Zoos

Lord Redesdale Excerpts

Monday 8th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Redesdale]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for initiating this debate. I can keep an eye on a clock just behind the noble Baroness. I spotted the time so I will not be short-changed. I also welcome the Minister to his position. He has taken on an excellent role. Considering that most zoos deal with endangered species, it is perhaps fitting that we are talking here about Defra, which has taken such savage cuts—which is reasonable given the number of people working for it—as of course have most other departments. However, there are probably too many cuts in the area that we are looking at.

I am a major supporter of zoos. I think that those who are against zoos have made very valid arguments. However, zoos have changed massively over the past few years from the zoos that I remember as a child. I am a particular supporter because I used to live almost next to London zoo and I could tell the calls of the gibbons and hear the lions. It was fantastic. My mother remarked that she knew that she had been to London zoo too often when my sisters knew the difference between an Arabian oryx and a gazelle more than they knew the difference between sheep and cows, but that is one of the joys of living next to London zoo. In fact I had my wedding reception at London zoo. We cut the wedding cake in the ballroom and were then directed to the aquarium for the reception. I learnt something amazing: do not walk through the monkey houses at night, since monkeys and apes will apparently throw soft and squidgy substances at you if you walk too close to their cages.

I am not alone in appreciating zoos; roughly 24 million visitors visited zoos last year, which is about one-third of the population. We should not forget that about 1.3 million educational visits took place in that time, and those are often children’s first introduction to zoos. Now, unlike when we went to zoos as children, it is clearly shown how endangered those species are, and children, including my children, come away understanding how fragile the environment is and how much damage we as a species have done to it.

Zoos are incredibly important to the economy: 11,000 permanent jobs are related to zoos, and BIAZA members contribute around £658 million of activity to the economy. One of the problems with zoos, however, is that we often associate them only with large species such as elephants, tigers and lions. In London zoo the elephants were moved out because of concerns about space. In fact, I know many of the elephant keepers. If you want to hear about zoos, go to the Albert pub just around the corner, where most of the keepers go for a drink after work; some of the stories about their dedication, but also about the problems of elephants can cause, are quite fun after a couple of pints.

However, we are talking not only about elephants and tigers but about much smaller species, such as the massive success of ZSL in British field cricket conservation. If you look this up on the website, the story is fantastic; I had not seen a field cricket before, but London zoo has bred 14,000 of them since 1991 and probably saved the species in this country. It is a biodiversity strategy action plan species in Britain that might well have disappeared. We are talking not just about British species, however; we are talking about species such as the Dominican mountain chicken. It is very important to preserve this frog—I was surprised when it turned out to be a frog, but it is a fabulous thing. There is a video on the website showing the mountain chicken feeding its unfertilised eggs to its tadpoles that have just hatched, a first in British zoos.

One of the questions that arise for the Minister is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, pointed out, licensing is a vital aspect of the operation of zoos, and one of the problems due to the funding cuts is that there has been a merger between those bodies—I was going to say what they were but I cannot actually remember what their acronyms stand for—that look after zoos. Defra, which used to supply the training for local authority inspectors, no longer does so because of the cuts; in fact it does not send out timings for local authority visits, which it used to. I hope that the Minister will reconsider this.

I understand my noble friend’s problems in dealing with budgets in particular areas, but it is not in zoos’ interests to have poor zoos operating, and there are examples of that, although the majority of zoos in this country run to the highest standard. I suggest that due to these cuts, which for many reasons will probably not be rolled back by any party after the next election, we should probably look outside the box. There are extremely good zoos in this country and most of the people who work in them are passionate—if you go down to the Albert and talk to the people who work in the zoo, you will see how passionate they are—about the standards that should apply.

I know that the Minister cannot answer tonight, but could he talk with his officials about self-regulation being a way forward? One problem is that if local authority licensing inspectors are not trained, that stores up problems because they do not know what they are meant to be looking for. Self-regulation is not the best solution, but it might be a very good cost-effective solution for the future.