Green Options

One of the poachers involved in the recent killing of a critically endangered Sumatran tiger inside Jambi’s Rimbo Zoo has been arrested.

Last month, when Sheila the tiger was poisoned and then skinned inside her enclosure, authorities feared the incident was a horrifying new development in the illegal trade in tiger skin and body parts.

Tragically, they were correct: Now that one of the men who killed Sheila has been arrested, police questioning has revealed that the murder was financed by a Palembang “businessman.”

Here’s some lighthearted news to bring a smile to your face. A nearly 20 year old giraffe at the zoo known as Israeli Safari has given birth to her 11th baby, setting a world record. She is formally known as Denissa, but more humorously known as “super-mum.”

A female Bengal tiger has become the star attraction in a South African zoo, after it was born with no stripes.

The tiger, named Fareeda, has been hand-reared by keepers at the Cango Wildlife Ranch, near Cape Town, South Africa, as part of a unique breeding programme to save the White Bengal species from extinction.

Six-month-old Fareeda joins an exclusive club - stripeless tigers are so rare that experts estimate there are fewer than 20 others like it anywhere in the world - all in captivity.

For years and years parents have taken their children to zoos to see exotic animals, animals that they don’t get to see everyday. They want to see lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! High on the the list of animals to be seen are elephants, nature’s gentle giants. These cute, (hardly) cuddly animals are the largest of the land mammals. But all of that could change. Elephants could be removed from zoos forever if In Defense of Animals (IDA) [...]

Despite extensive opposition and the rallying of animal activists and Hollywood celebrities alike, Los Angeles City Council voted today to go ahead with a $42 million elephant exhibit. About $12 million has already been spent towards the completion of the new exhibit, which is now 30 percent done.

Council also decided that the city will continue to keep Billy the elephant confined at the zoo instead of sending him to an animal sanctuary where he would have been afforded more space to roam. The planned six acre exhibit would be seven times larger than Billy’s current enclosure and feature approximately four acres of open space. Opponents argue that this falls far short of an elephant’s space requirements.

We zoo. We’re lucky enough to live an hour from the Indianapolis Zoo, and it’s the regular destination for a day trip when preschool is canceled, or dad’s got a day off of work, or a co-parent just absolutely has to have the house to themselves for at least eight hours or someone will have to shell out for marriage counseling.

We zoo, and so real-live lemurs and ostriches and boa constrictors are a familiar sight to my little Midwestern girls. They know about different environments, because the tigers live near the cafe over in the jungle habitat and the giraffes live way past the playground over in the plains. They know that different animals live together differently, because they saw the meerkats in the desert habitat all playing and fighting and humping each other, while the sharks in the oceans exhibit basically just ignore each other while swimming around looking predatory. They can tell which elephants are which in the elephant habitat, and which dolphins are which in the dolphin dome.

But at what price does this manufactured intimacy come?

Several days ago my family visited one of Lima, Peru’s zoos. On the day before our visit, I wrote about some of my general thoughts and feelings about zoos, in an article titled “Why Zoos Stimulate Our Minds.”

Writing out my thoughts was a sort of preparative exercise, mostly to try to articulate the main dilemma I have with zoos: do the potential education benefits of zoos outweigh the cruelty of caging animals in small spaces that I personally believe typically don’t provide them with fulfilling lives? I still am not sure of the answer, but my trip to the Huachipa Zoo did answer another intriguing question for me. When zoos are bad, would I personally prefer that a bad zoo exist rather than have no zoo at all?

Before I reveal the answer to the aforementioned question, I should explain that my wife and I came up with some criteria for rating zoos. For the purpose of reviewing more zoos in the future, I wanted to have some reasonable means to compare them.

Tomorrow my family is planning to make a trip to the zoo. I like zoos, but there are some things about them that always get my mind racing through ethical questions about animals and the nature of people.

I find that zoos tend to reliably provoke more thoughts in my mind than other places that can also stimulate me to think, like aquariums, museums, shopping malls, movie theaters, and parks. Before I started writing this article, in my nerdy social scientist way I dug through numerous scientific papers about topics such as whether or not people learn anything when they visit zoos, what attitudes people tend to have about zoos in general, and studies about how animals living in zoos might be negatively affected by us going to see them (especially those of us with more interest in animals). After reading and seeking more knowledge, I was only left with more questions.

Meet Flocke, a new polar bear cub at the Nuremberg Zoo in Germany.

Her name means “snowflake.” Since her birth in December, photos and videos from the zoo have been overloading the public with cuteness, stirring up “Flocke fever.”

Still, no one outside the zoo staff had ever seen Flocke in person. This week, she made her first live public appearance.

Rabbit CareEditor's note: We're pleased to welcome Gavin Hudson to our blogging team. Gavin lives in Seattle, and has worked for the Jane Goodall Institute, particularly its "Roots and Shoots" program. He'll be covering activism topics for us, particularly those that you can implement in your quest to "green the good life."

Do you dream of working with animals? Find out how you can volunteer at your local zoo or

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