Kid Territory: How Do You Build a Zoo?
The San Diego Zoo started with just a few cages of animals left over from a fair.
We've come a long way since and try to provide each of our animals with a home
they are comfortable in.
Animals need to have a safe place to rest. This den provides
a cozy bedroom for a bat-eared fox.
Some critters like to spend time in the water. These pygmy
hippos like to cool off in their spacious pool at the Zoo.
Don't forget food! Each animal species has special dietary needs that must
be met. Here are some of the tasty items we feed our gorillas.
When Dr. Harry Wegeforth started the San Diego Zoo in 1916, he took on a huge project and responsibility. He started by taking over the care of the animals that were left after the Panama-California Exposition, but that was barely a beginning. He needed to convince the City of San Diego to set aside the land where the Zoo would be built, develop a collection of animals, and construct all the exhibits and buildings to house the animals and take care of the people. He also had to raise money—a lot of it.
What would it take?
Still, it's fun to imagine building a zoo. If you were to start a zoo from scratch today, it would be even harder. There’s not much open land to build on, construction is very expensive, and since so many animals are threatened or endangered, there are strict rules about what animals a zoo can have and how to get them. Most zoos loan or trade animals with each other and similar types of facilities—it’s rare to buy an animal, so you can’t really say it costs this much to buy a zebra or that much to buy a giraffe.
The cost of running a zoo is mostly constructing and maintaining the exhibits and buildings, taking care of the health of the animals, buying the food to feed everything, buying and maintaining equipment, vehicles, and machinery, and paying all the people who work there. For the San Diego Zoo, it costs almost $1 million a year to feed our 7,000 animals. Altogether, it costs about $150 million each year to operate the Zoo and the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park.
Mission statement
If you were to think about building a zoo, what would you need to consider? First, you need to figure out why you are building this zoo and what you want it to accomplish. That’s known as a mission statement. Ours is: “The San Diego Zoo is a conservation, education, and recreation organization dedicated to the reproduction, protection, and exhibition of animals, plants, and their habitats.”
Then you need to consider the climate and weather. Does it
snow, or is it very hot? What kinds of exhibits and buildings
will you need for that? What kind of soil are you building
on? Does it rain a lot, so there might be floods? What about
tornadoes, hurricanes, or earthquakes? What kinds of buildings
and protection do you need for those conditions?
You need to choose the animals you want in your zoo, and why you want them.
Do they fit your mission statement? Do they create a theme or story you want
to tell visitors? Are they from the same parts of the world? What messages
do you want to send, and what do you want your visitors to learn or discover?
Different animals have different needs
Once you’ve ironed out the bigger issues, you need to consider the particular animals and their exhibits. Where is that species from originally? What is its habitat like? What kind of food does it eat, and how will you feed it? Does it need a pond, pool, or watering hole? How deep should that be, with how much water? What kinds of shelter does the species need—lots of shade, lots of sun, or some of both?
You also need to research each species’ behavior and physical abilities. How far or how high can it jump? Can it leap long distances? Is it afraid of rocky or uneven ground, or does it like to climb and be up high? How strong is it? Can it knock over fences or smash walls? Does it dig a lot, and how deep? Does it need room to run around, or does it need a secure place to hide?
All of those elements will tell you how high the walls have to be, how wide or long the exhibit needs to be, how secure and tough it needs to be, and what to put in it, like trees, bushes, rocks, logs, sand, and grass. What kind of exhibit can you build that will make the animal most comfortable, show off its characteristics, and keep it safe? To create an exhibit—or a whole zoo of them—you have to do a lot of research to find out all these details about each animal species. That’s a large part of the jobs of curators, keepers, exhibit designers, and construction staff.
How much can an exhibit cost? It depends on what you put in it and what materials you use, but a small exhibit for one animal might cost several thousand dollars, and a large exhibit for many different species can cost in the millions. As an example, the Zoo's newest exhibit, The Harry and Grace Steele Elephant Odyssey, cost $45 million. Remember that you’ll have to pay big water and electricity bills, too.
So on your next visit to the Zoo or Wild Animal Park, take a closer look at the exhibits and areas for the animals. How were they designed and constructed in order to meet the animals’ needs, keep them safe, and show them to you? If you had to build an exhibit, how would you do it?
Because of the delicate nature of wild animals and their importance in the wild, the San Diego Zoo counsels against private individuals maintaining exotic wild animals as pets.
More
San Diego Zoo: Elephant Odyssey
Wild Animal Park
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