Hemker Zoo - 2012

[guppiecat]

This summer, I took a quick trip to the Hemker Zoo in rural Minnesota. Frankly, it was not very enjoyable. The zoo is a USDA zoo, not an AZA zoo and believe me, you can tell the difference. I seriously doubt they would be able to achieve AZA accreditation. I didn't see any evidence of outright mistreatment, but the cages were small and concrete pads were under them. It was extremely hot that day and some of the animals (the raccoon in particular) did not look well.

Accreditation and market forces in the zoo space are interesting subjects. I feel for the people who run the Hemker zoo. The biggest market they can attract is the Saint Cloud area, which is 25 minutes away. However, there's not a lot of zoo there, so people in Saint Cloud get to choose between around one hours total in the car for an hour or so at the zoo or 3 total hours in the car for an entire day's fun at the Minnesota Zoo. Because of this, small zoos often have to add a "new" animal every few months to get the attendance needed to bring in the money to feed the animals and pay for the caretakers. I suspect that this is what was going on with the run of tiny cages with somewhat exotic animals in them.

The AZA (and CAZA in Canada) exist, in part, to combat this trend and make sure that all animals in zoos are well cared for. If you screw up, you fail the peer review, so you lose your status, so it's harder for you to get new animals and you don't get the bonuses that people give to accredited institutions. It's not a perfect system, but it works and, in general, the accredited zoos are much more pleasant than the non-accredited ones. (There are non-accredited institutions that are more sanctuary-focused than zoo-focused that are still great to visit, but that's a different sort of thing.)

The biggest difference visually, is that since the environment of the animals is less of a concern for non-accredited institutions, it is a lot harder for a photographer to get images that look natural. The animals in this set are clearly captive. I didn't deliberately go for depressing as this is far from the worst I've seen and I don't want to shame them. I just wish the economics didn't require growing institutions to have to compromise on the animal well being at a certain phase of their growth cycle.

Here is my favorite:

This was a one-week old deer that, at one point, mistook my finger for the nipple on a bottle and tried to get milk out of it.




I like how the ducklings split into two sets of three.


You can feed budgies if you want.


This is what happens when you let the budgie door slam.


I like the blue budgies the best.


The camel was tired because it was hump day.


A quick review of the magic of cropping:

Goats like to climb and be on high things.


*sigh* Poor goat.


This image, right here, is indicative of what the visit to the zoo felt like. It's really my most favorite of the set because it means something, but I didn't want to lead with it.

Comments

[birdfigment.livejournal.com]

The deer is so cute!!! that I think I will go back to looking at it and not thinking too much about the last photo. (I have not felt the same about zoos since I went on safari in ... 2006. Not that I wasn't ambivalent about them before that.)

[guppiecat]

My view of zoos is that in this world, they are absolutely necessary to reduce the impact of the inevitable extinctions as much as possible. I'd love to live in a world in which they weren't necessary, but we just have too many people and too few of them value nature. We need a way to preserve the species and, where possible, their behaviors until humanity grows up.

[birdfigment.livejournal.com]

You're right, and that's one of the things that makes them okay for me. But I wish that more zoos were able to have fewer, or less obvious, cages. I realize that's usually a function of funding. The best example I've seen of an almost-cageless zoo is the one in Belize... that was pretty great. They took the existing rainforest and fenced bits of it in with high fences, populated the enclosures, and laid some paths out for visitors. It felt so much more like safari than cages that it was really heartening.

[guppiecat]

It's a function of funding and vision. I'm actually reading an excellent book on zoo architecture right now, and a lot of the really well-funded zoos go the wrong way because they hire architects who want to make a statement or who design to maximize human throughput. The author is highly opinionated, but his arguments around animal-centric design are compelling.

The history is really interesting and the more I learn about it. I'm starting to see historical trends of design in the zoos I visit and am realizing that some of the differences I see in Canadian zoos are less about money and more about differing approaches to conservation.

I'm just glad that the days of Art Deco zoos are over. Those photos were horrifying.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

These are great photos, and I can't really tell that it felt like the last photo. I really like the ducks.

(Though my favorite-ever of your photos is a piglet sniffing a dandelion, which I think you took at a zoo--the piglet escaped and was determining the greenness of the grass on the other side.)

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

For me, the most important function of zoos and other animal attractions, the thing that justifies having them despite the ills that can be found in all of them, is that they give people real in person exposure to animals. The only hope that wild animals and nature itself have against the encroachment of humans is to have more humans give a damn about nature. Pretty pictures on the TV are good, but it takes something much more personal to get most people to care enough to really do something. Between excessive regulation and the crushing threat of litigation, people in the US are mostly denied the chance to really get to know the animals, and hence to really care about them. But, on the whole, the animal facilities we have do what they can, and that's why I bend over backwards to give animal facilities the benefit of the doubt. I take care of a bunch of very difficult animals myself, at a facility with a very low budget; I know a lot of the things there don't look good, but I also know that we do everything we can to make life as good as we can for the animals there.

When you go to a small zoo, you see unhappy looking animals in tiny cages. When you go to a big city zoo, you don't see that, but that doesn't mean it's not there. I've been behind the scenes at some major city zoos and they have very small, uncomfortable enclosures for animals that are off display. They're just big enough to hide them where the public can't see them. It puts me off far more than the small places with smaller budgets where it's obvious that they're struggling, but they do the best they can.

[guppiecat]

Yes. That was, I believe, the Vancouver zoo. The little pigs could get out. The big pigs were somewhat upset.

[silkensteel.livejournal.com]

for what it's worth, the goat's hooves look good. that's a sign of someone paying attention to an often-overlooked detail. trimming and maintaining domestic, well socialized goat hooves can be a challenge.