Why the Zoo Shoots the Tigers

Tim Radford

The Siberian tiger is large, beautiful and almost extinct. Last Christmas, London Zoo shot two of them. It destroyed two superb animals it had bred and reared itself as part of an international zoo push to save the Siberian tiger, and it did so because it had no home to offer them. Why the zoo had to do this is one of the bleakest stories in the world.

It did so because culling of zoo species is part of one strategy to save the Siberian tiger. There are about 200 in the wild. If they survive it will be little short of a miracle. Accordingly, some of the zoos which have thrown themselves behind coordinated campaigns to save species have developed a Noah's Ark policy. Species may have to be saved in zoos for perhaps as long as 200 years that is, until the world population levels begin to fall, the greenhouse effect has stabilised, the ozone layer has repaired and some form of global instrument has been devised to restore large areas of true wilderness.

The calculation is that the smallest possible number of Siberian tigers that could preserve the necessary “gene pool” is about 500. If you have trouble with the idea of a gene pool, think of trying to “save” the human race by selecting 500 members: trying to save the stock that went into making Einstein, Jessie Matthews, Jackson Pollock, Mother Theresa, Igor Oistrakh, Desmond Tutu, Sebastian Coe, Chou EN-Lai, Germaine Greer, Rocky Marcianco, Satyajit Ray, Henry Kissinger, Bo Derek, John Cleese and Rupert Brooke and so on by standing in Cheltenham Spa and selecting the first 500 sexually active people who walked past the Post Office after 9am on Friday morning... Quite clearly whoever had the unhappy task of “managing” this population would have to see that as many “gene lines” were kept going as possible: that is, partnership could not be at the whim of individuals and successful lines would have to be held back, less fruitful ones encouraged.

So it is with diminishing species. There is an international stud book, a pattern of zoo exchanges and artificial insemination is well developed. The programme has been very successful. It has been too successful. If all the zoos' female Siberian tigers had litters every second year, the zoo population would soar to 6,500 in 20 years.

But the world's serious zoos the ones, like London zoo, whose prime aim is science and conservation are very expensive to run. And Siberian tigers are not the only species at risk. One thousand birds one tenth of all avian species are on the edge of extinction. Sixty species of cat all the tigers, all the jaguars, all the leopards, all the cougars and all the cheetahs and all the small cats, the cerval and ocelots and so on are now endangered. So is the African elephant, four kinds of rhinoceros, two kinds of panda, ten species of bear, 23 species of whale and the mountain gorilla. Altogether there are at least 730 species of mammal threatened with extinction. There are attempts to “manage “ them in the wild. The United States has spent millions of dollars rescuing the blackfooted ferret from the brink. It spent millions failing to save the Florida dusky seaside sparrow. London Zoo has invested heavily in programmes to breed and reintroduce into the protected reserves that now stand for the wild, the oryx, Pere David's deer, the golden lion tamarin and Przewalski's horse. But some animals, especially the predators with desirable skins or the pachyderms hunted for horn or tusk, will probably only survive in zoos.

Which brings us back to the Siberian tiger. It is not the only candidate for the Ark. Mankind was wiping out species at the rate of one every four years from 1600 to 1900. By 1974, the guess was that species were being extinguished at the rate of 1,000 a year. The rate is increasing. We may be now eliminating a species every hour.

By the year 2000 we could have wiped out a million species. Most of them will be insects, plants, small fish, bats and small reptiles. But the larger creatures, the ones that live on, or depend in some way upon , insects, plants, small fish, bats and small reptiles are beginning to go as well. The international zoo fraternity has so far designated dozens of creatures in their survival plan: they may eventually push the total up to 1,000.

A thousand species is a trivial number when set against the worldwide extinction of species other than men, rats, cockroaches and domestic and farm animals. It is not, however, trivial for scientific zoos which are expected to survive on turnstile money from the public and sponsorship from the public and sponsorship from the big corporations. One architect of the species survival plan, the director of the New York Zoological Society, has calculated that to keep 2,000 species at levels of 500 each for just 20 years would cost $25 billion the sum NASA spent putting a man on the moon. Most people think his sums are underestimates. And most people think that the money will not be forthcoming: there will not be the political will.

The saddest thing of all is that we don't even know how many species there are. It was thought, not long ago, that the total might be two million. New research suggests there might be 10 million, or even 20 million. The Natural History Museum has simply given up any hope at all of trying to collect, describe and identify the world's insects. In many cases, by the time we have named and described an animal, it will have passed into oblivion, and hundreds more will have gone without our having known about them.

The zoos, unless they start receiving massive public and government support, haven't a hope of preserving more than a small percentage of creation's wealth. And, in the effort to keep the Siberian tiger alive - or, for that matter, any long lived larger animal they breed successfully they will have to go on shooting them.

(CX5030)

Subject Headings

• Conservation
• Endangered Species
• Genetics
• Natural History
• Nature
• Tigers
• Wildlife Ecology
• Wildlife Management
• Wildlife Preservation
• Wildlife Procreation
• Zoos

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