Elizabeth says...
1) Why don't many zoos have chimpanzees?
Quite a few zoos in the US do have chimpanzees; approximately 300
chimpanzees live in accredited zoos zoos,
managed under a
species survival plan to control population growth and prevent inbreeding.
Chimpanzees breed and mature slowly, so captive populations
grow slowly. Zoos could increase the number of captive chimpanzees
by taking more from the wild, but this would raise at least
two major ethical concerns. First, chimpanzees are threatened
in the wild, so taking chimpanzees from the wild would further
threaten the survival of wild populations. Second, traditional
methods of capturing wild chimpanzees involve much excess killing.
Adult chimpanzees are too large and powerful to capture and
transport, so animal dealers generally obtain chimpanzees as
infants by killing their mothers. Captured infants frequently
die before they reach any zoo, circus, pet store, or other destination,
so for every wild-caught chimpanzee that survives several additional
ones die.
Another reason that I can think of why some zoos don't keep chimpanzees is the difficulty of containing them and providing them with an environment that is rich enough to keep them happy and healthy. Most scientists estimate that chimpanzees have the intelligence of an average human 4 or 5 year old, yet they are 4 times as strong as a full grown man and very curious and inventive. As such, chimpanzees need regular and varied environmental enrichment. Chimpanzees have very complicated social relationships, so things like dominance issues need to be taken into account and managed. The Chimpanzee Species Survival Plan works very hard with the accredited zoos that do have chimpanzees to make sure all of these issues are appropriately managed.
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