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A spotlight on the conservation work being done to support, preserve and save at-risk and endangered species

Known for its captive breeding programs featuring charismatic mammals like snow leopards, Vancouver Island marmots and black-footed ferrets, the Toronto Zoo also breeds endangered fish species. (Photo courtesy Toronto Zoo)

Zoos have changed a lot since the Toronto Zoo opened its doors 50 years ago, says its chief executive Dolf DeJong. But what’s changed even more is what animals face in the wild. Now, about a million species risk extinction, a trend that has accelerated in the Toronto Zoo’s lifetime.

“Zoos — good, accredited zoos with conservation science programs and the right talented folks involved with them — are becoming more relevant than we ever imagined,” says DeJong. “Not through great planning, but because of humanity’s general neglect of the natural world.”

Take assisted reproduction programs. Accredited zoos around the world collect genetic material, analyze it, freeze it and, sometimes, figure out how to do in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. The Toronto Zoo is an international leader, with a bio bank, or frozen zoo — a series of liquid nitrogen tanks containing the genetic material of more than 50 endangered species. At one time, these were edgy experiments. Today, they are a key strategy to help some species stay alive in the wild.

The Toronto Zoo participates in a breeding program, which involves the collection and incubation of Blanding's turtle eggs to give them a head start. (Photo courtesy Toronto Zoo)

One of the most famous international examples is the resurrection of the golden lion tamarin, a small bright orange or red monkey that lives in the lowland rainforests of Brazil’s Atlantic coast. By the 1990s, as humans cut down the forest and captured the monkeys for pets, zoos and labs, just 150 remained in the wild. Zoos around the world, led by Jersey Zoo in the British Isles, stepped up and coordinated a tightly managed breeding program. Conservation groups began restoring some of the rainforest. Zoo-bred tamarins have been returned to the wild, boosting the population to several thousand. But they remain under threat.

“Golden lion tamarins wouldn’t exist [in the wild] without human conservation, breeding and reintroduction programs,” says DeJong.

The Toronto Zoo didn’t participate in the tamarin recovery but has a spate of other programs to help creatures in trouble. Like the endangered Blanding’s turtle. A decade ago, just seven lived in Toronto’s Rouge National Urban Park. Zoo staff collect eggs in the wild from vulnerable nests, incubate them, rear the babies for two years and then return them to secret spots in the park. More than 650 have gone back to the watershed.

The Toronto Zoo's breeding program also involves the preservation of snow leopards. (Photo courtesy Toronto Zoo)

Despite the zoo’s focus on these reproductive techniques, DeJong would prefer not to have to use them. He’d rather think of them as an insurance policy than as a necessity. “Noah built the ark before the rain, right? When it comes to conservation, it’s raining. It’s changing. And we need more than one ark. We need a lot of them,” he says.

It’s a long way from the early zoos, which were short on animal welfare and long on human entertainment, explains Suzanne MacDonald, a professor in York University’s departments of psychology and biology. She does research at the Toronto Zoo and is a director of its wildlife conservancy. The London Zoo, Bronx Zoo and many others once displayed chimpanzee tea parties, featuring young chimps sitting around a tiny dining table, drinking out of teacups. The parties continued at the London Zoo until 1972, just two years before the Toronto Zoo opened.

MacDonald remembers visiting the Stanley Park Zoo in Vancouver in the ’90s and confronting the then-director with its myriad deficiencies. “I went to the director and I said: ‘Hey, your zoo is really terrible. Your primates are really suffering.’ And he’s like: ‘Oh, well come and help us!’ And that’s how I started volunteering, doing research in zoos.” (That zoo eventually closed.)

The impulse to take better care of animals and the knowledge to do it have taken off since then. “It’s like a wave that swept over all the zoos. Research, evidence-based decision-making, conservation, all these important things are paramount. And that was not the case 20 or 30 years ago, for sure,” MacDonald says.

Still, some people simply don’t believe zoos should exist, even accredited ones immersed in science and conservation. DeJong has no wish to change their minds. “I’m going to thank them for caring passionately about animals,” he says. “Because if more people had a mindset beyond their backyard, beyond what’s right in front of them about the plight animal populations face… we’d be in a better spot.”

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Celebrating 50 years of the Toronto Zoo