I have read the paper (thank you for the link ZooChronicles). One of the authors works for the Born Free Foundation, which also funded the research. I have no problem with that as it is in the open and in line with Born Free's policy.
I would agree that the authors have found evidence that the Zoo Licensing Inspection system does have weaknesses and it is not transparent enough (for example inspection reports go to local authorities and are not collated centrally). We all know that there are some poor zoos and some generally decent zoos which have serious deficiencies: we need a system which can address that.
However that isn't sexy enough for the newspapers.
The overall statistics are
the authors analysed 192 zoo inspection reports
these contained a total of 9024 questions on animal welfare (ZOO 2 reports)
7511 answers met the standards (83%)
762 did not (9%)
the remainder were unanswered (usually because the questions were irrelevant)
All the unsatisfactory answers are causes for concern, and there are too many of them. However the majority of these answers related to veterinary care and nutrition programmes, and the keeping and use of veterinary and pathological records. These are important of course, but not exactly what springs to mind when the headlines say 'not meeting welfare standards', particularly when it might only apply to one species or even one animal in a collection.
BIAZA collections generally did better than non-members of BIAZA, although the differences were very small in some areas. Farm parks and specialist collections of birds and reptiles generally had worse records than mixed collections (zoos), aquariums and invertebrate collections.
The report is not an easy read and it's very easy to distort its conclusions - but if it leads to a better inspection system and so to better zoos, it must be a good thing.
Alan
