Book Review : The Zoo as Way Station to the Wilds

A Crowded Ark: The Role of Zoos in Wildlife Conservation by Jon R. Luoma (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95, 199 pages)

It’s not often that a book makes you think about an old, familiar subject in a new way, but “A Crowded Ark” does. I used to visit zoos frequently, but I never thought about them, their problems or their mission as author Jon R. Luoma suggests.

Of course, everyone knows by now that zoos that keep animals in small cages are little more than animal prisons, though such places were common until relatively recently and still exist here and there. Increasingly common are zoos without bars that give their animals room to roam and display them in simulated natural habitats.

The issues and heightened awareness surrounding this change are one of Luoma’s concerns, but they are not his main point. Rather, as his subtitle (“The Role of Zoos in Wildlife Conservation”) indicates, Luoma concentrates on the activities of zoos in preserving endangered species, and it is a remarkable yarn.

For one thing, it represents a complete change in the traditional function of animal menageries going back thousands of years. Luoma writes:

“Of all the hopes and dreams of the promoters of the new zoo as an environmental conservation resource, none is fonder than this--that zoos, once net depleters of wildlife from wild places, could become net producers of wildlife for wild places.”

That is, not only are zoos breeding offspring of endangered animals under a very complicated and carefully managed plan, their goal is to reintroduce these beasts into the wild, where they have all but disappeared.

(The main problem, by the way, is one that zoos cannot possibly solve: under pressure of human population growth, the natural habitats of many wild animals have shrunk substantially and are themselves “endangered species.” If this trend continues, there will be no places in which to set the zoo-bred animals free.)

Luoma writes at length of the efforts to breed Siberian tigers, including detailed descriptions of the artificial insemination of these magnificent cats. Just anesthetizing tigers is a trick in itself, not to mention gathering semen from a male and introducing it by hand into a female in another zoo.

You may wonder why artificial insemination is being practiced instead of putting two animals together and letting natural insemination occur. The answer is that it is a lot easier to move a vial of frozen semen from one part of the world to another than it is to transport a Siberian tiger.

As a reporter, Luoma witnessed these procedures and was pressed into service to assist in one of them. The amount of anesthetic to give a tiger--or any animal--is a touchy matter. The goal is to make sure that the beast is completely knocked out and will not wake up during the procedure, so animals are overanesthetized. At the same time, if too much drug is administered, the animal will die.

During one such procedure, which Luoma writes about in exquisite detail, one of the researchers gives him a job. Pointing to the tiger’s neck, the researcher tells Luoma: “If he starts to lift up his head, put both your hands on it and push it. If he still tries to lift it, put your knee right there.”

Luoma adds: “I am grateful that the tiger does not attempt to stand during the next half hour.”

Thoughtful Discussion

But the book is not just a description of these doings--engaging as they are--it also presents a thoughtful discussion of the many problems facing those who are trying to preserve endangered species.

“Zoos can be arks for only a few hundred out of the hundreds of thousands of species that are threatened with extinction,” Luoma says. “And, for individual animal species, there is no question that they reproduce, adapt and prosper best in their native ecosystems.”

But, as with most human activities, if one thinks solely of the enormous difficulty of the complete job, it seems hopeless. It is necessary to bite off a little bit at a time and do the best you can. One researcher tells Luoma, “Zoos are a poor place to preserve endangered species. But for some species, they’re the only place.”

The book contains several pages of bibliography, including a number of articles in popular magazines, but all of them had escaped my notice when they appeared. So I was essentially unaware of this activity until I found out about it in Luoma’s book.

I’m always glad to find out about something that I didn’t know about before, and Luoma’s presentation is both compelling and clear. The next time I go to a zoo, I’ll have many things to notice and think about.