The time when visitors to British zoos enjoyed watching chimpanzees drink high tea has long gone. After much soul-searching, today’s zoos are no longer a showcase for exotic animals, rather places for conservation, education and interaction. But not always saving animal life, it would appear.

Despite a storm of protest a zoo in Nuremberg, Germany, has resisted helping an adult polar bear Vilma to rear her baby cubs and officials there think she may have now eaten them. The authorities insisted nature should be allowed to take its course and were keen to avoid the kind of global publicity given to Knut, a bear hand-reared at Berlin Zoo last year.

The British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums backs Nuremberg to the hilt — and shares the same policy.

Its director Miranda Stevenson sets out the current practice: animals are only hand-reared by humans if there is a chance they can be re-introduced to the wild as soon as possible afterwards, with their natural behaviour characteristics retained.

“Primates can be hand-reared and returned to their own species but with polar bears it is impossible because they are solitary animals and it would be impossible to re-introduce a young polar bear cub to an adult because it would be killed. The mother rears its own cubs and is programmed to kill other cubs.”

Another reason not to intervene is that mothers in some species do not rear their first litter because they lack experience and don’t know what to do. By going through that process — letting nature take its course — they are more likely to raise their second.

There’s also a practical issue of a limited amount of “good zoo space” for such big and potentially dangerous animals, she says, and while it may seem odd to let an animal within its care die, the policy is thinking what is best in the long-term.

Nuremberg’s stance has surprised conservationists such as Charlotte Uhlenbroek. She is uncomfortable with polar bears being held in zoos and believes it’s “mad” to say events should unfold according to nature in an enclosure so far removed from their natural habitat.

The zoo has probably learnt from experience that hand-rearing a polar bear leaves it with the question of what to do with a large, semi-tame animal, says the zoologist, because it’s difficult to get captive polar bears to reproduce. However, she thinks hand-rearing can help save very endangered species and it can work for smaller primates like lemurs going back to the wild. But there are risks.

“If they’re a social animal they have to become part of a social group and being hand-reared they could forever be slightly removed from the rest of their kind which would seem rather pointless.”

Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, says the real story is the plight of animals in zoos and Nuremberg is further evidence of the harm they cause.

And they make polar bears neurotic, says Daniel Turner of the Born Free foundation, which campaigns against zoos.

Despite a Europe-wide intensive breeding programme, few species and no polar bears are ever reintroduced to the wild from zoos. And two macaques at Newquay Zoo were controversially put down in November because they were fighting, he says.

BBC News