rhinos at dubbo
glyn you guess the indian rhino program will collapse? dubbo have managed to have a world famouus black rhino breeding program for well over a decade now without any support from any other institution.
i'm very much for zoos following regional collection plans but i don't think in the case of rhinos, any other zoo can really pay out on dubbo - they do have one of the biggest white rhino groups (the nominate rhino taxa) in australasia. they definately meet their obligations there...
so they wanna utise their rhino expertise to breed another two
even more endangered taxa - i can't blame them for that!!
but hold on - haven't i said in the past that i am adamantly
against dubbo keeping african elephants? isn't this the same?
no its not. firstly dubbo don't have any breeding age asian elephants and its highly unlilkely they will be aquiring any in the near future. however it is inevitable that dubbo will end up holding breeding-age asian elephants long-term and its highly likely, being the only open range zoo with (very expensive to build) elephant facilities and previous experience that they will be the next in line to jump into the breeding program if it takes off.
if they want to spend resources on elephants best they put those resources into asian first, then like they have done with white rhino, they could expand to other species...
but even more importantly holding african elephants, due to these viral health risks we talk about, directly compromises their ability to do this. it exempts them from being able to breed asian elephants....ever.
so really there should be no african elephants for australia, because unlike rhino, in this case it directly compromises a zoos ability to support a program species. however, each situation is different and sometimes, so long as a zoo meets its obligations to a program species first, i see no problem with expanding it collection.
but hold on, the money being spent on balck and indian rhino could have gone towards another program species the zoo doesn't hold, or into holding even more white rhino...
sure it could, but then it wouldn't really be much of an open-range zoo would it? full of white rhino giraffe and zebra...
dubbos, world famous and for good reason. in fact i dare say many people wouldn't bother going to dubbo if it wern't for the zoo there. so indeed maintaining that "one of world's best" titles is particuarly important to dubbo and lets face it - keeping a big diverse collection is very much a part of that.
and who decides what the collection plan will be anyway? the zoos do. how do they decide that, well they generally choose species with good potential for whatever variety of reasons and species that they currently hold.
so best believe, in the case of rhino, short of dubbo failing on the blacks and indians i think its really only a matter of time, be it long or short, before we find other open-range zoos putting their hand up for some. especially when most of our antelope species die out. filling up the empty paddocks with deer, blackbuck, water buffalo and indian rhinos just might start to sound a little more appealing then....
