30/01/2020
After spending a couple of hours wandering the zoo, we were lucky to receive a talk given by Andy Moss and Kat Finch that work at Chester zoo.
Andy Moss is the lead conservation scientist and Kat Finch is a behaviour and welfare scientific assistant.
They both gave a brief chat about the work they do at Chester. Andy works a lot with trying to educate people about zoos and how we can make them as beneficial to protecting the earths biodiversity as possible.
Kat focuses on how animal behaviour can be used to influence management decisions.
After their talk in the learning centre, we were put into groups and given a scenario. Within our groups we had to decide whether our scenario would get approved or not. E.g. my groups scenario was about altering the diet of zebra finches and taking blood samples from them. Essentially to see if size effected the life histories of animals.
We came to the decision that it would get approved, however it didn’t! As they didn’t think it was deemed to be beneficial enough to warrant it.
We listened to all the other groups scenarios and whether or not they thought it would get approved or not and why.
I concluded that ethics and welfare can often be an emotional and difficult topic to work with. Lots of people will have differing view and opinions and not everyone will agree on a situation.
We got informed of the giraffe Marius that was euthanised because no zoo could take him, he was then cut up in front of customers of the zoo. This sparked a lot of outrage but euthanasia is sometimes necessary in this environment.
This was such a fun session that really got my brain working.
I think ethics and welfare could be a very interesting route to go down. It’s very holistic.
Life of El 