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Struggling to Save Baghdad Zoo Animals |
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Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News |
| June 4, 2003 |
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What do you do with a gorgeous Arabian horse that has run into a lethal metal mesh net and died? In war-torn Baghdad, if you're trying to save lives at the city's zoo, you feed the carcass to the lions and hope no one gets mad. The zoo is home to about 50 animals—brown bears, lions, cheetahs, a lone wolf, a badger—that survived the siege of Baghdad. It's hard to imagine how. Once one of the largest zoos in the Middle East, housing some 600 animals, the grounds of the Baghdad Zoo became a major battlefield when U.S.-led coalition forces reached the city. "You can almost see why Saddam might have picked it as a place where he could dig in," said Stephan Bognar. "It's near all the large palaces, with lots of trees and cover." Bognar works for WildAid, a wildlife conservation organization based in San Francisco. He has just returned from six weeks in Baghdad, working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, to stabilize the situation at the zoo. The animals had been poorly fed prior to the start of the war. When hostilities broke out, zookeepers fled, and the animals were left to starve, living in cages without food, water, and in some cases, access to sunlight. The fierce fighting between the Iraqi Republican Guard and the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division left the newly remodeled animal enclosures riddled with mortar and gunfire holes, and the grounds littered with unexploded ordnance. When Baghdad fell, looters took over, and the zoo population dropped at one point to about six animals. The lion enclosure had been hit during a mortar attack, leaving a 6-meter (20-foot) hole in the wall. A couple of lions escaped; one attacked a horse and brought it down; unfortunately the soldiers who came upon it had to shoot it as it charged. A starving brown bear roaming the city killed three Iraqi civilians before she was recaptured. The zoo's two giraffes were eaten. A baboon was found wandering in the desert and rescued by the U.S. Army. Many animals were stolen for the exotic pet trade, and many were eaten. But finding the animals was just one of many problems. The animals still at the zoo were starving and filthy, the zookeepers gone, the zoo stripped of everything from cleaning supplies to toilet flushers. "When I walked in the animals were starving, there were feces on the wall, everywhere; the place was filthy; it was really disgusting," said Bognar. "And looters had just stripped the place." Surviving Together "It was important to let people know right away that we weren't there just feeding the animals and letting the people starve," said Bognar. "We see the zoo as a community, and that includes both the people and the animals." Although WildAid's focus is on conservation of animals in the wild, the organization sponsors rescue centers for animals that have been saved from poachers but are injured or too young to be immediately released back into the wild. The organization also has considerable expertise working in war-torn countries. "Wherever there are people, our policy is to work with the people as well as the animals," said Bognar. "In Cambodia where we have a rescue operation, we're training the local people to be sustainable farmers, teaching the women alternative economic endeavors. Even though this is a zoo, we still have the same system." Bognar's first priority upon reaching Baghdad was to set up a version of WildAid's Surviving Together program. His first move was to offer returning zookeepers a U.S. $10-a-month salary supplement. ""The biggest challenge was to provide immediate relief to these guys. In a place where teachers earn $3 a month, $10 makes a difference," said Bognar. "Within four days, 95 percent of the zookeepers had returned. We also started providing meals everyday because we weren't sure they were getting enough to eat at home." Getting the animal enclosures cleaned and repaired, caring for the animals, trying to round up missing animals, and working with the military to fend off looters were all important tasks, but paled in comparison to the necessity of finding food. "The biggest challenge was to secure a food supply," he said. "We'd sometimes have to travel 100 kilometers (60 miles) to secure donkeys; we needed about two donkeys a day. We could get bones in the market, and some days we found frozen meat; there was a lot of buffalo meat imported from India, but it was quite costly. It was easier and less expensive to get donkeys. Since the giraffes had been eaten, we kept the donkeys in the giraffe enclosure." Pride of Lions The future fate of the animals has been the focus of much discussion. "The question of how many animals stay on site, and how many should be moved, if any, is really difficult," said David Jones, director of the North Carolina Zoo and of the Baghdad Zoo relief fund being coordinated by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA). "The case of the ancient brown bear, blinded with cataracts, is not controversial at all; she could clearly benefit from advanced medical treatment." Arrangements are being made by Barbara Maas with Care for the Wild, an animal welfare organization based in the United Kingdom, to transfer the brown bear to Greece, where she will also get a cataract operation. But there has been considerable discussion about the fate of the lions. "There are 19 large cats, each of which requires over 10 pounds (about 5 kilograms) of food a day," said Bognar. "That's too large a number, too costly, for any zoo to handle. We're trying to get them foreign passports, so to speak." A consensus seems to be forming among Iraqi officials, and members of an international coalition of animal welfare and zoo officials that has formed to provide aid to the zoo, said Jones. "There are good arguments to take out some of those animals, and there are places already lined up to take them," he said. "Certainly let the lioness and her six cubs go, and also a couple of one-year-olds, for whom there is a home in southern Africa." (Read the story about plans to relocate the lions to a South African sanctuary.) Rebuilding a Zoo for the 21st Century The real question is what is the zoo's long-term future? Despite having been remodeled, the zoo was a curious mixture of old and new. "We can do some wonderful things, repairing and improving, but there were some inadequacies," said Bognar. "They had built a new bear enclosure that had showers and [a] cold swimming pool. But the giraffe enclosure wasn't warm enough; the animals wouldn't have survived Iraq's winter. A lot of areas are still very primitive in design: cement floors, cages that have bars, and resemble cell blocks. And the people know very little about basic animal husbandry techniques." A relief fund established for the animals at the Baghdad zoo and animals from four other collections around the city is being coordinated by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA). So far U.S. $77,000 has been collected. "It's really touching that so many people want to help," said Jane Ballentine, spokesperson for the AZA. "And that amount of money goes so much farther in the Middle East." Other members of the coalition include the International Fund for Animal Welfare, WildAid, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, and Lawrence Anthony, who has been in Baghdad working alongside Bognar and is director of the Thula Thula Reserve in South Africa. "We faced a quite similar situation in Kabul after the war in Afghanistan," said Jones. "There are typically three phases—immediate emergency, stabilization and long-term care of the surviving animals. Right now the situation has been stabilized. I think we need to give the Iraqis time to decide how they want to allocate their resources, and to what extent they want to rebuild." Bognar remains concerned about the here and now. "While Lawrence [Anthony] and I were there, WildAid was the only organization providing money and practical assistance," he said. "Barbara Maas with Care for the Wild came in for five days and brought food, for which we were very grateful. But the situation there is still critical. Assessments about the long term future are fine, but we also need money now." 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