{"id":67,"date":"2003-10-07T23:04:12","date_gmt":"2003-10-07T23:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=67"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:07","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:07","slug":"lions-and-tigers-and-bears-goodbye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"lions and tigers and bears, goodbye?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Fugitive gorillas like Little Joe may be getting  all the headlines, but zoos may have a more long-term problem on their  hands: Stressing out their captive carnivores. A new study by British  zoologists in the Oct. 2 <em>Nature<\/em> says that carnivores who normally roam  over large territories &#8211; such as lions and polar bears &#8211; fare much worse  in zoos than animals with smaller territories. <!--more--><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><br \/>\nRos Clubb and Georgia Mason of the University of Oxford, UK, analyzed  data on 35 species of captive carnivores from published studies. They  found that animals with larger territories had higher infant mortality  rates in captivity than animals with smaller territories. Furthermore,  the amount of time an animal spent pacing &#8211; an indicator of stress &#8212;  increased in proportion to the size of its territory in the wild. Polar  bears, for example, are kept in enclosures that are more than a million  times smaller than their natural ranging areas.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Clubb stated in a press release: &#8220;We were surprised by the results  because, until now, we had always thought that not being able to hunt  was the biggest problem for zoo carnivores. But our results suggest that  it&#8217;s even more important to give these animals more space.&#8221; The  researchers suggest in their paper that &#8220;the keeping of naturally  wide-ranging carnivores should be either fundamentally improved or  phased out.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 10\/07\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fugitive gorillas like Little Joe may be getting all the headlines, but zoos may have a more long-term problem on their hands: Stressing out their captive carnivores. A new study by British zoologists in the Oct. 2 Nature says that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=67\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1134,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/1134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}