Zoo Animals

There are certain things you can always expect to see in Oklahoma’s landscape. Oil wells, cotton fields, red dirt. Cowboys in big trucks, and chicken fried steaks. But in the state’s capital, you’ll find some exotic creatures that are a bit out of place.

LAWSON: We’ve got most of what you might consider the marquee animals: elephants, tigers, lions, grizzly bears, you know, reptile house.

Dwight Lawson is executive director and C.E.O. of the Oklahoma City Zoo. It’s home to 1,000 animals of more than 300 different species. In the course of a day, you can see Indian rhinos, Komodo dragons, red pandas, Western lowland gorillas, Sumatran orangutans, Andean condors, and ring-tailed lemurs. You’ll even encounter a few endangered species.

LAWSON: We have a venomous beaded lizard from Guatemala that’s only in a handful of zoos across the country, as well as a couple of what are called ploughshare tortoises, and probably the most endangered tortoise on the planet, that only come from a small area of Madagascar. You know, lions spend about 20 hours a day sleeping, so you have to give other stuff for folks to see.

Oklahoma City Zoo is one of a few hundred accredited zoos and aquariums across the country. They attract visitors by stocking their exhibits with exciting creatures from the far reaches of the globe. But how exactly do they get them?

COLAHAN: It’s very hard to put a fair market value on an endangered species.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: zoo animals.

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Humans have kept wild animals in captivity for thousands of years. In the Middle Ages, aristocrats showed off their wealth and power by maintaining menageries — private collections of exotic creatures. The first modern zoological gardens were established in 18th century Europe with the aim of expanding our scientific understanding of the animal kingdom. By the early 1900s, zoos were a popular attraction in American cities, like New York and Philadelphia. And they competed with their wallets to get the best animals.

COLAHAN: In the early days of zoos almost all these animals were captured in the wild and brought back to zoo collections. 

That’s Hollie Colahan. She’s the deputy director of the Birmingham Zoo in Alabama.

COLAHAN: There was very much a focus on wanting to have things that were unique and rare to build up the appeal of your particular zoo. There was a lot more buying and selling of animals at that time.

Explorers were paid by zoos to capture wild animals throughout Africa and Asia — and some of them made a full-time living out of it. In the mid-19th century, a German by the name of Carl Hagenbeck set up a global trade that supplied animals to zoos all over Europe and America. He’d charge based on the size and difficulty of a capture; an elephant would fetch around $8,000; a hippopotamus, $5,000, and a giraffe, $1,500. In today’s money, that’s tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Handsome sums like this incentivized poachers and smugglers to participate in the trade, too. They’d often kill full-grown animals in the wild and steal their babies. Zoos relied on this wild animal trade for decades before the law caught up.

COLAHAN: The big shift in this country really happened in 1973 with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, which then put a lot of restrictions on the importation of endangered species. That really sort of pushed zoos to focus more on how to breed these animals and how to keep a supply of animals in our zoo without having to go out into the wild and capture them and bring them back.

These days, it’s rare for accredited zoos to buy or sell animals. Instead, they almost always source extra inventory from other zoos in the U.S. that already have the animals they’re looking for. And to find them, they turn to the AZA, or Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The AZA provides accreditation — it gives zoos a stamp of approval that signifies they meet certain standards for animal welfare and management. But the organization serves another purpose. In addition to her job at the Birmingham Zoo, Colahan is the chair of the AZA’s Animal Population Management Committee.

COLAHAN: Our big goal is to make sure that zoos and aquariums have the animals that they need for their collections.

The AZA maintains a census of all the wildlife at accredited zoos across the country. Each species has a coordinator who oversees a database of the animals in their category. And if someone like Dwight Lawson, over at the Oklahoma City Zoo, needs a specific animal for a new exhibit, he knows who to call.

LAWSON: Here’s an example. So we’re getting ready to build a penguin habitat that’ll be opening in a couple of years. We need you know, 12 to 20 penguins in two years’ time. So we go to the person that coordinates the penguin population among zoos and say, “Hey, here’s what we’re getting ready to do.” 

They will then go out and talk to other zoos that currently house those penguins and say, “Hey, Oklahoma City is going to need this. So we need to start producing some chicks,” and, kind of, line it up that way. So, you give them a little bit of lead time and they’ll put together a flock of penguins for you. Folks like to call it a dating app for various species. Now, in most forms of commerce, when you give something up, you receive something in return. But zoos have a more communal system. Sometimes, Lawson will request an animal from another zoo. And other times, he’ll give one away.

LAWSON: It’s really not tit for tat — you know, “You’ll give me penguins today and I’ll give you a lion tomorrow.” 

CROCKETT: So there’s no sort of calculation like, “An elephant is worth three zebras,” or something?

LAWSON: No, I wish there was, because we got plenty of elephants at the moment.

COLAHAN: We have to put the the greater good ahead of what our institutional needs might be. You might have an animal that, you know, everybody loves. But he’s related to the animals that you have, and in order for him to breed, he’s going to have to go someplace else.

The people who oversee each species are constantly taking stock of what’s out there. The lion coordinator, for instance, has access to data on every lion housed in an accredited zoo in America, including the animals’ genders, ages, and health. If a zoo needs a mate for their lion, they’ll bring in a population biologist to analyze all of the possible pairings on the list and pick the best one.

COLAHAN: We have some software that can help do those projections that say, ‘Hey, if I put these two lions together, there’s a 50/50 chance that they’re going to have cubs. And then, you know, they’re probably going to have two or three.”

When it comes to pairing animals for mating, Colahan and her colleagues at the AZA also have to keep a close eye on genetics.

COLAHAN: When we talk about value of animals, we’re actually talking typically about genetic value. We are breeding for maintaining genetic diversity. So we don’t look at, “Oh, he’s the handsomest lion, he should get, you know, priority,” or, “This is, you know, the friendliest lion, so let’s breed her because we want more friendly lions.” We don’t look at those personality traits. We don’t look at physical characteristics. We’re looking at trying to maintain as much of that genetic variation from the wild population as we possibly can.

Once a zoo identifies an animal it wants to acquire, the next step is to figure out transportation. And with something like an elephant, that’s no simple task.

COLAHAN: Typically you build a really big, really strong crate. And you train the elephant to voluntarily go into the crate. You want to start that months before the actual move and get them used to spending time in that crate. Usually you have to rent a crane to lift those crates onto the back of a truck. 

Lawson says the field of zoo animal transport is very niche.

LAWSON: There’s probably two or three people that we’d call for a rhino or an elephant shipment, you know, or a giraffe or something like that. They’re a fascinating bunch because, you know, they’ll show up with your giraffe and there’ll be three other things on the truck. You send some of your staff along with the animal shipments. So you may have, you know, your animal care team or your veterinarian, in a trail car following them.

While no money changes hands for the animals themselves, the receiving zoo still has to pay for transport.

LAWSON: As an example, we just received an Indian rhinoceros in the last two weeks. It was almost $14,000 to move a rhino from New York to Oklahoma.

Of course, there are certain animals that can’t be sourced from other zoos in the U.S. And the process for getting them is much more complicated.

LAWSON: For us, one of the most problematic animals in our new habitat was meerkats, which are pretty common among zoos in the U.S. but they haven’t been breeding well. So we actually had to go to Europe to get those, and the process to get some of those animals in internationally is really cumbersome and problematic.

CROCKETT: How so?

LAWSON: Because in the case of meerkats, they’re considered a potentially injurious wildlife if they were to actually get out and get established somewhere. So they’re on a federal government list that you need special permits for. It took several years to get that lined up.

And then, there are giant pandas.

LAWSON: Giant pandas, yeah, they’re out in a wing of the building on their own in terms of difficulty and, you know, political maneuvering that you need to do to make those arrangements.

CROCKETT: And what’s the deal with pandas? Why are they so hard to get?

LAWSON: Because China owns them all. And so you have to negotiate directly with China to be in a position to get them.

The lucky few American zoos that do have giant pandas — like the Smithsonian National Zoo, in Washington, D.C.— borrow them from the Chinese government. The loan is usually good for 10 years, and when it’s up, the bears go back to their native home in Southwest China, along with any cubs that were born in captivity. These panda loans aren’t just a diplomatic gesture: a pair of bears comes with a fee of $1 million dollars per year, which is earmarked for conservation efforts in China. But all things considered, those are relatively small costs for a zoo. The real overhead materializes once the animals are settled into their new home.

LAWSON: Getting the animal is one thing. Taking care of it is quite another.

That’s coming up.

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There are many different types of zoos in America. You can find animals in petting zoos, game reserves, safari parks, and even unaccredited roadside cages. But the zoos most Americans are familiar with are the theme park-like attractions that are located in major cities, or suburban areas. The business models of these zoos can vary.

LAWSON: There’s really a spectrum — everything from institutions that are run by a city or state that are completely funded, as part of a parks department or something like that, to for-profit private enterprises like Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

The Oklahoma City Zoo, where Dwight Lawson serves as C.E.O., is governed through a municipal trust. It’s funded by grants, donations, and a small cut of city sales tax revenue. And like most other zoos, it also makes money through ticket sales and concessions.

LAWSON: We just wrapped up our fiscal year and we actually had the highest attendance ever. We did just north of 1.1 million guests coming to the zoo. And for a metro area of about 1.3 million people, that’s a pretty phenomenal attendance.

All those ticket sales are necessary. Because as it turns out, building housing for hundreds of exotic animals is not cheap. Take for instance, a recent expansion at the Oklahoma City Zoo. A habitat for Galapagos tortoises ran $700,000 dollars. An enclosure for cheetahs and African wild dogs? $1.9 million. And a planned sea lion cove, which includes an underwater observation window, is going to set the zoo back around $30 million. Then, there’s the cost of ongoing care. Zoos employ dozens of keepers, dieticians, and veterinarians who specialize in certain groups of animals.

LAWSON: You get a blood sample from a lion, you’re not going in there, wrestling it to the ground. You’re training it to put its tail through the mesh so you can take a blood sample out of its tail while it’s wide awake. And they are no easier to train than your house cat — so, you know, try that next time you take it to the vet.

And all those animals need to be fed. Large zoos spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on fresh produce, meat, fish — and crickets. A full-grown elephant might eat around 300 pounds of hay every day.

LAWSON: A few years ago, the zoo community did a survey of folks, and I think the average cost per elephant was about $85,000 a year.

And the appetites of snakes, birds, and lizards can add up, too.

LAWSON: We spend $50,000 a year on frozen rodents to feed a variety of things. You need to think through what the upkeep is going to cost you. You know, not everybody is going to do a big herd of elephants whether that’s because of space or because of cost. And that plays out on smaller species as well. But obviously, the big ones are the ones that you think through the economics of a little bit more than say, you know, how many box turtles you’re going to put in a reptile house.

Despite all of these investments, zoos still face heavy criticism. Many people believe they shouldn’t exist at all — and serious questions have been raised about keeping large animals in captivity. Researchers have noticed that zoo animals often exhibit compulsive behaviors, like rocking back and forth, pulling out their hair, biting themselves, and eating their own feces. Some zoos feed antidepressants and antipsychotics to their animals to address these problems. A polar bear at the Central Park Zoo was prescribed Prozac after swimming in figure-eight loops for days on end. Zoos have addressed these problems, in part, by modifying their design.

LAWSON: I’d say that actually over the last couple of decades, there’s probably been less variance in zoos as everybody comes to the realization that you can’t manage everything in human care. There’s probably fewer species in zoos now than there were, you know, 20, 30 years ago, just by virtue of the fact that we’re focusing on fewer with quality, rather than just more. 

But more broadly, zoos claim that captivity provides scientific benefits. Again, here’s Hollie Colahan.

COLAHAN: We have a unique opportunity to provide, sometimes, information that scientists can’t get in the wild because we have such close, easy access to our animals. Our elephants are trained for voluntary blood collection — obviously that’s something that’s not easy to do on a wild elephant. So it allows us to provide samples, provide physiological data, behavioral data to researchers at universities or other NGOs.

Zoos also play a significant role in conservation efforts. They often breed threatened and endangered species at their facilities and reintroduce them to the wild. AZA-accredited zoos have helped save many species, including California condors, American red wolves, and black footed ferrets.

COLAHAN: Black footed ferrets are a great example. Zoos played a really critical role in bringing that species back from being extinct in the wild. There were a handful of places that bred them and released animals back. 

Accredited zoos and aquariums spend around $230 million dollars annually on conservation projects. That’s only a tiny sliver of the billions they spend on operations and new construction. But Colahan says the real impact of the work that zoos do can’t entirely be measured in dollars and cents.

COLAHAN: A lot of people aren’t going to get the opportunity to go to Africa to see animals in the wild. Zoos provide this safe, accessible place to make connections with wildlife that then, down the road maybe inspire somebody to get a little more engaged and in wanting to help save those animals in the wild. When people can have that up close, impactful experience with an animal, it changes them. I have seen that. I’ve experienced it. And there’s, there’s nothing quite like that. 

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For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Julie Kanfer and Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

COLAHAN: I used to catch stuff and bring it home with me and brought a turtle home one time and gave my whole family salmonella. So I don’t endorse that sort of activity.