Scandals and Sanctuaries

Whenever there's a story in the news about zoos, you can guarantee that there's going to be someone in the comments taking a potshot about how zoos are all evil, and that if we wanted to be a morally superior being like the commenter, we should only support sanctuaries.  Sanctuaries, I've noted long ago, have that wonderful advantage of being facilities that most people don't actually understand.  Many of the people making these comments imagine them to be vast tracts of land where animals live just as they would in the wild, only minus the whole predation and disease and death aspects.

In reality, many sanctuaries are very much like zoos.  There are keepers, taking care of animals in enclosures, using protocols very similar to those used to care for zoo animals.  Still, because of their supposedly purer status, sanctuaries, I'm afraid to say, can sometimes get away with things that would not fly in public zoos or aquariums.  It's almost as if the title blankets them from criticism.

Well, for some facilities, that blanket has startled to unravel a little.

Activists Concerned with Living Conditions at Chimp Sanctuary

A slew of criticism has been aimed at Project Chimps, perhaps the most famous chimpanzee sanctuary in the United States.  The facility is supposed to be a rescue for animals that were formerly used as lab specimens.  Instead, the allegations from whistle-blowing former keepers claim that they chimps spend almost all of their time indoors on concrete and receive inadequate healthcare, among other complaints.  The facility, which is accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (the sanctuary version of AZA) disputes the accusations.

Recently, I'd read additional complaints about another primate sanctuary, this one in Georgia, with firsthand accounts from both former keepers and perspective hires.  They described overcrowded monkeys wallowing in fecal matter and moldy food with no enrichment and far too few caretakers for the numbers of animals.  Management was described as highly toxic, spending more time worrying about the ideological purity (i.e., veganism) of staff than about animal care.  It sounded horrific.

I'm not bringing up these stories to bash sanctuaries, many of which are fine facilities that serve a great purpose.  I'm just exasperated that, if any of this nonsense was pulled at a well-known zoo, animal rights groups would be baying for blood.  Since these stories concern facilities that describe themselves as sanctuaries, however, they never make a peep.