The regional programs brought a big step forward because in former times, zoos didn’t need to breed so much. Usually, because animals were expensive, we just kept a pair, especially with, for example, gorillas or rhinos or so. And sometimes even a zoo director considered that a male gorilla looks very forceful and aggressive and therefore he did not even put him together with a female and so they couldn’t reproduce. And if one died, then the zoo director or curator ordered a replacement from the wild. Of course, this is no longer possible and that’s good that this is no longer possible. But a single zoo, and here Bill Conway always correctly teaches us, that a single zoo never, ever can reach a sustainable breeding, not even for a single species. And therefore, we have to consider all our zoo populations of a species as one population, which we manage in the best interest of the species. But there are some difficulties I see.
