Zoo News Digest 29th July 2016
(ZooNews 933)
(ZooNews 933)
Peter Dickinson
elvinhow@gmail.com
Dear Colleague,
It was stupid yes,
but it was also very sad. One woman killed and the other severely injured by
tigers at the Badaling Wildlife World in China. I don't suppose we will ever
know what the truth of the story was. Did they really believe they were out of
tiger area? Did hotheadness take over and sense fly out of the window? Whatever
I really don't think that these women deserved all the horrible remarks
leveled at them on the various Facebook groups. In fact the older woman (who
died) deserves praise and accolade in getting out of the car to try and save
her daughter. What would you have done? Honestly? There is no way that I could
have sat by and watched someone I loved being attacked. I too would have got
out of the car and tried to help with full knowledge of what may happen. So I
say a huge respect to that woman.
The death of the
small girl in Rabat Zoo appears to have been a terrible accident and I hope
that is just what it was but that the zoo does take some responsibility. I
recollect an elephant in a zoo I worked in that, for no good reason, took a
particular dislike to me. It had the ability to throw rocks at me with unerring
accuracy at distances of over a hundred yards. Happily it had days when I was considered not worth the effort.
The Dartmoor Zoo
Story has taken a new twist as has the saga of the South Lakes Safari Zoo. I
continue to wonder just what will happen next.
First mention of
VinPearl Safari on Phu Quoc Island in a while….if I don't count the posing
pictures with the tiger cubs (there's a story there if you read between the
lines). Here they list newly imported animals includes chimpanzees. There is a
great deal about this collection which bothers me so I have to ask, where did
the chimpanzees come from? Which zoo were they captive bred in? Would I be
wrong in thinking that they are babies brought in from the wild? Would I? I am
quite prepared to say sorry if that is not the case.
Why do I persist in
drawing attention to the posing sessions with Orangutans in Taman Safari in
each Zoo News Digest mail out? Well in the first place because it is wrong and
secondly because I know they see it and it annoys the hell out of them. It
isn't clever and it isn't a joke and now we have Ark Avilon Zoo in the
Philippines doing the same thing. This is very sad because Ark Avilon is one of
the best zoos in the Philippines and so will now be copied by the other
outstandingly crap collections there. It goes on everywhere in Asia but it
isn't acceptable and there are no reasonable excuses. It disgusts me that such
practices are not condemned by SEAZA and other zoo bodies. It is as if they do
not give a damn….perhaps they don't.
Did You Know?
ZooNews Digest has over 25,500 'Like's' on Facebook and has a weekly reach often exceeding over 250,000 people? That ZooNews Digest has subscribers in over 800 Zoos in 153+ countries? That the subscriber list reads like a 'Zoos Who's Who?'
If you are a subscriber to the email version then you probably knew this already. You would also know that ZooNews Digest pre-dates any of the others. It was there before FaceBook. It was there shortly after the internet became popular and was a 'Blog' before the word had been invented. ZooNews Digest reaches zoo people.
Dear Colleague,
It was stupid yes,
but it was also very sad. One woman killed and the other severely injured by
tigers at the Badaling Wildlife World in China. I don't suppose we will ever
know what the truth of the story was. Did they really believe they were out of
tiger area? Did hotheadness take over and sense fly out of the window? Whatever
I really don't think that these women deserved all the horrible remarks
leveled at them on the various Facebook groups. In fact the older woman (who
died) deserves praise and accolade in getting out of the car to try and save
her daughter. What would you have done? Honestly? There is no way that I could
have sat by and watched someone I loved being attacked. I too would have got
out of the car and tried to help with full knowledge of what may happen. So I
say a huge respect to that woman.
The death of the
small girl in Rabat Zoo appears to have been a terrible accident and I hope
that is just what it was but that the zoo does take some responsibility. I
recollect an elephant in a zoo I worked in that, for no good reason, took a
particular dislike to me. It had the ability to throw rocks at me with unerring
accuracy at distances of over a hundred yards. Happily it had days when I was considered not worth the effort.
The Dartmoor Zoo
Story has taken a new twist as has the saga of the South Lakes Safari Zoo. I
continue to wonder just what will happen next.
First mention of
VinPearl Safari on Phu Quoc Island in a while….if I don't count the posing
pictures with the tiger cubs (there's a story there if you read between the
lines). Here they list newly imported animals includes chimpanzees. There is a
great deal about this collection which bothers me so I have to ask, where did
the chimpanzees come from? Which zoo were they captive bred in? Would I be
wrong in thinking that they are babies brought in from the wild? Would I? I am
quite prepared to say sorry if that is not the case.
Why do I persist in
drawing attention to the posing sessions with Orangutans in Taman Safari in
each Zoo News Digest mail out? Well in the first place because it is wrong and
secondly because I know they see it and it annoys the hell out of them. It
isn't clever and it isn't a joke and now we have Ark Avilon Zoo in the
Philippines doing the same thing. This is very sad because Ark Avilon is one of
the best zoos in the Philippines and so will now be copied by the other
outstandingly crap collections there. It goes on everywhere in Asia but it
isn't acceptable and there are no reasonable excuses. It disgusts me that such
practices are not condemned by SEAZA and other zoo bodies. It is as if they do
not give a damn….perhaps they don't.
Did You Know?
ZooNews Digest has over 25,500 'Like's' on Facebook and has a weekly reach often exceeding over 250,000 people? That ZooNews Digest has subscribers in over 800 Zoos in 153+ countries? That the subscriber list reads like a 'Zoos Who's Who?'
If you are a subscriber to the email version then you probably knew this already. You would also know that ZooNews Digest pre-dates any of the others. It was there before FaceBook. It was there shortly after the internet became popular and was a 'Blog' before the word had been invented. ZooNews Digest reaches zoo people.
Charging RHINOS smash into family's car in West
Midland Safari Park terror
A dad told of his
terror after a pair of RHINOS charged his family’s car as his two young
daughters sat in the back.
Stuart Hall’s girls,
four-year-old Alexi and Isabella, nine, screamed out as the massive beasts –
which can weigh up to two tonnes – careered into their Volvo as they fought.
Isabella, was sent
flying by the impact at West Midland Safari Park , near Bewdley in
Worcestershire .
Suspected speed-breeding in tiger tourism industry
A “cruel” practice
of speed-breeding cubs in Thailand’s tiger entertainment industry is suspected
following a secret investigation by World Animal Protection.
It is already widely
reported that tigers at many entertainment venues endure lifelong suffering,
often chained and confined in barren cages and subjected to harsh training
processes to perform for tourists.
But WAP claims its
report – Tiger selfies exposed: a portrait of Thailand’s tiger entertainment
industry – is the first comprehensive analysis of the business in Thailand.
Volume XXXI, Number 7 July 2016 ISSN 0971-6378 (Print edition); 0973-2543 (Online edition); RNI Date of publication 27 July 2016
Thoughts for Behaviour: Species and individuals who
prefer to flee… Where do you start?
You know this one
animal, or these species who are extremely afraid of humans? In the marine
mammal world, we do have these individuals who are more sensitive than others.
In the zoo world we have many species who are afraid, or are flight animals by
nature. With these animal’s reinforcement strategies work very different. This
most likely because they value their behaviour of fleeing over what you decided
to provide them after they did a good job. It’s up to the trainer to discover
what is the best reinforcer for that particular specie, that individual and
even the scenario
N. Korea completes construction of nature museum,
remodeled zoo in Pyongyang
North Korea has
completed the construction of a nature museum and remodeled a zoo in Pyongyang,
the country's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Monday.
The KCNA said that
an inaugural ceremony took place on Sunday and was attended by Premier Pak
Pong-ju, along with Choe Thae-bok and O Su-yong, both vice chairmen of the
Workers' Party Central Committee.
Pak said in an
address that the successful construction of the Nature Museum and the Central
Zoo was the "fruition of the wise leadership of Marshal Kim Jong-un who is
devoting his all to the work for providing the people with the world-level base
for cultural and leisure activities," according to the KCNA.
The news agency said
the Nature Museum, covering more than 35,000 square meters, is a modern mass
educational and science research center as well as a leisure complex. The
museum has a Space Hall, Paleozoic Era Hall, Mesozoic Era Hall, Cenozoic Era
Hall, Animals Hall, Plants Hall, Gifts Hall, E-Library and Sci-tech
Disseminating Room, it said.
In regards to the
zoo, more than 40 animal pens have been built for reptiles, monkeys and other
wild animals to match the surrounding scenery, the KC
In Bojnice zoo, bear escapee was put to sleep
It was visitors
themselves who pointed to the animal running loose, being separated from them
by just a fence.
The animal –
allegedly nameless as it arrived at Bojnice only about a month ago – aged 6 and
coming from the Czech zoo in Tábor, was caught soon afterwards. Later, it
turned out he was called Balú (after the bear in the Jungle Book) in Tábor, and
never showed any signs of being aggressive.
Then, the reports on
what happened differ: “A vet first used a tranquilizer gun, but without
success; thus, we had to kill the animal – in the name of security of
everyone,” Andrea Klasová of the Zoo’s marketing department told the Pravda
daily, adding that the bear has been aggressiv
Orangutan Green Team guides buying land to protect
Borneo's wildlife from palm oil threat
A small group of
Indonesian tour guides are buying up forest lands in a bid to protect wildlife,
including sun bears and orangutans, in the world's top palm oil-producing
country.
With the help of
money from tourists, the 28 local guides, known as the Orangutan Green Team,
are buying land along the river opposite Kalimantan's Tanjung Puting National
Park, in the heart of Borneo.
Leaving the port at
Kumai, tourists board their traditional river boat or klotok, gliding through
the wide river before turning down narrower dark brown r
Charging RHINOS smash into family's car in West
Midland Safari Park terror
A dad told of his
terror after a pair of RHINOS charged his family’s car as his two young
daughters sat in the back.
Stuart Hall’s girls,
four-year-old Alexi and Isabella, nine, screamed out as the massive beasts –
which can weigh up to two tonnes – careered into their Volvo as they fought.
Isabella, was sent
flying by the impact at West Midland Safari Park , near Bewdley in
Worcestershire .
Suspected speed-breeding in tiger tourism industry
A “cruel” practice
of speed-breeding cubs in Thailand’s tiger entertainment industry is suspected
following a secret investigation by World Animal Protection.
It is already widely
reported that tigers at many entertainment venues endure lifelong suffering,
often chained and confined in barren cages and subjected to harsh training
processes to perform for tourists.
But WAP claims its
report – Tiger selfies exposed: a portrait of Thailand’s tiger entertainment
industry – is the first comprehensive analysis of the business in Thailand.
| Volume XXXI, Number 7 |
| July 2016 |
| ISSN 0971-6378 (Print edition); 0973-2543 (Online edition); RNI |
| Date of publication 27 July 2016 |
Thoughts for Behaviour: Species and individuals who
prefer to flee… Where do you start?
You know this one
animal, or these species who are extremely afraid of humans? In the marine
mammal world, we do have these individuals who are more sensitive than others.
In the zoo world we have many species who are afraid, or are flight animals by
nature. With these animal’s reinforcement strategies work very different. This
most likely because they value their behaviour of fleeing over what you decided
to provide them after they did a good job. It’s up to the trainer to discover
what is the best reinforcer for that particular specie, that individual and
even the scenario
N. Korea completes construction of nature museum,
remodeled zoo in Pyongyang
North Korea has
completed the construction of a nature museum and remodeled a zoo in Pyongyang,
the country's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Monday.
The KCNA said that
an inaugural ceremony took place on Sunday and was attended by Premier Pak
Pong-ju, along with Choe Thae-bok and O Su-yong, both vice chairmen of the
Workers' Party Central Committee.
Pak said in an
address that the successful construction of the Nature Museum and the Central
Zoo was the "fruition of the wise leadership of Marshal Kim Jong-un who is
devoting his all to the work for providing the people with the world-level base
for cultural and leisure activities," according to the KCNA.
The news agency said
the Nature Museum, covering more than 35,000 square meters, is a modern mass
educational and science research center as well as a leisure complex. The
museum has a Space Hall, Paleozoic Era Hall, Mesozoic Era Hall, Cenozoic Era
Hall, Animals Hall, Plants Hall, Gifts Hall, E-Library and Sci-tech
Disseminating Room, it said.
In regards to the
zoo, more than 40 animal pens have been built for reptiles, monkeys and other
wild animals to match the surrounding scenery, the KC
In Bojnice zoo, bear escapee was put to sleep
It was visitors
themselves who pointed to the animal running loose, being separated from them
by just a fence.
The animal –
allegedly nameless as it arrived at Bojnice only about a month ago – aged 6 and
coming from the Czech zoo in Tábor, was caught soon afterwards. Later, it
turned out he was called Balú (after the bear in the Jungle Book) in Tábor, and
never showed any signs of being aggressive.
Then, the reports on
what happened differ: “A vet first used a tranquilizer gun, but without
success; thus, we had to kill the animal – in the name of security of
everyone,” Andrea Klasová of the Zoo’s marketing department told the Pravda
daily, adding that the bear has been aggressiv
Orangutan Green Team guides buying land to protect
Borneo's wildlife from palm oil threat
A small group of
Indonesian tour guides are buying up forest lands in a bid to protect wildlife,
including sun bears and orangutans, in the world's top palm oil-producing
country.
With the help of
money from tourists, the 28 local guides, known as the Orangutan Green Team,
are buying land along the river opposite Kalimantan's Tanjung Puting National
Park, in the heart of Borneo.
Leaving the port at
Kumai, tourists board their traditional river boat or klotok, gliding through
the wide river before turning down narrower dark brown r
THE WOLF AT THE DOOR
Wolves are breeding
rapidly across Europe. In central Greece, Adam Nicolson finds shepherds and
conservationists at odds over how to deal with their incursions
t is not often that
you see wildness erupting into a man’s life, but it happened in front of me.
Sotiris Stamoulis, a shepherd who keeps his 300 breeding goats in the beautiful
blond wood pasture of Mount Gerania outside Corinth in central Greece, was only
18 inches away from my face but shouting his distress and rage, a gale of
frustration and worry blowing out of him.
Below the trees were
the distant, wind-stirred waters of the Gulf of Corinth; beyond them the
mountains of the Peloponnese. Warm resin and wild oregano drifted past on the
wind. Even in the daytime, nightingales were above us singing broken snatches
of their song. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might have thought this
another Arcadia. But for the men who live and work here, it isn’t. This is one
of Europe’s wolf frontiers – the Mount Gerania pack are the southernmost wolves
in Europe. Stamoulis is point-man for a way of life under existential threat
and for all his strong, straddled presence, anxiety rippled through every
gesture he made.
“In the beginning
four years ago, I was starting to lose some animals but I didn’t know why. I’d
had trouble with dogs before, usually biting the goats on the legs. But this
was different: whatever it was, they were going for the throats. There was no
memory of wolves here. My father, my grandfather, both had been shepherds here
but none had known them. Not even 200 years ago were there any wolves here.”
New virus strains found in hunters bitten by gorillas
Scientists from the
Institut Pasteur and the CNRS have identified two new strains of the HTLV-4
virus in two hunters who were bitten by gorillas in Gabon. These findings,
published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, support the notion that
gorillas represent a major source of infectious agents that can be passed on to
humans.
Many of the viral
pathogenic agents that have emerged in humans in recent decades are of animal
origin – including SARS coronavirus, avian influenza virus, hantaviruses, Ebola
virus, Marburg virus and Nipah virus. After the initial contact between species,
some of these viruses used a variety of evolutionary mechanisms to adapt to
their new human host. Scientists from the unité d’Epidémiologie et
physiopathologie des virus oncogènes (Institut Pasteur/CNRS), directed by
Antoine Gessain, are working on a group of RNA viruses known as HTLV
retroviruses. In 2 to 8% of cases, HTLV type 1 resul
Mass killing of elephants: Will the EU go on turning a
blind eye?
Every year, 30,000
elephants are killed for their tusks according to Fondation Franz Weber, a
Swiss-based NGO campaigning against the ivory trade for over 40 years, writes
Willy Fautre.
Willy Fautré is the
Director of Human Rights Without Frontiers.
However, the EU
continues to turn a deaf ear to the calls for a total ivory trade ban. On 1
July 2016, the European Commission decided that a global ivory trade ban did
“not seem justified” and encouraged the Council to take a position against “a
general closure of domestic ivory markets.”
This recommendation
comes ahead of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) to the
1976 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (CITES), which will take place in South Africa from 24 September- 5 October
and in which 182 member states of CITES will participate.
In 1978, the US
Endangered Species Act classified the African Elephant as “threatened.” Since
then, elephant populations have dropped to less than half of the number in
1978, falling by roughly 3% every year because of poaching, hunting and habitat
destruction.
The EU is the
largest exporter of legal ivory, and it is this trade that fuels the illegal
trade in ivory, and the mass killing of elephants.
During the past
decade, EU member states legally exported more than 20,000 carvings and 564
tusks to Asia. On the other hand, from 2011 to 2014, EU countries seized around
4,500 ivory items that were to be illegally exported to China, Hong Kong, and
Vietnam. In these countries, ivory imports far exceed the number of official EU
export certificates.
Consumption of ivory
by China’s middle class pushe
THE WOLF AT THE DOOR
Wolves are breeding
rapidly across Europe. In central Greece, Adam Nicolson finds shepherds and
conservationists at odds over how to deal with their incursions
t is not often that
you see wildness erupting into a man’s life, but it happened in front of me.
Sotiris Stamoulis, a shepherd who keeps his 300 breeding goats in the beautiful
blond wood pasture of Mount Gerania outside Corinth in central Greece, was only
18 inches away from my face but shouting his distress and rage, a gale of
frustration and worry blowing out of him.
Below the trees were
the distant, wind-stirred waters of the Gulf of Corinth; beyond them the
mountains of the Peloponnese. Warm resin and wild oregano drifted past on the
wind. Even in the daytime, nightingales were above us singing broken snatches
of their song. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might have thought this
another Arcadia. But for the men who live and work here, it isn’t. This is one
of Europe’s wolf frontiers – the Mount Gerania pack are the southernmost wolves
in Europe. Stamoulis is point-man for a way of life under existential threat
and for all his strong, straddled presence, anxiety rippled through every
gesture he made.
“In the beginning
four years ago, I was starting to lose some animals but I didn’t know why. I’d
had trouble with dogs before, usually biting the goats on the legs. But this
was different: whatever it was, they were going for the throats. There was no
memory of wolves here. My father, my grandfather, both had been shepherds here
but none had known them. Not even 200 years ago were there any wolves here.”
New virus strains found in hunters bitten by gorillas
Scientists from the
Institut Pasteur and the CNRS have identified two new strains of the HTLV-4
virus in two hunters who were bitten by gorillas in Gabon. These findings,
published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, support the notion that
gorillas represent a major source of infectious agents that can be passed on to
humans.
Many of the viral
pathogenic agents that have emerged in humans in recent decades are of animal
origin – including SARS coronavirus, avian influenza virus, hantaviruses, Ebola
virus, Marburg virus and Nipah virus. After the initial contact between species,
some of these viruses used a variety of evolutionary mechanisms to adapt to
their new human host. Scientists from the unité d’Epidémiologie et
physiopathologie des virus oncogènes (Institut Pasteur/CNRS), directed by
Antoine Gessain, are working on a group of RNA viruses known as HTLV
retroviruses. In 2 to 8% of cases, HTLV type 1 resul
Mass killing of elephants: Will the EU go on turning a
blind eye?
Every year, 30,000
elephants are killed for their tusks according to Fondation Franz Weber, a
Swiss-based NGO campaigning against the ivory trade for over 40 years, writes
Willy Fautre.
Willy Fautré is the
Director of Human Rights Without Frontiers.
However, the EU
continues to turn a deaf ear to the calls for a total ivory trade ban. On 1
July 2016, the European Commission decided that a global ivory trade ban did
“not seem justified” and encouraged the Council to take a position against “a
general closure of domestic ivory markets.”
This recommendation
comes ahead of the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) to the
1976 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (CITES), which will take place in South Africa from 24 September- 5 October
and in which 182 member states of CITES will participate.
In 1978, the US
Endangered Species Act classified the African Elephant as “threatened.” Since
then, elephant populations have dropped to less than half of the number in
1978, falling by roughly 3% every year because of poaching, hunting and habitat
destruction.
The EU is the
largest exporter of legal ivory, and it is this trade that fuels the illegal
trade in ivory, and the mass killing of elephants.
During the past
decade, EU member states legally exported more than 20,000 carvings and 564
tusks to Asia. On the other hand, from 2011 to 2014, EU countries seized around
4,500 ivory items that were to be illegally exported to China, Hong Kong, and
Vietnam. In these countries, ivory imports far exceed the number of official EU
export certificates.
Consumption of ivory
by China’s middle class pushe
Vol 8, No 7 (2016)
Manatees from Singapore zoo head to Caribbean in first
repopulation scheme
Singapore’s zoo said
yesterday that it will send two manatees to Guadeloupe as part of the world’s
first repopulation programme for the animal, which became extinct on the French
Caribbean island in the early 20th century.
Males Kai, seven,
and Junior, six, will be the first manatees – also known as sea cows – on the
island since the species died out.
Another 13 manatees
of both genders from zoos around the world will follow the pair to the Grand
Cul-de-Sac Marin, a 15,000 hectare (37,000 acre) protected bay, the Asian
city-state’s zoo operator said.
Any offspring from
the group will be reintroduced into the wild as part of the repopulation
programme.
The species is
listed as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s
Red List of Threatened Species, with the West Indian variety becoming extinct
in the Caribbean due to overhunting.
During the 30-hour
journey, the ma
Flying tigers over Vietnam with CV alive
Four endangered
Indochinese tigers were transported from their origin in the Czech Republic to
Luxembourg and then onwards to a new home in Vietnam by Cargolux for exhibition
in the Hanoi Zoo.
The tigers were
carried on a Cargolux 747 freighter via “CV alive,” the carrier’s live cargo
transportation service. Over the years, Cargolux has transported a wide range
of exotic animals, including giraffes, alpacas, white tigers and white rhinos.
In this instance, the tigers were kept in a carefully ventilated and
temperature-controlled environment that the airline says can replicate any
natural environment from 4˚C to 29˚C.
With fewer than 350
animals in this extremely rare subspecies currently alive in the wilderness of
Southeast Asia, and another 20 registered in captivity, the endangered
Indochinese tiger population has been diminished by protracted regional
conflicts in the past. More recently, the population has been reduced by 70
percent by urbanization and agricultural activity in the last decade, according
to the World Wildlife Fund.
The Hanoi Zoo today
has a tiger breeding program to help save the animals from extinction, but the
zoo had come under scrutiny in 2008 when it had admitted to illegall
Gorillas in Democratic Republic of Congo Have Strong
Connection to Metro Detroit
The executive
director of the Democratic Republic of Congo-based Gorilla Rehabilitation and
Conservation Education Center, or GRACE, will speak next month at an event
organized by the Detroit Zoological Society, one of its partners in the
worldwide effort to save the highly endangered Grauer's gorilla, formerly known
as the eastern lowland gorilla.
Dr. Sonya M.
Kahlenberg will speak at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 14, in the Ford Education
Center at the Detroit Zoo. The presentation — titled “Saving Gorillas from
Extinction” — is open to the public at a cost of $25, with all proceeds
benefiting GRACE.
GRACE is the only
facility in the world that provides rescue and rehabilitative care for orphaned
Grauer's gorillas – considered one of the world’s most endangered primates. The
organization was founded in 2009 by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International
and is now led by a board of directors chaired by DZS
The San Diego Zoo's panda interpreter
The sign at the
beginning of Panda Trek at the San Diego Zoo says the wait is 35 to 40 minutes.
Might be nice to have something that will help pass the time.
That’s where Kay
Ferguson comes in.
She’s a panda
interpreter, and from her chair in one corner of the exhibit, she speaks
through a microphone to give visitors information about the popular black and
white bears: what they eat, what they weigh, how old they are when they first
start climbing. Even how often they poop.
Ferguson has been
doing this for about 20 years, in shifts that last four to six hours, and she
knows the pandas so well that when Xiao Liwu begins to settle in for a nap in a
tree, she calls out his moves before he does them.
“Put the paws up,”
she says, and Xiao Liwu does, onto a branch.
“Get one more
picture before he turns around,” she tells the visitors, just as Xiao Liwu
rises up and shifts position.
If Ferguson’s
wardrobe is any indication, she loves her work. She’s wearing panda earrings,
panda socks, a panda pendant. Her purse and cellphone case have pandas on them.
The Lemon Grove
resident is 76 and has no plans t
Phu Quoc Island’s Safari Zoo welcomes more species
After six months of
operation, Vinpearl Safari, a wildlife park off the southern province of Kien
Giang, has successfully bred more rare species.
The Vinpearl Safari
park, covering 500 hectares of the province’s Phu Quoc Island, has added a
number of new species to its brood, including antelopes, servals, kangaroos,
peacocks, and pheasants.
Early last month,
two Bengal tigers gave birth to four pups.
Le Hong Nhat, head
of the animal care group at Vinpearl Safari, said that two months after their
birth, the baby tigers’ weight had increased to between 5 and 7 kilograms from
0.7 kilograms at delivery.
According to
Vietnamese realty conglomerate Vingroup, the safari’s management unit, Vinpearl
Safari will eventually house and protect more than 2,000 animals of 140
different species.
The list of animals
there includes common waterbucks, striped hyena, royal pythons, chacma baboons,
bat-eared foxes, common elands, greater kudus, gemsboks, dromedarie
IAATE INTERNATIONAL
SYMPOSIUM - EUROPE
10 - 12 OCTOBER 2016
- ZOOMARINE, PORTUGAL
Shock twist as Dalton zoo founder David Gill and
his wife reappointed as sole directors and four bosses 'terminated'
SOUTH Lakes Safari
Zoo founder David Gill and his wife have been reappointed as sole directors of
the zoo - with the four new directors being terminated from their positions.
In a strange twist,
despite vowing that Mr Gill would no longer be involved in the running of the
zoo at a formal licensing meeting just three weeks ago, the company has
yesterday terminated the four directors and reappointed Mr Gill and his wife
Frieda Rivera-Schreiber.
The previous four
directors - Karen Brewer, Jayne Birkett, Claire Lambert and Stewart Lambert
have all been terminated. Mrs Brewer had been head of the new management
structure appointed to take over the running of the zoo to comply with
inspectors' and Barrow Borough Council's concerns about Mr Gill.
The Evening Mail
understands that Barrow Borough Council is aware of the change in directors.
Barrow Borough
Council rejected an application to the renew the licence of South Lakes Safari
Zoo over health and safety and management concerns.
South Lakes Safari
Zoo applied to renew its licence in January 2016 but Barrow Borough Council
have been forced to consider whether or not the attraction can be allowed to
stay open after concerns relating to its owner, David Gill.
The council decided
to reject Mr Gill's application but the zoo now has six months to reapply in
its own right. It will stay open during this time.
On the first day of
the hearing, July 5, in a text message sent
Massive flock of egrets causing problems at Kansas zoo
Officials at a
Kansas zoo say a flock of nearly 5,000 egrets are causing problems.
The Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/2aeAfc7 ) reports that the
federally protected birds have taken up residence in a corner of the Sedgwick
County Zoo in Wichita.
Zoo bird curator
Scott Newland says he's been dealing with the flock for about two years and
that eggs, chicks and nesting twigs have been falling onto public pathways and
into animal exhibits. Newland says it's posing a risk to animals. The egrets
moved to the zoo after their rookery was torn down in November 2014 to make way
for duplexes.
The egrets have
mostly been concentrated in a three-acre area on the southeast corner of the
zoo.
"It's a public
health concern, it's also a health concern with our animals," Newland
said. "It's not ideal for these birds to be nesting over our exhibits,
nesting over our animals. So that's been the biggest headache."
The zoo has devoted
more than 500 hours and $50,000 to keep the birds under control. Newland says
that a zoo keeper could remove 10 wheelbarrows full of waste and fallen twigs
on any given day due to the egrets. Due to the mess, the wolves at the zoo have
been off exhibit since mid-May.
The zoo has had a
depredation permit, which allows it to scare away, capture or kill birds if
necessary for health and safety.
U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Services representative Steve Sepin said the government will allow the
killing of birds in fire situations after other steps hav
Mysterious New Whale Species Discovered in Alaska
Like many good
mysteries, this one started with a corpse, but the body in question was 24 feet
(7.3 meters) long.
The remains floated
ashore in June of 2014, in the Pribilof Islands community of St. George, a tiny
oasis of rock and grass in the middle of Alaska's Bering Sea. A young biology
teacher spotted the carcass half-buried in sand on a desolate windswept beach.
He alerted a former fur seal researcher who presumed, at first, that she knew
what they'd found: a Baird's beaked whale, a large, gray, deep-diving creature
that occasionally washes in dead with the tide.
But a closer
examination later show
SeaWorld's Middle Eastern expansion will not include
orcas, says CEO
SeaWorld’s first
attraction outside of North America will also be its first not to include
killer whales, Attractions Management can exclusively reveal.
The company, which
pledged its current generation of orcas would be its last in captivity earlier
this year, has firmed up plans for a Middle Eastern expansion – rumoured to be
coming to either Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia.
“We have moved to a
definitive agreement stage, money has changed hands and we’re currently
designing the park, but we haven’t made a public announcement of where and who
– something we hope to to in the fall,” said SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby, speaking
to Attractions Management.
Under Manby’s
stewardship, SeaWorld has spent the last year-and-a-half redefining itself as a
park that cares and one that wants to create memorable experiences.
Manby first
announced progress in SeaWorld’s global expansion plans during a call regarding
the company’s annual earnings report, saying the company had “moved to the next
phase” of its international development strategy by signing an MoU with a
Middle Eastern partner.
When SeaWorld
announced the end to orca breeding at its parks, no mention was made of its
planned expansion, only that the whales would “live out their lives at the
company's park habitats”.
The move signals a
new phase in the life of SeaWorld, with plans for a broader entertainment mix
to replace its iconic orcas.
“Things are
certainly progressing and it will be the first SeaWorld attraction ever to not
have a killer whale facility,” Manby said. “W
[LISTEN] SAVE AFRICAN PENGUINS FROM EXTINCTION
Wildlife park may not be held legally responsible for
deadly attack, DOESN'T put tigers to death
On Saturday, tigers
at Beijing's Badaling Wildlife Park mauled two women after they exited their
car inside the safari zone, killing one on the spot and seriously injuring the
other. Legal experts say that the park will not bear liability for the attack if
it can prove that it fulfilled its obligations of warning and protecting
visitors.
The incident
happened after a family drove inside the Siberian tigers' enclosure as part of
a safari-style tour. The husband of the injured woman claimed that she did not
realize that they were inside the enclosure when she got out of the car.
Netizens speculate that he may have said this to place blame on the park.
When a visitor is
hurt in any zoo, the legal liability goes first to the zoo, according to Chang
Sha, a lawyer from the King & Capital Law Firm. However, if the zoo can
prove that its facilities were not flawed and the staff fulfilled all
obligations of warning visitors against dangerous beh
Orangutan learns to mimic human conversation for the
first time
An orangutan has
shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets
us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the
communications of ancestral great apes.
‘Rocky’ the ginger
ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a
“conversational context”.
“This opens up the
potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids
that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how
the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans,” says lead researcher
Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, UK.
Playing the game
His team conducted a
game in which the ape mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made
vowel-like calls.
Comparing his sounds
against a large database of recordings of wild and captive orangutans showed
they were markedly different.
Rocky was able to
learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in the way humans do when
they conduct a conversation, the scientists concluded.
“Instead of learning
new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by
arousal over which they have no control,” says Lameria. “But our research pr
Fatal Tiger Mauling Shows What's Wrong With Animal
Parks
Surveillance video
at a wildlife park in northern China shows the horrifying moment a woman is
attacked by a captive tiger. The woman survived, but her mother was killed
after she rushed to defend her daughter.
The woman's husband
also came to his wife's rescue and was not hurt.
The deadly encounter
took place Saturday at Badaling Wildlife World outside Beijing. Yet the
incident could have been prevented and is a reminder of the danger—and
questionable track record—of such captive animal experiences, says Luke Dollar,
a conservation biologist who directs National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative.
"Lack of
awareness and lack of respect for wild animals can sometimes be very expensive,
and unfortunately it cost a woman her life," Dollar says.
John Goodrich, the
senior program director fo
Bronx Zoo breeds a little penguin for first time in
120-year history
New York City's Bronx Zoo has bred a little
penguin for the first time in its 120-year history.
The zoo is now
exhibiting the chick , which can be seen on its YouTube channel. The chick
hatched on May 10.
Zoo animals are starving to death at Venezuela's zoos
Venezuela is no
stranger to crisis. In recent years, the South American country has been on the
brink of economic collapse.
A drastic fall in
oil prices, which provides almost all of Venezuela's foreign income, has been
followed by a severe recession and widespread food and medicine shortages.
For Venezuelans, the
scarcity has led to choosing between waiting in hours-long lines for basic food
supplies or succumbing to sky-high prices on the black market.
That scarcity has
now spread to Venezuela's zoos, where food shortages have left some animals
emaciated or even dying.
Rabat Zoo Seems to Deny Responsibility over Death of
Child
The Rabat Zoo has
denied responsibility for a young girl’s death on Tuesday after an elephant
threw a stone out of its enclosure that struck her on the head.
The official
statement from the zoo today noted that the elephant enclosure met all
international standards. It asserted: “Accidents of this type are rare,
unforeseeable, and unusual. Accidents of this nature happened in international
zoos, most recently in Disney World Orlando and the Cincinnati Zoo in the
United States.”
A video posted by
Jadid24/7 depicts the girl receiving medical care from passerby and a man who
appears to be in uniform. However, the commentator of the video notes that the
accident had occurred over five minutes ago and an ambulance had still not arrived.
A commenter on the
video expressed his outrage at the zoo’s handling of the case. “Primarily
responsible for this tragedy is the director of the Rabat Zoo. How is it
possible that the place receives a large number of
DNA Study Reveals the One and Only Wolf Species in
North America
SeaWorld San Diego drops lawsuit over breeding ban
SeaWorld San Diego
has dropped a lawsuit against the California Coastal Commission that challenged
the agency’s right to impose a ban on the breeding of killer whales at the
theme park.
SeaWorld, facing
pressure from animal-rights groups and others, announced in March that it would
no longer breed its captive orcas.
“Fantastic news,”
Coastal Commission Vice Chair Dayna Bochco said of the decision to drop the
lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of California in San Diego. “This finally
closes the chapter on captive orca breeding in California.”
SeaWorld and the
Coastal Commission clashed when the theme park applied with the state agency to
expand its orca holding tanks, saying it wanted to give the whales more room to
swim and create a new opportunity for research.
The state agency
approved the project in October but added the condition that SeaWorld stop
breeding its whales. The conditio
Former Dartmoor Zoo owners accuse current boss of
destroying their legacy
The family who once
ran Dartmoor Zoo have launched a scathing attack on its current owner, accusing
him of destroying their legacy.
Ben Mee bought
Dartmoor Zoo from the Daw family in 2006 after they had owned it for 36 years.
But Lynne Daw, aged
64, who ran it with her former husband Ellis, says she is distraught at how he
has run things – and were devastated he had let a big cat escape from the
grounds.
They have also
accused Mr Mee of neglecting the health and safety of the animals in lieu of
promoting himself.
Construction of large zoo in Yekaterinburg to begin in
2018
The investor plans
to begin construction of a new zoon in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in
2018.
Within the first
phase, the construction site will occupy an area of 34,7 hectares in the
Novokoltsovsky micro-district located near the “Yekaterinburg-Expo” exhibition
center, the local media reports on Thursday.
Erection of the
first phase of the zoo is planned to be completed by celebrations on the
occasion of the 300 years anniversary of Yekaterinburg that will be held in
2023.
Animals in the zoo
will be represented in accordance with the continents, where they inhabit:
Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica.
The second phase
envisages the creation of a scientific and
Close all tiger farms, WWF tells Asian states
The World Wildlife
Fund on Thursday called on Asian states to close their tiger farms to boost the
fight against the black-market trade in animal parts.
The conservation
group said there remained 200 tiger farms in Asia, mostly in China, Laos,
Vietnam and Thailand.
The tiger population
in farms is about 8,000, more than the estimated 3,900 living in the wild, WWF
said in a statement ahead of the July 29 International Day of the Tiger.
Many tiger farms
have been implicated in the hugely lucrative but illegal trafficking market.
The so-called
"Temple of Tigers" in western Thailand was closed in May after Thai
wildlife officials discovered dozens of dead cubs inside a freezer.
The universal
closure of such farms was crucial, WWF said, because
PLEASE, LET TRUSTING THE DODO AS A SOURCE GO EXTINCT.
Let’s talk today
about how important it is to fact-check major publications in the realm of
animal media before sharing any information they present. Specifically, let’s
talk about why The Dodo is never a source on animal related issues to be
trusted, because of the misinformation they perpetuate and the directly harmful
ideas they propagate. Dodo articles are rife with misinformation, twisted
presentations of facts, quotes from purported ‘experts’ who are well known to
be biased and unreliable sources, have non-existent primary citations, and in
many cases are just egregiously incorrect about things that can simply be
googled.
Today, a new article
showed up that I was hoping would be a valid source of information: How To Tell
if An Animal Sanctuary is a ‘Fake’. It is, sadly, just as egregiously not
fact-checked as everything else animal related The Dodo has produced - and what’s
worse is that the incorrect information it presents is mixed in with other
really valid and important points for interpreting the quality of a sanctuary.
Before we break down why it’s so infuriating, let’s look at the way Dodo
articles are produced in general.
Zoo workers stage protest
Alleging partiality
in extending work permit for tour vehicle operators inside the Arignar Anna
Zoological Park, Vandalur, workers and staff staged a protest in front of the
Zoo Director’s office on Thursday.
More than 150
tourist drivers, including selection grade and special grade staff, are working
in the zoo for more than 25 years.
“We have been asked
to submit our documents before Wednesday,” said Iraniyappan, secretary, AAZP
Staff and Workers Union.
The union was
demanding extension of their work permit and upgradation of animal maintenance
as well.
The protesting
workers sought an appointment with Zoo Director, KSSVP Reddy, who will be
retiring on July 31.
Mr. Iraniyappan said
they would be fo
Guangzhou aquarium denies 'world's saddest polar bear'
is sad, 500,000 sign petition calling for its release
The Grandview
Aquarium, located inside a sprawling shopping mall in Guangzhou, has become
notorious for its questionable treatment of its animals, in particular one very
sad-looking polar bear named Pizza.
International Tiger Day
International Tiger
Day is sometimes termed Global Tiger Day. It takes place each year on the 29th
July. A relatively new celebration it was first initiated in St. Petersburg in
2010. As the name suggests this is a worldwide event.
The primary aim of
International Tiger Day is to draw the worlds attention to the plight which
tigers face in the wild AND in captivity.
This year both Good
Zoos and Bad Zoos will be hosting events to raise money for Tiger Conservation
in the wild. Some Bad Zoos will pocket the cash or use it for their own
personal Tiger schemes. Other Bad Zoos may hand all of the money over to
genuine conser
** ***
** **
***
*
Manatees from Singapore zoo head to Caribbean in first
repopulation scheme
Singapore’s zoo said
yesterday that it will send two manatees to Guadeloupe as part of the world’s
first repopulation programme for the animal, which became extinct on the French
Caribbean island in the early 20th century.
Males Kai, seven,
and Junior, six, will be the first manatees – also known as sea cows – on the
island since the species died out.
Another 13 manatees
of both genders from zoos around the world will follow the pair to the Grand
Cul-de-Sac Marin, a 15,000 hectare (37,000 acre) protected bay, the Asian
city-state’s zoo operator said.
Any offspring from
the group will be reintroduced into the wild as part of the repopulation
programme.
The species is
listed as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s
Red List of Threatened Species, with the West Indian variety becoming extinct
in the Caribbean due to overhunting.
During the 30-hour
journey, the ma
Flying tigers over Vietnam with CV alive
Four endangered
Indochinese tigers were transported from their origin in the Czech Republic to
Luxembourg and then onwards to a new home in Vietnam by Cargolux for exhibition
in the Hanoi Zoo.
The tigers were
carried on a Cargolux 747 freighter via “CV alive,” the carrier’s live cargo
transportation service. Over the years, Cargolux has transported a wide range
of exotic animals, including giraffes, alpacas, white tigers and white rhinos.
In this instance, the tigers were kept in a carefully ventilated and
temperature-controlled environment that the airline says can replicate any
natural environment from 4˚C to 29˚C.
With fewer than 350
animals in this extremely rare subspecies currently alive in the wilderness of
Southeast Asia, and another 20 registered in captivity, the endangered
Indochinese tiger population has been diminished by protracted regional
conflicts in the past. More recently, the population has been reduced by 70
percent by urbanization and agricultural activity in the last decade, according
to the World Wildlife Fund.
The Hanoi Zoo today
has a tiger breeding program to help save the animals from extinction, but the
zoo had come under scrutiny in 2008 when it had admitted to illegall
Gorillas in Democratic Republic of Congo Have Strong
Connection to Metro Detroit
The executive
director of the Democratic Republic of Congo-based Gorilla Rehabilitation and
Conservation Education Center, or GRACE, will speak next month at an event
organized by the Detroit Zoological Society, one of its partners in the
worldwide effort to save the highly endangered Grauer's gorilla, formerly known
as the eastern lowland gorilla.
Dr. Sonya M.
Kahlenberg will speak at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 14, in the Ford Education
Center at the Detroit Zoo. The presentation — titled “Saving Gorillas from
Extinction” — is open to the public at a cost of $25, with all proceeds
benefiting GRACE.
GRACE is the only
facility in the world that provides rescue and rehabilitative care for orphaned
Grauer's gorillas – considered one of the world’s most endangered primates. The
organization was founded in 2009 by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International
and is now led by a board of directors chaired by DZS
The San Diego Zoo's panda interpreter
The sign at the
beginning of Panda Trek at the San Diego Zoo says the wait is 35 to 40 minutes.
Might be nice to have something that will help pass the time.
That’s where Kay
Ferguson comes in.
She’s a panda
interpreter, and from her chair in one corner of the exhibit, she speaks
through a microphone to give visitors information about the popular black and
white bears: what they eat, what they weigh, how old they are when they first
start climbing. Even how often they poop.
Ferguson has been
doing this for about 20 years, in shifts that last four to six hours, and she
knows the pandas so well that when Xiao Liwu begins to settle in for a nap in a
tree, she calls out his moves before he does them.
“Put the paws up,”
she says, and Xiao Liwu does, onto a branch.
“Get one more
picture before he turns around,” she tells the visitors, just as Xiao Liwu
rises up and shifts position.
If Ferguson’s
wardrobe is any indication, she loves her work. She’s wearing panda earrings,
panda socks, a panda pendant. Her purse and cellphone case have pandas on them.
The Lemon Grove
resident is 76 and has no plans t
Phu Quoc Island’s Safari Zoo welcomes more species
After six months of
operation, Vinpearl Safari, a wildlife park off the southern province of Kien
Giang, has successfully bred more rare species.
The Vinpearl Safari
park, covering 500 hectares of the province’s Phu Quoc Island, has added a
number of new species to its brood, including antelopes, servals, kangaroos,
peacocks, and pheasants.
Early last month,
two Bengal tigers gave birth to four pups.
Le Hong Nhat, head
of the animal care group at Vinpearl Safari, said that two months after their
birth, the baby tigers’ weight had increased to between 5 and 7 kilograms from
0.7 kilograms at delivery.
According to
Vietnamese realty conglomerate Vingroup, the safari’s management unit, Vinpearl
Safari will eventually house and protect more than 2,000 animals of 140
different species.
The list of animals
there includes common waterbucks, striped hyena, royal pythons, chacma baboons,
bat-eared foxes, common elands, greater kudus, gemsboks, dromedarie
IAATE INTERNATIONAL
SYMPOSIUM - EUROPE
10 - 12 OCTOBER 2016
- ZOOMARINE, PORTUGAL
Shock twist as Dalton zoo founder David Gill and
his wife reappointed as sole directors and four bosses 'terminated'
SOUTH Lakes Safari
Zoo founder David Gill and his wife have been reappointed as sole directors of
the zoo - with the four new directors being terminated from their positions.
In a strange twist,
despite vowing that Mr Gill would no longer be involved in the running of the
zoo at a formal licensing meeting just three weeks ago, the company has
yesterday terminated the four directors and reappointed Mr Gill and his wife
Frieda Rivera-Schreiber.
The previous four
directors - Karen Brewer, Jayne Birkett, Claire Lambert and Stewart Lambert
have all been terminated. Mrs Brewer had been head of the new management
structure appointed to take over the running of the zoo to comply with
inspectors' and Barrow Borough Council's concerns about Mr Gill.
The Evening Mail
understands that Barrow Borough Council is aware of the change in directors.
Barrow Borough
Council rejected an application to the renew the licence of South Lakes Safari
Zoo over health and safety and management concerns.
South Lakes Safari
Zoo applied to renew its licence in January 2016 but Barrow Borough Council
have been forced to consider whether or not the attraction can be allowed to
stay open after concerns relating to its owner, David Gill.
The council decided
to reject Mr Gill's application but the zoo now has six months to reapply in
its own right. It will stay open during this time.
On the first day of
the hearing, July 5, in a text message sent
Massive flock of egrets causing problems at Kansas zoo
Officials at a
Kansas zoo say a flock of nearly 5,000 egrets are causing problems.
The Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/2aeAfc7 ) reports that the
federally protected birds have taken up residence in a corner of the Sedgwick
County Zoo in Wichita.
Zoo bird curator
Scott Newland says he's been dealing with the flock for about two years and
that eggs, chicks and nesting twigs have been falling onto public pathways and
into animal exhibits. Newland says it's posing a risk to animals. The egrets
moved to the zoo after their rookery was torn down in November 2014 to make way
for duplexes.
The egrets have
mostly been concentrated in a three-acre area on the southeast corner of the
zoo.
"It's a public
health concern, it's also a health concern with our animals," Newland
said. "It's not ideal for these birds to be nesting over our exhibits,
nesting over our animals. So that's been the biggest headache."
The zoo has devoted
more than 500 hours and $50,000 to keep the birds under control. Newland says
that a zoo keeper could remove 10 wheelbarrows full of waste and fallen twigs
on any given day due to the egrets. Due to the mess, the wolves at the zoo have
been off exhibit since mid-May.
The zoo has had a
depredation permit, which allows it to scare away, capture or kill birds if
necessary for health and safety.
U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Services representative Steve Sepin said the government will allow the
killing of birds in fire situations after other steps hav
Mysterious New Whale Species Discovered in Alaska
Like many good
mysteries, this one started with a corpse, but the body in question was 24 feet
(7.3 meters) long.
The remains floated
ashore in June of 2014, in the Pribilof Islands community of St. George, a tiny
oasis of rock and grass in the middle of Alaska's Bering Sea. A young biology
teacher spotted the carcass half-buried in sand on a desolate windswept beach.
He alerted a former fur seal researcher who presumed, at first, that she knew
what they'd found: a Baird's beaked whale, a large, gray, deep-diving creature
that occasionally washes in dead with the tide.
But a closer
examination later show
SeaWorld's Middle Eastern expansion will not include
orcas, says CEO
SeaWorld’s first
attraction outside of North America will also be its first not to include
killer whales, Attractions Management can exclusively reveal.
The company, which
pledged its current generation of orcas would be its last in captivity earlier
this year, has firmed up plans for a Middle Eastern expansion – rumoured to be
coming to either Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia.
“We have moved to a
definitive agreement stage, money has changed hands and we’re currently
designing the park, but we haven’t made a public announcement of where and who
– something we hope to to in the fall,” said SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby, speaking
to Attractions Management.
Under Manby’s
stewardship, SeaWorld has spent the last year-and-a-half redefining itself as a
park that cares and one that wants to create memorable experiences.
Manby first
announced progress in SeaWorld’s global expansion plans during a call regarding
the company’s annual earnings report, saying the company had “moved to the next
phase” of its international development strategy by signing an MoU with a
Middle Eastern partner.
When SeaWorld
announced the end to orca breeding at its parks, no mention was made of its
planned expansion, only that the whales would “live out their lives at the
company's park habitats”.
The move signals a
new phase in the life of SeaWorld, with plans for a broader entertainment mix
to replace its iconic orcas.
“Things are
certainly progressing and it will be the first SeaWorld attraction ever to not
have a killer whale facility,” Manby said. “W
[LISTEN] SAVE AFRICAN PENGUINS FROM EXTINCTION
Wildlife park may not be held legally responsible for
deadly attack, DOESN'T put tigers to death
On Saturday, tigers
at Beijing's Badaling Wildlife Park mauled two women after they exited their
car inside the safari zone, killing one on the spot and seriously injuring the
other. Legal experts say that the park will not bear liability for the attack if
it can prove that it fulfilled its obligations of warning and protecting
visitors.
The incident
happened after a family drove inside the Siberian tigers' enclosure as part of
a safari-style tour. The husband of the injured woman claimed that she did not
realize that they were inside the enclosure when she got out of the car.
Netizens speculate that he may have said this to place blame on the park.
When a visitor is
hurt in any zoo, the legal liability goes first to the zoo, according to Chang
Sha, a lawyer from the King & Capital Law Firm. However, if the zoo can
prove that its facilities were not flawed and the staff fulfilled all
obligations of warning visitors against dangerous beh
Orangutan learns to mimic human conversation for the
first time
An orangutan has
shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets
us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the
communications of ancestral great apes.
‘Rocky’ the ginger
ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a
“conversational context”.
“This opens up the
potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids
that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how
the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans,” says lead researcher
Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, UK.
Playing the game
His team conducted a
game in which the ape mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made
vowel-like calls.
Comparing his sounds
against a large database of recordings of wild and captive orangutans showed
they were markedly different.
Rocky was able to
learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in the way humans do when
they conduct a conversation, the scientists concluded.
“Instead of learning
new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by
arousal over which they have no control,” says Lameria. “But our research pr
Fatal Tiger Mauling Shows What's Wrong With Animal
Parks
Surveillance video
at a wildlife park in northern China shows the horrifying moment a woman is
attacked by a captive tiger. The woman survived, but her mother was killed
after she rushed to defend her daughter.
The woman's husband
also came to his wife's rescue and was not hurt.
The deadly encounter
took place Saturday at Badaling Wildlife World outside Beijing. Yet the
incident could have been prevented and is a reminder of the danger—and
questionable track record—of such captive animal experiences, says Luke Dollar,
a conservation biologist who directs National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative.
"Lack of
awareness and lack of respect for wild animals can sometimes be very expensive,
and unfortunately it cost a woman her life," Dollar says.
John Goodrich, the
senior program director fo
Bronx Zoo breeds a little penguin for first time in
120-year history
New York City's Bronx Zoo has bred a little
penguin for the first time in its 120-year history.
The zoo is now
exhibiting the chick , which can be seen on its YouTube channel. The chick
hatched on May 10.
Zoo animals are starving to death at Venezuela's zoos
Venezuela is no
stranger to crisis. In recent years, the South American country has been on the
brink of economic collapse.
A drastic fall in
oil prices, which provides almost all of Venezuela's foreign income, has been
followed by a severe recession and widespread food and medicine shortages.
For Venezuelans, the
scarcity has led to choosing between waiting in hours-long lines for basic food
supplies or succumbing to sky-high prices on the black market.
That scarcity has
now spread to Venezuela's zoos, where food shortages have left some animals
emaciated or even dying.
Rabat Zoo Seems to Deny Responsibility over Death of
Child
The Rabat Zoo has
denied responsibility for a young girl’s death on Tuesday after an elephant
threw a stone out of its enclosure that struck her on the head.
The official
statement from the zoo today noted that the elephant enclosure met all
international standards. It asserted: “Accidents of this type are rare,
unforeseeable, and unusual. Accidents of this nature happened in international
zoos, most recently in Disney World Orlando and the Cincinnati Zoo in the
United States.”
A video posted by
Jadid24/7 depicts the girl receiving medical care from passerby and a man who
appears to be in uniform. However, the commentator of the video notes that the
accident had occurred over five minutes ago and an ambulance had still not arrived.
A commenter on the
video expressed his outrage at the zoo’s handling of the case. “Primarily
responsible for this tragedy is the director of the Rabat Zoo. How is it
possible that the place receives a large number of
DNA Study Reveals the One and Only Wolf Species in
North America
SeaWorld San Diego drops lawsuit over breeding ban
SeaWorld San Diego
has dropped a lawsuit against the California Coastal Commission that challenged
the agency’s right to impose a ban on the breeding of killer whales at the
theme park.
SeaWorld, facing
pressure from animal-rights groups and others, announced in March that it would
no longer breed its captive orcas.
“Fantastic news,”
Coastal Commission Vice Chair Dayna Bochco said of the decision to drop the
lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of California in San Diego. “This finally
closes the chapter on captive orca breeding in California.”
SeaWorld and the
Coastal Commission clashed when the theme park applied with the state agency to
expand its orca holding tanks, saying it wanted to give the whales more room to
swim and create a new opportunity for research.
The state agency
approved the project in October but added the condition that SeaWorld stop
breeding its whales. The conditio
Former Dartmoor Zoo owners accuse current boss of
destroying their legacy
The family who once
ran Dartmoor Zoo have launched a scathing attack on its current owner, accusing
him of destroying their legacy.
Ben Mee bought
Dartmoor Zoo from the Daw family in 2006 after they had owned it for 36 years.
But Lynne Daw, aged
64, who ran it with her former husband Ellis, says she is distraught at how he
has run things – and were devastated he had let a big cat escape from the
grounds.
They have also
accused Mr Mee of neglecting the health and safety of the animals in lieu of
promoting himself.
Construction of large zoo in Yekaterinburg to begin in
2018
The investor plans
to begin construction of a new zoon in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in
2018.
Within the first
phase, the construction site will occupy an area of 34,7 hectares in the
Novokoltsovsky micro-district located near the “Yekaterinburg-Expo” exhibition
center, the local media reports on Thursday.
Erection of the
first phase of the zoo is planned to be completed by celebrations on the
occasion of the 300 years anniversary of Yekaterinburg that will be held in
2023.
Animals in the zoo
will be represented in accordance with the continents, where they inhabit:
Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica.
The second phase
envisages the creation of a scientific and
Close all tiger farms, WWF tells Asian states
The World Wildlife
Fund on Thursday called on Asian states to close their tiger farms to boost the
fight against the black-market trade in animal parts.
The conservation
group said there remained 200 tiger farms in Asia, mostly in China, Laos,
Vietnam and Thailand.
The tiger population
in farms is about 8,000, more than the estimated 3,900 living in the wild, WWF
said in a statement ahead of the July 29 International Day of the Tiger.
Many tiger farms
have been implicated in the hugely lucrative but illegal trafficking market.
The so-called
"Temple of Tigers" in western Thailand was closed in May after Thai
wildlife officials discovered dozens of dead cubs inside a freezer.
The universal
closure of such farms was crucial, WWF said, because
PLEASE, LET TRUSTING THE DODO AS A SOURCE GO EXTINCT.
Let’s talk today
about how important it is to fact-check major publications in the realm of
animal media before sharing any information they present. Specifically, let’s
talk about why The Dodo is never a source on animal related issues to be
trusted, because of the misinformation they perpetuate and the directly harmful
ideas they propagate. Dodo articles are rife with misinformation, twisted
presentations of facts, quotes from purported ‘experts’ who are well known to
be biased and unreliable sources, have non-existent primary citations, and in
many cases are just egregiously incorrect about things that can simply be
googled.
Today, a new article
showed up that I was hoping would be a valid source of information: How To Tell
if An Animal Sanctuary is a ‘Fake’. It is, sadly, just as egregiously not
fact-checked as everything else animal related The Dodo has produced - and what’s
worse is that the incorrect information it presents is mixed in with other
really valid and important points for interpreting the quality of a sanctuary.
Before we break down why it’s so infuriating, let’s look at the way Dodo
articles are produced in general.
Zoo workers stage protest
Alleging partiality
in extending work permit for tour vehicle operators inside the Arignar Anna
Zoological Park, Vandalur, workers and staff staged a protest in front of the
Zoo Director’s office on Thursday.
More than 150
tourist drivers, including selection grade and special grade staff, are working
in the zoo for more than 25 years.
“We have been asked
to submit our documents before Wednesday,” said Iraniyappan, secretary, AAZP
Staff and Workers Union.
The union was
demanding extension of their work permit and upgradation of animal maintenance
as well.
The protesting
workers sought an appointment with Zoo Director, KSSVP Reddy, who will be
retiring on July 31.
Mr. Iraniyappan said
they would be fo
Guangzhou aquarium denies 'world's saddest polar bear'
is sad, 500,000 sign petition calling for its release
The Grandview
Aquarium, located inside a sprawling shopping mall in Guangzhou, has become
notorious for its questionable treatment of its animals, in particular one very
sad-looking polar bear named Pizza.
International Tiger Day
International Tiger
Day is sometimes termed Global Tiger Day. It takes place each year on the 29th
July. A relatively new celebration it was first initiated in St. Petersburg in
2010. As the name suggests this is a worldwide event.
The primary aim of
International Tiger Day is to draw the worlds attention to the plight which
tigers face in the wild AND in captivity.
This year both Good
Zoos and Bad Zoos will be hosting events to raise money for Tiger Conservation
in the wild. Some Bad Zoos will pocket the cash or use it for their own
personal Tiger schemes. Other Bad Zoos may hand all of the money over to
genuine conser
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New Meetings and Conferences updated Here
New Meetings and Conferences updated Here
If you have anything to add then please email me at elvinhow@gmail.com
I will include it when I get a minute. You know it makes sense.
Recent Zoo Vacancies
Vacancies in Zoos and Aquariums and Wildlife/Conservation facilities around the World
*****
About me
After more than 47 years working in private, commercial and National zoos in the capacity of keeper, head keeper and curator Peter Dickinson started to travel. He sold house and all his possessions and hit the road. He has traveled extensively in Turkey, Southern India and much of South East Asia before settling in Thailand. In his travels he has visited well over 200 zoos and writes about these in his blog http://zoonewsdigest.blogspot.com/
or on Hubpages http://hubpages.com/profile/Peter+Dickinson
Peter earns his living as an independent international zoo consultant, critic and writer. Currently working as Curator of Penguins in Ski Dubai. United Arab Emirates. He describes himself as an itinerant zoo keeper, one time zoo inspector, a dreamer, a traveler, a people watcher, a lover, a thinker, a cosmopolitan, a writer, a hedonist, an explorer, a pantheist, a gastronome, sometime fool, a good friend to some and a pain in the butt to others.
"These are the best days of my life"
Peter Dickinson
Independent International Zoo Consultant        |
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