zoo’s entire mission, according to its most recent reports to city hall.

Once a place to ogle lions and tigers with a few environmental messages sprinkled in, the zoo now envisions itself as a conservation and climate-change organization first and foremost.听It wants to foreground its efforts to breed and release Canadian animals hovering on the edge of extinction, while phasing out more than 100 other mainly foreign species, including some hippos, rhinos and kangaroos.

The听word “zoo,” in fact, came dead last in a description of the zoo’s purpose as presented to its board earlier this month.

“The zoo is our interface,” says CEO Dolf DeJong. “Why is it here, and why is it here today? Why it’s here today is because things aren’t necessarily going well for nature.”

Skeptics, however, have asked that same question听鈥� Why are zoos here today?听鈥� and come up with a far less charitable answer.听At worst, these critics charge, zoos are greenwashed theme parks operating at the expense of animal well-being; at best, they are an ineffective tool against a rapidly metastasizing planetary crisis. A key question: do programs that breed endangered species for reintroduction to the wild work, or are they just window-dressing?

DeJong knows the organization faces a credibility gap听鈥� not just from these critics, but from Torontonians who see the zoo as an aging attraction, or don’t think about it at all. Most residents do not see the zoo as it sees itself: as a backstop against extinction, a kind of Noah’s Ark in Scarborough.听

“The public doesn’t realize what’s taking place at their 海角社区官网Zoo,” says DeJong.听

“We have some work to do to get that message across.”

Boss the rattler, a 10-year-old wild-caught male, is the kind of animal that might be a main character at the new zoo. The southernmost populations of Massasauga rattlesnakes are endangered thanks to habitat loss, car strikes and “human persecution” (not everyone appreciates venomous snakes).听The 海角社区官网Zoo has been part of a species survival plan for the rattlesnakes for almost 20 years, and in 2020 it published a chest-puffing birth notice: four baby Massasaugas had just hatched, a big coup for a difficult-to-breed animal. Another 14 were born in 2022.

The zoo also hosts breeding programs for Blanding’s turtles, black-footed ferrets, Vancouver Island marmots and more. But visitors will never get to see some of these in person. Blanding’s turtle hatchlings are viewable through one-way glass, but the ferrets are kept in strict isolation because of disease fears. The marmots, the most critically endangered mammal in Canada, are very rarely exposed to people for fears that human acclimatization would risk success in reintroducing these animals to the wild.

An animal that zoo guests rarely get to see听鈥� particularly a cute and fuzzy one听鈥� might seem like self-sabotage. But the zoo has taken steps in recent years to wean itself off its reliance on gate fees, and by extension, what might drive ticket-paying guests to come through those gates. It has launched a charitable fundraising arm, the 海角社区官网Zoo Wildlife Conservancy, to expand its funding sources, which also includes an annual cash infusion from the city; last year’s was $14.7 million.

“We love the fact that we have 1.3 million guests coming in, and they pay for a great day at the zoo and we get to connect them to that conservation science work in nature. We love that, we’re going to keep growing that,” says DeJong. “But we need to take a far broader approach, and historically, we’ve almost focused exclusively on that.”听

The perils of pandas听

To understand the potential conflict between a guest-driven zoo and the conservation-driven one, an easy place to start is with pandas.

In 2013, the 海角社区官网Zoo received two Giant Pandas on loan from China, Er Shun and Da Mao. Attendance spiked the year of their arrival to 1.46 million, the highest in almost 20 years. Panda merchandise drove retail revenue to an all-time peak of $4 million. After Da Mao gave birth to twin cubs in late 2015, attendance and revenue spiked again.

As global icons of conservation, the pandas were understandably used by the zoo to extoll the virtues of protecting nature. The reality was more complicated.

Pandas eat one thing, bamboo, in staggering volumes. It couldn’t be grown at scale locally. So the zoo tendered a contract to fly hundreds of kilograms of bamboo by FedEx jet from Memphis, Tenn., to Pearson airport three times weekly.

The irony of this arrangement is hard to overstate. Climate change is a primary driver of the extinction crisis, and a rough calculation of the fossil fuels burned to feed the pandas puts them in league with the highest greenhouse gas-emitting humans worldwide.

At the time, staff claimed the trade-offs in costs and carbon were worth the important conservation message the pandas embodied.

Asked if the zoo would make the same calculus today, DeJong, whose tenure began six months after the bears left, is less sanguine.

“I have no intention of getting pandas,” he says, adding that they “didn’t have an impact at the scale people believed.” DeJong did not elaborate, but attendance flagged outside the arrival and birth years, and the animals cost millions of dollars in upkeep, insurance and an annual $1-million “panda conservation fee” paid to China.

The zoo would be better served by emphasizing the work it’s doing itself, here at home, he says.

“When we talk about that credibility, when we tell our own stories, people are going to realize that’s happening here, as opposed to sharing the work that’s happening on the other side of the planet.”

Selecting the species

In 2020, the zoo released a new scoring matrix for how it will decide which animals to keep in its care. Two important factors are how endangered the animal is and how big an impact the zoo can have on its sustainability. The plan includes an explicit goal to reduce the number of species, concentrating on ones most important for conservation.听听

That appears to be working: the number of species at the zoo has dropped to 300 from a recent high of 495. The goal is to drop further yet to 175, according to the plan presented to the board this month.

But DeJong also readily admits that these calculations are sometimes in conflict with the kinds of animals visitors want to see. The scoring matrix is not immune to these pressures: It also rates each species’ “public appeal,” with some rated “big draw” and听others as “not charismatic.” (The term has a wider use in this context: the debate over whether disproportionate conservation resources are funnelled to “charismatic megafauna,” or big animals humans like, has roiled the field for years.)

Is it acceptable to keep animals in captivity for human entertainment and education if it benefits their wild counterparts?

Where people fall on that question drives a lot of strong opinions about zoos.

“If zoos didn’t exist and someone was like, ‘Hey, I have this idea, you guys! Let’s set aside a bunch of land in the city and then go around the world and capture wild animals and keep them captive in cages there so we can look at them,’ People would be like, ‘Excuse me?’” says Emma Marris, author of “Wild Souls,” a book about the ethics of human-animal relationships.

“That seems bonkers.”

Marris believes that zookeepers genuinely care about these animals. But the reason zoos continue to exist, she argues, is not because they are effective conservation tools, but because they are hard to get rid of.听

“They have this incredible inertia as institutions, because they are woven into the power structure of the city,” says Marris. “Unwinding a zoo would be a massive undertaking.”听

Others believe that keeping animals because people like them, provided they are well cared for, is ultimately a boon for nature.

Zoos “make nature accessible to a wide range of people, and I think that’s a valuable function,” says Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster who has studied zoos.听

Not everyone gets to go on a real safari, or even to a provincial park. Seeing adults oohing and aahing over animals, Clayton says, teaches children that we value wildlife.听

“There can be a sort of attitude that there’s a right way to enjoy nature and a wrong way, which can be elitist听鈥� that, you know, enjoying nature in the wrong way is not furthering the cause,” says Clayton.

But some people aren’t going to appreciate little brown birds: “They need to have a little bit more exciting animal to look at. And instead of criticizing people for wanting to see that, you sort of maybe should acknowledge that, well, that’s just a fact about human beings.”

When Marris describes what zoos should become, elements sounds similar to the 海角社区官网Zoo’s new pitch. But she believes some animals should never be in captivity, including Great Apes, which includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees (and humans).

The 海角社区官网Zoo recently spent $11 million on a new outdoor enclosure for its Sumatran orangutans, which it considers a “flagship species”听鈥� popular and charismatic, and messengers for every other species in Sumatran rainforests being clear-cut and burnt for palm oil.

DeJong believes many zoo critics are stuck in the past, criticizing historical practices that were true at the time the zoo opened but aren’t now. “They’re making an argument based on 1974 thinking, and we hope those people will join us in 2024,” he says.

But Marris says, “Serious conservationists try to protect their habitat and people from killing them in the wild. That is how you do it. You do not do it by growing a bunch of them in Baltimore and 海角社区官网and Helsinki,听and then some day putting them all in a barge and letting them out in Sumatra.”

A shot at survival

As the 海角社区官网Zoo highlights its conservation breeding programs, some of the messaging might get tricky, in part because these programs are so challenging. Some biologists used to be dismissive of these programs because they face such long odds; now, they accept it could be some species’ last shot at survival.听

Blanding’s turtles have been a highlight for the zoo, because they are hyperlocal: over the past decade, the institution has bred and released 730 of them practically next door into Rouge National Urban Park. (The exact location is a secret due to poaching concerns.)

Biologists say breeding programs can work, but only if equal attention is paid to habitat: there’s no point raising animals with nowhere left to go. The 海角社区官网Zoo could be seen as missing an opportunity on that front when it comes to the turtles.

When the Ford government announced legislation opening the Greenbelt for development in 2022, the zoo objected, in a letter to the province’s environmental registry. Some of the lands slated for development overlapped with where they had worked so hard to build back turtles.

But the zoo did not leverage its massive audience to broadcast its objection: there were no public-facing messages about the Greenbelt on its social media channels or anywhere else.听

The story of the black-footed ferrets perhaps best encapsulates the difficult choices the zoo has to make. The species was once thought totally extinct in the U.S. and Canada until a farmer in Wyoming stumbled on one. In 1992, nine ferrets came to Toronto, and the breeding programs helped the animals regain a foothold in their American habitat.

But the zoo wanted to rebuild the black-footed ferret in Canada, too. Almost 75 ferrets were released into Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan between 2009 and 2012, and the zoo was thrilled when wild-born kits were seen afterwards. But back-to-back droughts decimated the ferrets’ prey, and sylvatic plague, which helped lead to the species’ near-extinction the first time, was听discovered in the park. The Canadian program was suspended, and no black-footed ferrets have been seen there since 2015.听

The zoo now sends all its wild-returning black-footed ferrets to the U.S. The program is under review as the zoo struggles to prioritize species. It wants to focus on animals where it can have an impact. But letting go of its ferrets means giving up their last toehold in the country. If the Canadian prairies can ever support the species again, there won’t be a Canadian breeding program left.

The zoo is making decisions that “will have permanent implications,” says DeJong.