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Why Do European Zoos Kill Healthy Animals?

On Thursday, the Odense Zoo in Denmark is scheduled to dissect a lion for the educational benefit of children on school holidays.

The 9-month-old female lion was considered "surplus." Officials at Odense said they had too many female lions. And they also were concerned about inbreeding, according to reports. The lion was offered to other zoos, but when no takers were found she was killed and stored in a freezer earlier this year.

The zoo has been dissecting animals in front of guests for 20 years. The zoo's killing and dissection of this lion has outraged some, especially in the U.S. It's cumulative anger, because last year the Copenhagen Zoo carried out a similar double play — killing a healthy animal, Marius the giraffe, with a bolt gun then dissecting the body in front of schoolchildren and feeding the remains to its lions. At that time, Copenhagen Zoo Scientific Director Bengt Holst came under widespread fire outside Denmark;petitions called for his resignation.

But it's not just Denmark. The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA)issued a statement on Tuesday supporting the Odense Zoo's plan. The statement notes that "culling of animals is one of a range of scientifically valid solutions to the long term genetic and demographic sustainability of animal populations in human care." It goes on to say that the dissection "for educational purposes is a valid choice of the zoo."

According to the BBC, between 3,000 and 5,000 healthy zoo animals are killed in Europe every year.

Here in the U.S., the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) says flatly that incidents of killing healthy surplus animals "do not happen at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums." The whole thrust of captive management in this country centers around birth control.

Certainly, I can't picture elementary school children gathered at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park or the San Diego Zoo to observe as an animal, once put on display to delight them, is taken apart joint-by-joint for their anatomical enlightenment.

A yawning cultural gap clearly exists in the European and American visions for the role of zoos in captive management of animals.

Earlier this week, I contacted the Copenhagen Zoo to ask Bengt Holst for his views on the Odense Zoo controversy. Told that Holst is traveling for business, I was directed to a page from the zoo's web site that he wrote. Key passages, which I excerpt here, explain that European zoos focus on the health of populations rather than of individual animals:

"When an animal's genes are well represented in the breeding programme and there is no place for the animal in another zoo, the European Breeding Programme has agreed that the animal is to be euthanized.

We see this as a positive sign and as insurance that we in the future will have a healthy animal population in European zoos. The most important factor must be that the animals are healthy physically and behaviourally and that they have a good life whilst they are living whether this life is long or short. This is something Copenhagen Zoo believes strongly in."

Why not administer birth control in order to achieve this same end, healthy animal populations? Holst continues:

"In Copenhagen Zoo we let the animals breed naturally. With naturally we mean that they will get young within the same intervals as they would in the wild. That means that the animals get to carry out their natural behaviours."

I'm struck by the terrible irony represented here: Zoos like this enclose animals in captivity, allow them to practice "natural behavior" of mating and reproduction, then slaughter them when they are no longer viewed as helpful to the project of coaxing visitors through the gates.

In a televised interview from last year, Holst talks about the killing and dissection of Marius the giraffe, defending the "natural" act of feeding Marius's body to lions. "Why protect schoolchildren from real life?" he asks.

But listen to the very first answer Holst offers to the interviewer. It is revealing: Children weren't invited to attend the slaughter of Marius because "when looked upon, the killing can be pretty cruel."

Zoos are entrusted to care for animals. There is no place in zoos — there should be no place, despite differences in cultural attitudes — for cruelty. npr

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The World's Most Trafficked Mammal Is One You May Never Have Heard Of

Lisa Hywood remembers the first time she ever set eyes on a pangolin. It was in 1994, and she had just founded the Tikki Hywood Trust, a wildlife conservation sanctuary in Zimbabwe. One morning, someone dropped off a strange-looking, injured creature that had been confiscated from an illegal trader.

"This animal arrived in a sack and smelling something horrendous," she recalls. "And I looked at this animal and I thought it's like no other mammal that I've ever encountered."

The pangolin is about the size of a raccoon and looks like an artichoke with legs. Its head and body are covered with an armor of thorny scales, giving it the appearance of a reptile. When a pangolin is scared, it curls up into a tight ball.

"I actually, at that moment, felt completely helpless because I had no idea how to take care of that animal," Hywood says. "At that moment, I actually said to myself, 'Right, you need to figure this out.' "

Since then, many pangolins have been brought to Hywood's sanctuary doorstep. The shy, nocturnal creature is the most trafficked mammal in the world, says Jeff Flocken, a regional director with the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Almost a million pangolins were trafficked in the past 10 years.

"They are finding literally crates filled with pangolin scales, you know — entire boats with bags and bags of live or frozen and dead pangolins that are being taken from the wild," Flocken says.

Rising Demand

All eight species of this animal, which is found over large parts of Africa and Asia, are facing extinction, according to Jonathan Baillie, a pangolin specialist at theInternational Union for Conservation of Nature in London.

"The demand for the pangolins is actually in China and Vietnam," he says. "And the Asian pangolin, particularly the Chinese pangolin, has basically been wiped out."

The animal has long been prized for its scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine. But Baillie says nowadays, pangolin meat is considered a luxury item by a growing middle class in Vietnam and China.

"We're seeing that the body is actually being eaten as some sort of celebration when a business deal is done," he says. "The price can go up to many hundreds of dollars per kilo."

As the number of Asian species declines, Baillie says, there is an increasing demand for African pangolins. International trade of the African species is allowed with the right paperwork. But they're being poached and sent to Asian markets at an alarming rate.

Hywood, the Zimbabwe sanctuary director, says the trade has caught many African governments off-guard.

"In Africa, you are dealing with a species that most of the authorities, up until, I can honestly say, this year, are not aware of the plight of the pangolin," she says. "They do not understand why the pangolin has such a demand in Asia."

Last month, Indonesian customs officials seized more than a ton of frozen pangolins bound for Singapore. The animal is critically endangered, due to high levels of hunting and poaching for its meat and scales.

Improving Awareness

Pangolin products are showing up in the U.S. as well. Part of the problem is the pangolin doesn't have a high profile like the elephant or rhino, so it's easier to slip the live animal or its byproducts past customs officials, says Luke Bond, a criminal intelligence officer with Interpol's environmental crime program.

"There's opportunities to conceal these animals," he says. "They're small. Border control agencies are often not trained enough to recognize what they actually might be."

Bond says the illegal trafficking in pangolins is linked to other global crimes.

"I've seen it firsthand in every operation I've been in for the last 10 years or so," he says. "I've seen drugs and weapons and financial crime activities associated with the wildlife trade."

But the sheer speed with which the pangolin is being trafficked is now pushing governments and conservationists into high gear to get the message out that it has to be saved. That's not easy when many people haven't heard of the pangolin, says Rosemarie Gnam of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The agency is stepping up coverage of pangolins on its website, to include interactive maps and pages for children to discover the mammal.

"We're really trying to put the word out there about pangolins, building on the public's awareness of the rhino and elephant," Gnam says.

A pangolin will soon be making a debut on an Angry Birds game, and one recently appeared in a Mark Trail comic strip.

There's also an effort to list all eight species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and another to make it illegal to trade the pangolin under CITES, the multilateral treaty to protect endangered animals.

For Hywood, the effort to save the pangolin is paramount. In the two decades since that first scared and injured pangolin was dropped off in a sack, she has created a sanctuary for rehabilitating pangolins. It's one of only a handful in the world.

"It's not an animal that you can just collect and put in a cage and feed an artificial diet," she says. "That's not going to work. Pangolins don't adapt very well to captivity at all."

At the moment, Hywood is caring for nine pangolins. Each one forages in the wild — with its own security detail to protect it from poachers. npr

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Juvenile camels 'key source' of Mers

An international team looked for evidence of current or past infection in more than 800 dromedary camels.

They found that more than 90% of animals became infected by the age of two and virus shedding was more common in calves than in adults.

The scientists argue that changes in animal husbandry may reduce the occurrence of human Mers infections.

The study is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The first reports of human Mers coronavirus infection emerged in June 2012, although cases are likely to have occurred before then.

More than 1,100 cases have been recorded and more than 400 people have died. Infections have been seen in 25 countries across Europe, Asia and Africa, but Saudi Arabia has experienced the biggest burden.

Because of its devastating effects in humans scientists have been searching for the source of the virus, to try to identify ways in which human infections can be prevented.

Speaking to BBC's Science in Action, Dr Müller who was involved in the earlier ground-breaking research looking for the origins or Mers said, "We could identify, in South Africa, bats that were carrying ancestral viruses: viruses that are [evolutionary] older than the Mers virus that we are seeing today".

Out of Africa

But, whilst related, these bat viruses were distinct from the Mers virus cropping up in humans. There had to be another source.

Following a brainstorming meeting between the Bonn scientists and colleagues based at the Erasmus Medical College in the Netherlands, the researchers focussed their efforts on animals that had close contact with humans living in the Middle East: horses, cattle, sheep, goats and dromedary camels.

The finding from their initial work was clear. Dromedary camels living in the Middle East had antibodies that recognised Mers virus protein - a strong sign of past infection. None of the other animals tested contained these.

To gain further insight into the origins of this emerging human infection and the link to camels, the team then looked at samples obtained from dromedary camels living in other countries. bbc

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DNA evidence suggests that the split between dogs and their wild ancestors occurred closer to 30,000 years ago

It looks like dogs might well have been man's (and woman's) best friend for a lot longer than once thought.

The long-held conventional wisdom is that canis lupus familiaris split from wolves 11,000 to 16,000 years ago and that the divergence was helped along by Stone Age humans who wanted a fellow hunter, a sentry and a companion.

Now, DNA evidence suggests that the split between dogs and their wild ancestors occurred closer to 30,000 years ago.

Publishing in Thursday's edition of Current Biology, the authors of a new study looked at the genome of a 35,000-year-old wolf from the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. "We find that this individual belonged to a population that diverged from the common ancestor of present-day wolves and dogs very close in time to the appearance of the domestic dog lineage," they wrote in the abstract.

The team, led by Pontus Skoglun, a research fellow at Harvard, concluded that the mutation rate for canines is "substantially slower than assumed by most previous studies, suggesting that the ancestors of dogs were separated from present-day wolves before the Last Glacial Maximum."

In other words, there may have been a faithful Fido walking with a human before the end of the last Ice Age (and before agriculture).

As The New York Times writes: "Based on the differences between the genome of the new species, called the Taimyr wolf, and the genomes of modern wolves and dogs, the researchers built a family tree that shows wolves and dogs splitting much earlier than the 11,000 to 16,000 years ago that a study in 2014 concluded."

However, a study reported in 2013 places the date of the canine split closer to the study published on Thursday. As NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reported then, a team headed by Robert Wayne, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and publishing in Science, used DNA analysis to peg the date at somewhere between 18,800 to 32,100 years ago.

In the new study, an author of the report was quoted by the Times as saying the simplest explanation for the new data is that dogs were domesticated as much as 30,000 years ago, but he cautions that the study does not prove it. "We can't just look at the DNA and say whether a canid was living with modern humans," he was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

"One scenario is that wolves started following humans around and domesticated themselves," Dalen told BBC. "Another is that early humans simply caught wolf cubs and kept them as pets and this gradually led to these wild wolves being domesticated. If this model is correct then dogs were domesticated by hunter gatherers that led a fairly nomadic lifestyle." npr

Black Rhino Is Killed By U.S. Hunter Who Won Controversial Auction

An endangered black rhino is seen in this file photo from the Etosha National Park in northern Namibia last year. An American hunter has killed one of the animals, under a special permit he bought for $350,000.

A Texas hunter who paid $350,000 for the right to hunt a rare black rhino in Namibia has killed the animal. The hunt has drawn controversy and spurred debate over the best way to manage endangered wildlife.

Corey Knowlton won an auction last January for a hunting permit that would allow him to kill a black rhino weighing around 3,000 pounds.

"There are only an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 black rhinos living in the wild," Mark wrote for the Two-Way last year. "Namibian authorities issue five kill permits per year."

The permit came from Namibia's Ministry of Environment and Tourism; each year, it targets several older rhinos that are no longer able to breed – but still pose a deadly threat to younger males. The proceeds are meant to go toward anti-poaching and conservation efforts.

Namibia is facing a surge in poaching — last week, the country's New Era newspaper said that 60 rhinos have been poached so far in 2015, leading Namibia's environmental ministry to double its reward for information about the killings.

After winning the auction, Knowlton then had to get special permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to bring the carcass back to America. The agency, which gave its approval in March, writes:

"The removal of limited numbers of males has been shown to stimulate population growth in some areas. Removing specific individuals from a population can result in reduced male fighting, shorter calving intervals, and reduced juvenile mortality."

Black rhinos have "the highest combat mortality rates of any mammal," Namibia's Oshili 24 reports. "Approximately 50 percent of males and 30 percent of females die from combat-related injuries."

But, the news site adds, "Many in Namibia opposed the auction." Protests against the hunt came from international groups; demonstrators also picketed the auction held by the Dallas Safari Club.

As Knowlton told CNN, the rhino hunt could have ended in three possible scenarios – including one in which the wrong rhino could be killed:

"If it charges at us and we are already sure it's the right one, we are going to kill it," Knowlton said. "If we aren't sure if it's the right one, we are going to try and get out of the way. If we don't feel like we can get out of the way, we got to kill it."

Knowlton invited CNN to join him on the hunt; the network's Ed Lavandera spent several days with the hunter and a team of trackers, documenting their walk through the bush. A sample:

"The rhino is close. Knowlton's hands firmly grip his high-powered 500 Nitro Express rifle. Moments later, I see a massive flash of gray leap up over the bushes some 50 feet in front of us. It disappears and you can't tell which direction the rhino is running.

"It's jarring to see this close how quickly these massive creatures can move."

The hunting party picked up the rhino's trail near a watering hole early in the morning. When they finally got close to it, the rhino charged – and was shot several times.

"Any time you take an animal's life it's an emotional thing," Knowlton tells CNN.

"I felt like from day one it was something benefiting the black rhino," Knowlton tells Lavandera shortly after the hunt. "Being on this hunt, with the amount of criticism it brought and the amount of praise it brought from both sides, I don't think it could have brought more awareness to the black rhino."

If you're wondering how the 36-year-old Knowlton could afford the steep hunting fee, we're seeing that he's a hunting consultant based in Dallas, as well as a personality on an Outdoor Channel hunting show, Jim Shockey's The Professionals. He's also a son of Lary Knowlton, the co-founder of BASA Resources, which was characterized last year as one of "the top 20 oil producers in the state of Texas." npr