| 0s | I want to ultimately find out if zoos need to change to serve animals and |
| 6s | humans better, or if they should be consigned to history. If you peel it all |
| 14s | back and you look at say London Zoo in 1828 |
| 19s | and all the others zoos throughout the nineteenth century, they all had big |
| 24s | animals, showy animals, colorful animals, mainly from Africa or from Asia. A typical |
| 30s | zoos today has got exactly the same collections. They have not moved on from |
| 34s | there. Opened in 1928, Detroit Zoo kept the same animals most other zoos did |
| 40s | including elephants, a star attraction. This place is taking a long hard look at |
| 47s | the scientific evidence to determine what animals it should keep and what it |
| 51s | shouldn't. This used to be the indoor enclosure for Detroit's two Asian |
| 57s | elephants. Now notice there is more room for people than there is for elephants. I was gonna say! |
| 63s | I didn't want to be smart about it but, how come there's more |
| 66s | room for the people? Because zoos in the beginning were thinking a little bit |
| 71s | more about people than they were about animals. Many captive elephants have |
| 75s | major problems with their feet because they're not walking enough and they're |
| 79s | not walking in the right material. It turned out captive born female Asian |
| 83s | elephants, the majority of the zoo population, were living 19 years on |
| 88s | average. We looked to the nearest thing which was timber camps in Burma. We found |
| 94s | that they were living to their about 40 so and at least double what we were |
| 99s | seeing in zoos. It really raised a massive red flag that something is not |
| 105s | right. I think this generation of elephants have suffered and you can see |
| 111s | that in the scientific data - we can see it. It's - it's a shame - shame on us, but the |
| 116s | next thing is what we're going to do about it and the next generation needs |
| 119s | to be protected and we learn from the past. |
| 123s | This is stereotypic behavior, abnormal |
| 129s | and repetitive with no obvious purpose. Professor Mason investigated why animals |
| 136s | display this behavior. The species most at risk was the polar bear, which has the |
| 141s | largest home range of all land mammals, sometimes over 250,000 square kilometers. |
| 147s | She challenged zoos to fundamentally improve the way they keep wide-ranging |
| 152s | carnivores or phase them out. That really put the cat amongst the pigeons. At over |
| 159s | 1.6 acres this enclosure is more than eight times the size of the old one. This |
| 166s | enclosure cost around 16 million dollars to design and build. At that kind of |
| 172s | price, trying to meet the welfare needs of animals like polar bears forces zoos |
| 176s | to make hard choices. You can't do every animal. You can't have a postage stamp |
| 182s | collection and expect to be able to have all the animals thrive. If the world is |
| 188s | beautiful and like it was when I went first to Africa, that's where all chimps |
| 193s | should be and quite honestly when you go to a really good zoo, which has a big |
| 198s | outside enclosure, then you think well, actually if I was a chimp I'd probably rather be |
| 204s | here than out in all these dangerous situations in the world. Zoos are saying |
| 210s | that saving animals is their fundamental role. Around 400 pandas have been bred in |
| 218s | captivity. This project is succeeding in breeding animals but struggling to build |
| 223s | a self-sustaining population in the wild. Just five have been released and only |
| 229s | three survived. All things considered, a huge amount of money has been spent on |
| 235s | the captive breeding program for pandas. And considering so few, although precious |
| 242s | individuals, have been reintroduced, is - has it been worth it? Is it - is it worth |
| 248s | |
| 251s | Ah, I mean we've learned a lot and - and should we continue them? Eight now I'm |
| 266s | feeling, no. Rhere are a lot of people today who say |
| 271s | that zoos should shut down. What do you think? I think those arguments of zoos |
| 276s | being part of the problem and using animals and having massive welfare |
| 280s | issues and not educating the public and not doing conservation was - was true in |
| 285s | the 40s, 50s, 60s and shame on us, probably in the 70s and early 80s as well, but |
| 290s | genuinely the last 10 or 15 years the world's changed and a lot of zoos have |
| 295s | woken up to that and a lot of zoos are run now by people like me who |
| 298s | passionately understand this, understand the arguments and we're trying to make a |
| 302s | |
