When we manage animal populations, whether they be cockroaches or elephants, we deal with the rigidities of demography of sex, there only two. And, we can have enormous problems with the birth of too many males or too many females of a species. If this is a cockroach, the answer to that is apparent to everybody. If it’s an elephant, or a gorilla, even a, often most of a dear, even though people are used to shooting deer of all kinds to hunt on them, in New York state, we hunt over 100,000 deer a year and incidentally in the country as a whole, I think we’re hunting over 20,000 black bear. And each year in the United States, we kill about 2,500 cougars. But killing a zoo animal because it is surplus to the population is an extremely difficult problem, is an emotional problem for the curator or director who must insist that it be done for the keepers who have cared for it and for the public who like to think of the zoo as an Eden where nothing ever gets ill or dies. But that’s not the way the world works. And this is a problem, it will continue to be a problem and in some parts it is insoluble.
