The deer population has to be big enough to provide that much tiger food. If we take the math a little bit further, a deer population can produce a surplus of about 10% a year. Now if you keep working down the numbers you’ll see that the sustained 250 tigers,… Read More
Should it matter if it’s a Caspian tiger or if it’s a Amur tiger in this dwindling population?… Read More
Should we be that concerned about those splitting, if you will, of taxonomy?… Read More
The zoo field has worked very, very hard to get the wildest genotypes they can in the breeding collection that is now being managed as Mongolian wild horse. And they have maintained very careful records and the horses are now being reintroduced in nature and are beginning to do pretty… Read More
Picking up on the tigers, and you talked about numbers, is a tiger, in these dwindling populations with even rhinoceros, is a tiger, a tiger?… Read More
What was the point of having a horse that was partly domestic?… Read More
Javans? Certainly not. They ought to be extinct, they are. Caspians are gone now. This is a truly serious problem, which the zoos themselves are having trouble with, but the private breeders complicate it even more. And we can’t tell what is going to happen. Another example, take the Przewalski’s… Read More
Unfortunately, a domestic stallion and maybe more than one became involved with some of the breeding stock. And the first thing you know, you had a group of animals that did not meet the requirements of being called a Mongolian wild horse. Read More
Are they Amur tigers?… Read More
Are they Sumatrans?… Read More
Is it a good idea that it’s turned around?… Read More
In my opinion, we need badly to involve all the animals that are in the country that are properly, that we can identify. Let me give you an example of what I mean when I say properly identified, in the United States today in zoos, there are about 350 tigers,… Read More
We can’t do that. The private breeders have lots and lots of tigers, who knows what they are. Read More
Including the collections of private breeders within the overall zoo management of wild animals is highly desirable and very, very difficult. When you are dependent upon understanding how many males and females and a blood genetic lines in order to put together breeding pairs and the private breeder can’t or… Read More
How can this situation be changed?… Read More
In my opinion, zoos have got to understand that not just entertainment, not just public education, but all of it together within a core effort of wildlife preservation. If you’re in the zoo business, why wouldn’t preserving wild animals, be the first thing on your mind. And yet by and… Read More
Did that hurt or help zoos?… Read More
Zoos are embracing them, but not sufficiently, not a sufficiently broad fashion. Moreover, what we are now doing through the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the European AZA is not yet common in the zoo world. There is not a global program of accreditation. There is not a… Read More
So this is one of the directions, this global initiative that zoos should be embracing?… Read More
(William coughs) I am concerned that zoos have been very slow to recognize their responsibility, to make conservation their core public service. It’s taken them a long, long time. Zoos had no accreditation program until 1972 when I wrote it. There was no species survival plan until some years later,… Read More