68. Zoo Animals
18:40 Share

There are certain things that you can always expect to see in oklahoma's landscape, oil wells, cotton fields, red dirt cowboys and big trucks and chicken fried stakes. But in the state's capital, you'll find some max atic creatures that are a bit out of place.

We've got most of what you you might consider the markey animals, elephants, tigers, lions, brisley bears, reptile house .

right lesson is the executive director and CEO of the oklahoma city zoo. It's home to a thousand animals of more than three hundred different species. In the course of a day, you can see indian rino s como dragons, red pandas, western lowland gillis smattering, argentine andy, an condors and retail lamers. You'll even encounter a few endangered species.

We have a venomous beated lizard from automobile that's only in a hand full of zoos across the country, as well as a couple of what ercol pal share. Tortures, the most endanger tortures on the planet that only come from a small area of metaxa. You know, lions spent about twenty hours a day sleeping. You have to give other stuff for folks to see.

Oklahoma city zoo is one of a few hundred accredited zoo and aquarium across the country. They attract visitors by stocking their exhibits with exciting creatures from the far reaches of the globe. But how exactly do they get them?

It's very hard to put a fair market value on an endangered species .

for the free economics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm actually racket today. Zoo animals, humans have kept wild animals in captivity for thousands of years. In the middle ages, arrest craters showed after wealth and power by maintaining massari private collections of exotic creatures. The first modern zoloft ical gardens were established in eighteen th century europe with the aim of expanding our scientific understanding of the animal kingdom. By the early thousand nine hundred hundreds, zoos were a popular attraction in american cities like new york and philadelphia, and they competed with their wallets to get the best animals.

In the early days of zoos, almost all these animals were captured in the wild and brought back to zoo collections.

That's holy culham. She's the deputy director of the birmingham zoo in alabama.

There was very much a focus on wanting to have things that were unique and rare to build up the appeal of your particular zoo. There was a lot more buying and selling of animals at that time.

Explores were paid by zoos to capture wild animals throughout africa, asia, and some of them made a full time living out of IT in the middle th century. A german, by the name of Carol hagen back set up a global trade, supplied animals to use all over europe. In america, he would charge, based on the size and difficulty of capture.

An elephant would fetch around eight thousand dollars, a hypotheticals five thousand, and a draft fifteen hundred in today's money. That's tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Handsome sums like this in the vise.

Poachers and smuggles to participate in the trade too. They're often kill full grown animals in the wild and steal their babies. Zoos relied on this wild animal trade for decades before the law caught up.

The big shift in this country really happened in nineteen thousand seven, three, with the passage of the indian species act, which then put a lot of restrictions on the importation of endanger species that really sort of push zoo to focus more on how to break these animals and how to keep a supply of animals in our zoo without having to go out into the wild and capture them and bring them back.

These days, it's rare for accredited zoos to buy or sell animals. Instead, they almost always source extra inventory from other zoos in the U. S.

That already have the animals they're looking for. And to find them, they turn to the A, E, A or association of zs and aquarium. The A C, A provides a credit ation.

IT gives you us a stamp of approval that signifies they meet certain standards for animal welfare and management, but the organization serves another purpose. In addition to our job at the birmingham zoo, kahan is the chair of the A S. Animal population and management committee.

Are big goal is to make sure that inquiries have the animals that they need for their collections.

The a maintains a census of all the wildlife at a credited zoos across the country. Each species has a coordinator who oversees a database of the animals in their category. And if someone like dite lossing over at the okhotsk zoo needs a specific animal for a new exhibit, he knows who to call.

Here's an example. So we're getting ready to build a penguin habitat that will be opening in a couple of years. We need to twelve to twenty penguins in two years time.

So we go to the person that ordinates the penguin population among zoos and say, here's we're get ready to do. They will then go out and talk to other zoos that currently house those penguins and say, hey, okhotsk is gonna need this. So we need to start producing some chicks and kind of mind IT up that way. So you give a little bit of lead time, and they'll put together a flock of penguins for you folks like to call C A dating APP for various species.

Now, in most forms of commerce, when you give something up, you receive something in return. But zoo have a more communal system. Sometimes lost in will request an animal from another zoo and other times he'll give one away.

It's really not tip for that. You know you'll give me penguins today and i'll give you a lion tomorrow.

So there's no sort of calculation like an elephant is where three zebras or something?

No, I wish there was because we ve got plenty of elephants at the moment.

We have to put the greater good ahead of what our institutional needs might be. You might have an animal that know everybody loves, but he's related to the animals that you have. And in order for him to breed, he's going to have to go some play cells.

The people who oversee each species are constantly taking stock of what's out there. The lion ordinator, for instance, has access to data on every lion house in an accredited zoo in america, including the animals gender, ages and health. If a zoo needs a mates further lion, it'll bring in a population biologist to analyze all of the possible pair rings on the list and pick the best one.

We have some software that can help do those projections that say, hey, if I put these two lines together, there's a fifty, fifty chance that are gonna have clubs and they're probably going to a have two or three.

When IT comes to parent animals for meeting cola, han and her colleagues at the a also have to keep a close. E on genetics.

When we talk about value of animals were actually talking typically about genetic value. We are breathing for maintaining genetic diversity. So we don't look at, oh, he's the handsome est lions.

He should get, you know, priority. Or this is, you know, the friendly est lions. So let's breed her because we want more friendly lions.

We don't look at those personality traits. We don't look at physical characteristics. We're looking at trying to maintain as much of that genetic variation from the child population as we possibly .

can once the zoo identifies an animal that wants to acquire, the next step is to figure out transportation. And with something like an elephant, that's no simple task.

Typically, you build a really big, really strong create, and you train the elephant to voluntarily go into the create. You want to start that months before the actual move and get them used to spending time in that create. Usually if the renter crane to lift those crates onto the back of a truck.

Boston says the field of zoo animal transport is very niche.

There's probably two or three people that we call for a rino elephant element, organic or something like that. They're fascinating bunch because you they'll show up with your giraffe. It'll be three other things on the truck. You send some of your staff along with the animal shipment so you may have you know your animal care team or your veteran in a trail car following them.

While no money changes hands for the animals themselves, the receiving zoo still has to pay for transport.

As an example, we just received in hindi an rino series in the last two weeks, I was almost fourteen thousand dollars to move rhino from new york okhotsk.

Of course, there are certain animals that came to be sourced from others, zoo in the us, and the process for getting them is much more complicated for us.

One of most problematic animals in our new habitat was mere cats, which are pretty common among zoo in the us. But they haven't been breaking walls. So we actually had to go to europe to get those.

And the process to get some of those animals and internationally is really cumbersome. M and problematic. how? So because in the case of mir cats, they're considered a potentially injurious wildlife if they were to actually get out and get establish somewhere. So they're on a federal government list that you need special permits for. That took several years .

to get that lined up. And then there are giant pandas.

Giant pan is, yeah, they are out in a wing of the building on their own in terms of difficulty and political maneuvering that you need to do to make those arrangements.

And what's the deal with pandas? Why are they so hard to get?

Because china owns them all. And so you have to negotiate directly with china to be in a position to get them .

the lucky few american zoos that do have giant pandas like the Smith oni, a national zoo in washington, D. C, borrow them from the chinese government. The loan is usually good for ten years.

And when it's up, the bears go back to their native home in southwest china, along with any cubs that were born in captivity. These panda loans are in just a diplomatic gesture. A pair of bears comes with the fee of one million dollars per year, which is earmarked for conservation efforts in china. But all things considered, those are relatively small costs for a zoo. The real overhead materializes once the animals are settled into their new home.

Getting the animals one thing taking care of IT is quite another .

that's coming up. There are many different types of zoos in america. You can find animals and petty zoos, game reserves, safari parks and even on a credited roadside cages. But the zoo most americans are familiar with are the theme park like attractions that are located in major cities or suburban areas. The business models of these zoos can vary.

There's really a spectre of everything from institutions that are run by a city or state that are completely funded as part of a park department or something like that, to for profit private enterprises like disney's animal kingdom.

the oklahoma city zoo were dry. Last son serves A C, O, is governed through a municipality st. It's funded by grants, donations and a small cuts of city sales tax revenue. And like most others, shoes IT also makes money through ticket sales and concessions.

We just wrapped up our fiscal year, and we actually had the highest attendance ever. We did just north of one point one million gas coming to the zoo. And for a metro area of about one point three million people, that's pretty phenomenal attendance.

All those ticket sales are necessary because, as IT turns out, building housing for hundreds of exotic animals is not cheap.

Take, for instance, a recent expansion of the oklahoma city zoo, a habitats for global s tortures ran seven hundred thousand dollars, an enclosure for cheats and african wild dogs one point nine million, and a planned c lion cove, which includes an underwater observation, is going to set the zoo back around a thirty million. Then there's the cost of ongoing care. Zoo is employed dozens of keepers, dietetic and veterinarians who specialized in certain groups of animals.

Do you get a blood sample from a lion and you're not going in there wrestling into the ground? You're training IT to put his tail through the mesh. You can take a blood and out of its tae while it's wide awake and there are no easier to train than your house cat. So you try that next time you take IT to the vet.

and all those animals need to be fed. Large zoo spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on fresh produce, meat, fish and crickets. A full grown elephant might eat around three hundred pounds of hay every day.

A few years ago, the zoo community did a survey of folks, and I think the average cost per elephant was about eighty five thousand dollars a year.

And the appetites of snakes, birds and lizards can add up to.

We spend fifty thousand dollars a year on frozen rodents to feed variety of things. You need to think through what the upkeep is. Gonna cost.

You, you know, not everybody's gonna do a big hurt of elephant, whether that's because of space or because of cost. And that plays out on smaller species as well. But obviously, the big ones were the ones that you think through the economics of a little bit more than many box in house.

Despite all of these investments, sues still face heavy criticism. Many people believe they shouldn't exist at all, and serious questions have been raised about keeping large animals in captivity. Researchers have noticed that zoo animals often exhibit compulsive behaviors, cracking back and forth, pulling out their hair, biting themselves and eating their own feces.

Some zoos feed anti depression and politics to their animals. To address these problems, a polar bear, the central park zo, was prescribed prosaic after swimming and figurate loops for days on end. Zoo have addressed these problems, in part by modifying their design.

I'd say that actually over the last couple of decades has probably been less variant in zoos as everyone comes, the realization that you can't manage everything in human care. There's probably fewer species in zoos now. Then there were no twenty, thirty years ago just by virtually the fact that we're focusing on fewer with quality rather than just more.

But more broadly, zoo claimed the captivity provide the scientific benefits. Again, here's holy cola.

And we have a unique opportunity to provide sometimes information that scientists can get in the wild because we have such close, easy access to our animals. Our office are trained for voluntary blood collection. Obviously, that's something that's not easy to do on a wild elephant. So IT allows us to provide samples, provide physiological data, behavioral data, two researchers at universities or other researchers.

Zoos also play a significant role in conservation efforts. They often breathe threatened in endangered species that their facilities and reintroduce them to the wild. Asa credited zoos have helped save many species, including california condors, american red wolves and black footed ferrets.

Black footed ferrets are a great example of these, play a really critical role and bring that species back from being extinct in a while. They were hand full of places that bread them and released animals back.

A credited zoo and aquarium spend around two hundred and thirty million dollars annual leave on conservation projects. That's only a tiny sliver of the billions they spend on Operations and new construction. But cohen says the real impact of the work that zoos do can't be entirely measured in dollars and cents.

A lot of people aren't going to get the opportunity to go to africa to see animals in the wild. Zoos provide this safe, accessible place to make connections with wildlife that then down the road may be inspire somebody to get little more engaged in wanting to help save those animals in the wild. When people can have that up close impact for experience with an animal, IT changes them. I have seen that i've experienced IT, and there's nothing quite like that.

For the economics of everyday things, i'm a crack. This episode is produced by me and series and mixed by jermy Justin. We had help from Julie cancer and Daniel.

I used to catch stuff and bring at home with me. I brought a turtle home one time and gave my whole family salmonella. I don't endorse that sort of activity.

The for economics radio network, the hidden side of everything. stitcher.