If you are with a small zoo, you can make a major contribution, even though you are limited in what you can breed or exhibit in the zoo. Because you can help build constituency. If we don’t build a constituency for wildlife, all the efforts we make to propagate it or to set up parks and reserves will fail. So educational programs at small zoos are enormously important. But the other thing is small zoos can do, and not enough of them are doing now is specialize. Small zoos have no business trying to sustain a broad range of the world’s animals, two this, three of that, and four of the other thing, they must specialize and have significant numbers of the species they’re exhibiting, enough so that they can sustain them with skill, with expertise. If you have 500 or a thousand species, maintaining that you have the expertise to sustain all of these creatures in very small numbers, doesn’t make good sense.
