By Ellen Airhart
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As climate change escalates the intensity and frequency of natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes, zoos are having to find new ways to keep their animals safe. This means stocking up on emergency provisions for a hundred or more species, each with their own special medical, dietary, and habitat needs. It also means knowing, at a moment’s notice, which species need to move if keeping them outdoors becomes unsafe. Collecting such information requires years of planning. But zoos only began doing the work fairly recently. Yvonne Nadler, who worked as a veterinary epidemiologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago during the avian influenza outbreak in 2007, says that at that time, very few zoo workers had the needed expertise—a gap that put both people and animals in danger. “There’s no just-in-time training to know how to evacuate a lion,” she says.
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Without good planning, zoo disasters can escalate. After a flood in western Germany this year, a bear escaped its enclosure and was killed by police, according to CNN. Many animals and zoo staff died during floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2015, when lions, tigers, and several other animals escaped from their enclosures.
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But zoos can assist each other to avoid further tragedies during a disaster. During Hurricane Katrina, the Houston Zoo sent staff to help the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. And during Hurricane Florence, the North Carolina Zoo was able to take in red wolves from two facilities at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and other nearby places that became vulnerable during the storm.
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