London Zoo's worldwide collection of wild creatures is nothing if not comprehensive. In 1987 a visitor to Regent's Park could have expected to see a total of 8,869 exhibits representing 847 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians and invertebrates. All are well cared for. Many have adapted so well to life behind bars that they breed quite happily in captivity. So much so that London Zoo's male lion has been given a vasectomy.
In the old-style, traditional zoo the accent was on security, hygiene and easy management, leading to iron-barred cages and concrete enclosures with tiled walls which any keeper could scrub clean with a hose and a yard broom. It was a regime which enabled animals to be kept in good physical health while their psychological needs were ignored.
Today, behavioural enrichment are the buzz-words in modern zoo-keeping, and huge strides have been made at Regent's Park and other caring zoos to provide animals with enclosures which enable them to behave as if they were in the wild. The assumption being that wild animals, having spent millions of years evolving to live in specific environments, are unlikely to adapt to cramped, bleak cells which offer no opportunity to forage for food.
At London Zoo, Dr David Shepherdson, a research fellow funded by the Universities Fund for Animal Welfare (UFAW), has been looking at the way animals behave in captivity and trying to stimulate more natural behaviour. "Space is important for any animal," he says; "but it is more important to look at what is happening inside that space. If you have animals that like to climb, such as chimpanzees, then you must design an enclosure which allows them to do so. If an animal behaves in captivity in much the same way as it would in the wild, there isn't much wrong with its surroundings."
Under Shepherdson's guidance, all kinds of intriguing ideas have been introduced. The meerkats (small mammals from the Kalahari), are given meal-worms which wriggle out of a dispenser in the roof of the cage and drop into the sand below, inviting the animals to dig and snuffle for them as they would in the wild. Installing the dispenser has increased the meerkats' foraging behaviour by about three times so that one third of their day is now spent searching for food.
Another of Shepherdson's projects involves the use of natural sounds. A pair of gibbons are now able to hear the calls of other gibbons (through a hidden loud-speaker with a time-switch). When they hear the recorded voices, they respond enthusiastically with calls of their own, as they would in the wild.
So far, all very reassuring. But some species seem unable to adapt. They are simply too big, or their social lives are too complex, or their instinctive need to hunt and forage over huge distances is too strong to be satisfied by a man-made enclosure. In captivity, no matter how good their physical condition, they seem unable to survive for long without showing signs of psychological stress. They become bored and dejected. In short, they suffer. Such a victim is the polar bear.
Polar bears have always been popular with the zoo-going public. When Brumas, the baby polar bear, was born in 1947, attendances at London Zoo nudged three million. That is why even today there are still 19 polar bears in Britain, although London Zoo has not kept them since the Mappin Terraces were closed four years ago. The two animals it had then, Pipaluk and Mosha, were moved to Dudley Zoo, near Birmingham. This year they were flown to Poland as a gift for the Katewice Zoo, and it is now unlikely that London will ever exhibit polar bears again. Plans to redesign their enclosure as an Arctic animals exhibit have been shelved and director David Jones has vowed not to keep polar bears unless รบ5 million could be found to create a suitable environment.
In 1986 Zoo Check, the animal welfare group, published a report on captive polar bears in Britain and Ireland. The report claimed that 12 of the 20 animals exhibited at that time were suffering from stereotype behaviour or showing abnormal behaviour patterns indicating that they were unhappy in captivity.
Stereotype behaviour manifests itself as a set ritual of identical movements, regularly repeated, with no obvious function; classic symptoms are pacing to and fro, or standing on the spot rocking or head-weaving. Such abnormal behaviour has not been observed among wild polar bears but seems to be an inevitable response wherever they are kept in captivity.
The worst case is that of Misha at Bristol Zoo. Misha was bought from Chipperfield's Circus, where he had been kept in a travelling wagon for up to eight years. As a result of this confinement, says Zoo Check, Misha arrived at Bristol with a "very distressing stereotypic behaviour".
"Believe it or not we bought him without even seeing him," says Geoffrey Greed, the zoo's director. "Polar bears are not easy to obtain. You just can't go out and buy one off the peg, and I needed a male for breeding purposes."
Misha's companion, Nina, is now nearly 31 - an octogenarian in polar bear terms. She, too, is given to bouts of mindless pacing; but both animals are kept on because it seems kinder than destroying them. They are two sad, elderly bears, being allowed to end their days with as much dignity as the zoo can provide. But when they die, Bristol, which has exhibited polar bears for more than 150 years, will not replace them. "We are a city-centre zoo with a 12-acre site," says Geoffrey Greed, "and we no longer believe we can do justice to such a demanding species."
"Most animals lead active lives, but zoo animals exist merely as passive exhibits," says Dr Roger Mugford. "No wonder they sometimes show abnormal behaviour."
Dr Mugford is an animal-shrink. In his consulting rooms near Chertsey, Surrey, he even has that classic accessory of his profession, the psychiatrist's couch; but his practice, called The Company of Animals, specialises in counselling the owners of problem pets. "We try and find out why companion animals behave as they do. We look at their negative sides and see how we can modify them."
In January this year he was approached by Zoo Check, who wanted to know if his work could be applied to zoo animals, notably polar bears. "I've watched Nina and Misha pacing," he says. "I've seen the same thing at Chester and Dudley. It seems to stem from frustration and increases as feeding time approaches." But he also believes such behaviour stems from a lack of physical stimulation. Pacing, he says is a pathetic substitute for play. "We believe in the importance of play for humans and dogs; so why not for bears?"
The result is that Bristol's bears now have toys to play with. "If they don't smash them they are certainly successful in reducing stereotypic behaviour - at least in the short term," Mugford says. "Although, like children, if you leave the toys there long enough the bears will get bored and walk away."
A wild polar bear is never bored. It is too busy staying alive. In its natural home, an Arctic world bigger than any country, its behaviour has evolved as a direct response to its survival in one of the harshest places on earth. It is a tireless wanderer, often travelling hundreds of miles in search of food, as if possessed of the explorer's insatiable curiosity to know what lies over the next horizon. At home in the Arctic a bear may sit for hours beside a hole in the ice, every sense alert as it waits for a seal to surface. In a zoo its food is provided. The hunter is deprived of its need to hunt. The result, all too often, is a bored, psychotic animal reduced to pacing or head-weaving. In such situations, says Mugford, a zoo is little better than a prison. "It's a penal system for animals. They are incarcerated for life."
Not everyone agrees. Dr Brian Bertram, former curator of mammals at London Zoo and now director-general of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, believes in the concept of a zoo as gene bank, as a hedge against extinction.
"We've got to look ahead," he says. "How animals were kept in the past is no longer relevant to how they might be kept in the future. At present the polar bear is doing well in the wild; but we've got to be one jump ahead of conservation. The world needs to ensure that we can keep and breed such species in captivity, ready to meet any threats which may face them in the future. I accept that solitary carnivores such as polar bears are in general much harder to cater for. But I don't subscribe to the view that they cannot be kept adequately - although of course it would be horribly expensive."
Increasingly, zoos are attempting to justify their existence on the grounds of conservation, education and research. It is no longer enough to be a place of fun for a family day out, although no zoo will survive for long without the paying public.
"The best reason to conserve animals in zoos is simply that it gives us pleasure," says Jeremy Cherfas, the author of "Zoo 2000". "But that alone is not enough. They [the directors] must first discharge their responsibilities to the animals by providing the best possible environment for their charges.
