Maintaining the Balance of Nature : Zoos, Critics Dispute Reasons for Animal Surpluses, Feasibility of Controlling Them

Behind a fence, out of view of San Diego Zoo visitors, a female dhole, an endangered species of wild dog from China, is living the life of a surplus animal.

The nameless dog, which is known only by the identification number BK2, lost her right rear leg after an injury in 1988. Although otherwise healthy, BK2 was taken off exhibit after she was rejected by her fellow dholes. For the past three months, BK2 has lived in a 14-by-7-foot concrete and wire pen in a holding area behind the African Veldt section of the zoo. If another zoo does not agree to take BK2, zoo officials say, she may be euthanized.

Not far away, a male scimitar-horned oryx stands alone in a large, empty pen. Though not yet endangered, the oryx is rare and is being preserved through a national captive-breeding program. But he, too, is a surplus animal in search of a home. It is possible, officials say, that this oryx will end up on a wild game ranch.

If so, experts say, he will be one of the lucky ones. Nationally, they say, surplus zoo animals sometimes end up at less savory destinations, including hunting ranches, roadside menageries and even private pet dealers.

To most zoo visitors, it is incomprehensible that endangered or rare animals could be considered “surplus.” Many zoo officials wince at the term, arguing that there are in fact no excesses of rare animals, just shortages of space. Zoo officials in San Diego say that, in order to protect captive populations from inbreeding, however, such surplus animals are an essential byproduct of a successful zoo.

Ironically, the surplus animal problem has arisen because zoos have improved. Just 20 years ago, said Larry Killmar, curator of mammals at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, having extra endangered animals was unthought of. Zoos have become better breeding grounds, Killmar pointed out, and “the science hasn’t caught up with the success”--especially the imperfect science of animal contraception. When preserving the genetic integrity of a species, zoo officials say, it is better to have too many animals than too few.

“You cannot not have surplus--you need that as your backup, your savings account,” Killmar said. “If you’re going to have a collection that’s going to be able to sustain itself, you’re going to have to have animals either in your facility or in other facilities that you can draw upon to maintain a breeding program.”

However, critics of zoos around the country say that surplus animals are the result of careless breeding practices and mismanagement. According to Dr. John W. Grandy, vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, many zoos allow the indiscriminate breeding of animals in order to lure visitors with the babies.

“After animals grow out of the ‘cute’ stage, they are cast off indiscriminately by large, small and even accredited . . . zoos,” he wrote in an article on the issue last summer.

Moreover, Grandy and others say, once a surplus animal is sold or traded into the complex wildlife marketplace--a network of animal dealers, transporters and private game farms that do business with the nation’s zoos--its fate is uncertain at best.

Despite a zoo’s confidence in its animal transporters, critics say that animal traders provide the loophole through which surplus animals can slip--sometimes ending up at wildlife auctions, uncertified private collections and private hunting parks, among other destinations.

The San Diego Zoological Society takes some steps to close the loophole. Buyers who sign agreements vowing to provide “humane care” also promise to make their customers sign the same agreement. The zoo does not require, however, that such third-party agreements be reported to San Diego authorities. Tattoos and ear notches are used to identify some animals to help prevent their sale at auctions and other undesirable outlets. But authorities acknowledge that such marks are not universally applied--and are far from foolproof.

“If you could cut off the surplus animals at the zoo level, wildlife auctions would dry up,” said Lisa Landres, an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States and a former animal keeper at the San Diego Zoo. “Surplus animals are usually not the byproduct of a controlled breeding program. Surplus animals come from irresponsible breeding of animals. And those animals are still going to end up in this kind of situation unless we attack the problem at the source, by managing animal breeding.”

San Diego Zoo officials deny that they mismanage their animal stock.

“I don’t think we breed indiscriminately,” said James M. Dolan Jr., director of collections for the zoological society, which includes the zoo and the Wild Animal Park. “Of course I like baby animals--everyone does. But that is not the issue here. We don’t breed the animals for the babies.”

Although suitable habitats in many cases are limited, Dolan said, the zoo has sometimes successfully released animals back into the wild. More than 40 Arabian oryx have been sent back to Middle East deserts. A few Bali mynahs have been returned to the South Pacific, and Andean condors have been taken to the mountainous regions of Colombia.

Curators acknowledge, however, that they do not always know where the surplus animals go after they are sold or traded to an animal dealer.

“I don’t write everything down for every animal transaction,” Killmar said, describing how he works with dealers such as Earl Tatum, the principal transporter used by the zoo. “If he says, ‘I need X amount of animals, and they’re going to go to Baton Rouge.’ You know what the trade transaction shows? It shows ‘to Earl Tatum.’ On my records it’s not going to show that they went to Baton Rouge. . . .. You ask any other zoo the same question and, if the trade goes to Earl Tatum and the conversation is the same with the curator, he will probably say the same thing.”

Dolan agreed.

“There are certainly some that we don’t know where they’re going,” he said. “The best thing for everyone would be to know where these animals ultimately wind up. The system to use? I don’t know.”

In fact, the San Diego Zoo, like other zoos, has no system of tracking the ultimate destinations of the surplus wildlife they trade and sell to animal dealers and private breeders.

The federal government also lacks a comprehensive system, making it virtually impossible to track the final buyers of many zoo animals. Federal wildlife regulations require only that haulers report the destinations of endangered and threatened animals sold in interstate commerce; the buyers must also possess federal wildlife permits. Thus, there is a paper trail for endangered and threatened wildlife sold from zoos and other sources.

But the vast majority of the exotic animals that are transported are not endangered and thus can be transported without federal reporting requirements.

In addition, some zoo officials have been less than ethical in their dealings with surplus animals and animal traders.

In March, 1985, Gunter Voss, formerly Detroit’s director of zoological parks, pleaded guilty to extortion in U.S. District Court after being accused of demanding kickbacks from a New York animal vendor who supplied wildlife to the city’s zoos. Voss, who once worked on commission for the same dealer, was placed on probation for three years and agreed to repay the $2,434 in kickbacks.

In San Diego, Dolan acknowledged in an interview last week that he was sent a letter of reprimand by the ethics board of the American Assn. of Zoological Parks and Aquariums in connection with the disposition of two unspecified surplus birds from the Bronx Zoo.

Neither Dolan, who has worked for the San Diego Zoological Society since 1963, or association officials would provide details on the matter.

An outline of the incident, without names, was published in the May, 1986, issue of the newsletter of the association. The “guilty party,” the newsletter account says, contacted the other facility and requested that “surplus” birds be shipped to him. The birds were destined not for a zoo, the account says, but for an individual’s private bird collection.

“I make mistakes all the time,” Dolan said this week, adding that the reprimand was the result of a personality conflict with someone at another zoo . “I’m like everyone else.”

Dolan believes that the solution to the surplus animal problem lies in the laboratory.

“What we need is development of a program where it is possible to determine very early on the sex of the embryos,” Dolan said. “That would be the solution to the whole (surplus) problem. Then we could abort the males, in some species, females. That would be the greatest tool.”

In the meantime, Barbara S. Durrant, a reproductive physiologist at the zoo’s Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, spends her days studying how to enhance reproduction in some species and discourage it in others. She says contraception is only part of the answer.

Faced with a shortage of research funds, Durrant says she relies in large part on human contraception research. As a result, she says, progress is slow. Under her supervision, several species at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park have been implanted with contraceptives, including lions, tigers, leopards, pumas, Cape hunting dogs and Scottish wildcats.

But contraceptives are not perfected for all species, including antelopes, deer and gazelles. Each year, the Wild Animal Park alone produces more blackbuck antelope, axis deer and Persian gazelles than can be housed there or at other institutions. As a stopgap measure last year, keepers were instructed to euthanize three dozen male blackbuck born at the park.

Landres of the Humane Society of the United States says she believes better management of animal populations would make such measures unnecessary.

“Why should anybody end up being sacrificed?” she asked. “The zoo has a moral obligation to the individual. And let me tell you, when you start looking at them as numbers, that’s when animals start to suffer.”

But Durrant disagreed.

“It sounds very hard and so cold to say, ‘This is a (genetically) overrepresented animal and therefore it is surplus,’ ” she said. “But it’s really not. We’re making decisions for each individual that affect a whole species. We must not be more concerned with how one animal dies than with whether an entire species lives.”