Dark side of the zoo (Columbus edition)

Few people realize how badly a zoo must mess up to lose accreditation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Every zoo has issues. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs touted its rare clean accreditation achieved in late 2021, which only four zoos have achieved in 50 years. Upon inspection, there’s always something the AZA will want to see fixed or improved. Cheyenne Mountain shut down an old primate building last year, deeming the building too dated to continue housing animals. That would have dinged the zoo’s rating had it remained. 

To lose accreditation, zoo has to make monumental mistakes.With AZA denying the Columbus zoo’s appeal after its accreditation was revoked in October (NBC4, Dec. 13, 2021) , the monumental mistakes still seem insurmountable. One of the Ohio’s most popular tourist attractions finds its reputation critically damaged. 

Most people recognize the unnatural nature of zoos. They have grown to become engines for conservation in many places, helping boost endangered species, educating the public, housing orphaned and injured animals, to deliver enrichment to those animals and where possible, and helping creatures live with as light a human touch as possible. It is still captivity, but the days of steel bars and concrete enclosures have mostly passed. 

Regardless of opinions about zoos, it isn’t hard to separate a well-operated one from a bad one. There are plenty of wild animal parks touting access to rare animals. I have been to some small zoos that left a bad taste; the one that left the worst, which I won’t name, is not AZA-approved, nor should it be. If the animals pace in irritation or seem too large for the enclosures, the zoo probably hasn’t kept up with the times. 

The Columbus zoo always felt expansive, a place where you could lose yourself for a day and never hit everything. I remember its humid manatee exhibit, its elephants and its Pallas cats crammed into their exhibit’s rocks on a blustery winter day. But size and scope cannot protect a zoo from bad entanglements.

 As we saw with the Tiger King series, an entire sub-culture of exotic animals operates in the U.S., one that zoos generally don’t go near except in cases where those animals require rescue. 

There are legitimate animal rescues – The Wild Animal Refuge in Keenesburg, Colo., among others – but bad ones garner the press. The Columbus zoo’s ties to the bad ones did the damage. Sadly the revocation stems from the man who brought the Columbus zoo to the world. 

Former director Jack Hanna has retired from public life due to dementia (NBC News, April 7, 2021). But he figures squarely in that revocation from his ties to non-AZA animals and the exotic animal trade. 

The issues were highlighted in the 2021 documentary Conservation Game, in which big cats used on television often came from less-reputable sources (10TV News, Aug. 17, 2021). Having brought animals to the Late Show with David Letterman for decades, Hanna was easily the best-known person from Columbus not associated with college football. Tying him to an exploitive animal subculture is a stain the Columbus Zoo cannot simply scrub away. 

The accreditation denial also came due to financial issues with the zoo. These are not minor issues, with some major malfeasance involve and multiple resignations. But let’s face it, ties to the unregulated and smarmy exotic animal trade get the headlines for obvious reasons. For all Hanna's celebrity, we now see the dark side of all those years of free publicity on late-night television. 

The Columbus zoo won’t shut down. But loss of accreditation delivers a major blow to the zoo’s credibility and will limit animal transfers while it remains unaccredited. The zoo can’t apply for accreditation again until September 2022, and this will undoubtedly hang over operations. It will likely regain accreditation at some point. Lines to enter will remain long, even if its reputation might take longer to recover.

The list of AZA-approved facilities runs of all sizes. This year I visited three small-town zoos, all AZA-accredited – the Lee Richardson Zoo (Garden City, Kansas), Pueblo Zoo and the Riverside Discovery Center (Scottsbluff, Nebraska) – seriously, Kansas and Nebraska have an inordinate number of zoos for their small populations. 

All have AZA accreditation, although they operate on much smaller scales than big-city zoos. Few outside the regions might have heard of these zoos. 

At the moment, they can all tout better standing than the much-larger zoo in Columbus.