The Best of the Least

Sand cats aren't an especially common species in American zoos, and while I've never been a keeper for the species, I've still managed to see them in a half dozen or so facilities over the years.  One of the challenges involved in keeping these desert-adapted felines is their tolerance for a limited range of temperature and humidity.  This, combined with their small size, often results in them being kept indoors, in exhibits that tend to lean heavy on the concrete and fake rocks, less so on the... well, sand.  Most of them tend to be on the smaller side, even for such a small cat.  Thinking upon it, I don't know if I've ever seen a sand cat exhibit that I would call truly great.

I've seen some magnificent exhibits for lions, tigers, and cheetahs, as well as decent ones for a variety of other cats.  But a great sand cat exhibit?  That, theoretically, should be the easiest thing in the world to do.  They're small, so a proportionately large and complex exhibit should be a lot easier and cheaper to build than a lion exhibit.  They live in the desert, so no expensive water features, or refrigeration systems (it always seems to be cheaper and more economical to heat exhibits than to cool them).  I feel that for a relatively paltry sum, I could build the best sand cat exhibit in the world.  Or at least in the US.  There are some pretty excellent sand cat exhibits in Europe.

And it's not just sand cats.  There's a lot of smaller, less-celebrated species where we seem to be stuck in the mindset of "good enough."  Zoos trip over themselves to build increasingly elaborate exhibits for animals like polar bears and gorillas, spending tens of millions, sometimes with the end result of something that's strictly middling.  For a percent of those costs, they could to something incredible.  Imagine saying you have the best exhibit ever of North American porcupine, or pale-faced saki?  Wouldn't that be something?  Wouldn't it help push the envelope on the husbandry of that species?

Years ago, a tree fell at a zoo where I worked and damaged a small aviary, one that held a single species of smallish bird.  After the rubble was cleared (no birds were harmed or escaped), my co-workers and I realized that there was nothing particularly close to this aviary, so when we were rebuilding it, why not expand it?  We ended up making it over three times larger, which allowed us to do so much more with perching and substrate and terrain, as well as building an indoor holding component.  This was all done in house, except for a little electrical work we needed to contract out, seeing as we didn't want to die, and cost us very little.

I'm not saying that the finished product was the best exhibit for that species ever built, but to be honest, it was the best I'd ever seen.  I was quite proud of it, at any rate.  With the result that, whenever I see that species at another zoo in a smaller, nondescript aviary, my first thought is, "Come on, even I could do better than that..."  And that should be a lesson that we take away when we look at a lot of these smaller animals.  We can do better... and in many cases, it wouldn't even be that hard.