A China Daily reporter almost got herself into trouble more than 15 years ago after she published a feature story narrating the hard time a major zoo was going through in keeping all the animals fed.

On Monday, however, a manager from Bingchuan Zoo in Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province, pleaded for public understanding and support when she appeared on China Central Television's morning news.

The safari-style zoo located in Qipanshan Forest in the suburbs of Shenyang, has to close down, she said, because many of its 1,000 animals have little food or meat to eat as a result of the zoo's financial crisis. They are only able to fully feed a small number of animals.

From silence to public pronouncement, the change in zoo managers' attitude is very dramatic. Their candidness demonstrates the gradual openness of such public institutions, and more importantly, it highlights the crisis some of the country's zoos or wildlife parks many of them private business establishments are going through.

Bingchuan Zoo is not alone. In the island province of Hainan, the Nantai Lake Crocodile Zoo started selling crocodile meat on Sunday, according to a media report, because the zoo, which keeps some 2,000 crocodiles, can no longer sustain itself.

Coming out to solicit public donations is one way to help zoos get past difficulties. However, I believe there is far more the zoos, as well as related government agencies, should do to alleviate the crisis.

The government agencies that approve and supervise the establishment of zoos and wildlife parks should keep themselves alert over the well-being of the institutions and of the animals they keep.

According to the Chinese Society of Zoological Gardens, there were 173 public zoos in China by 1998. Over the years, some of the zoos have been moved to suburbs to become wildlife parks, while other new safari parks, such as the Shenzhen Wildlife Park and Shanghai Wildlife Zoo, have been opened.

No official institutions have released the recent figures of the animals in captivity in those zoos, but some zoologists sounded alarms early this year that there were too many of these establishments to safely ensure the well-being of the animals.

Meanwhile, the zoos have not kept up with the times in their management and publicity despite their continuous expansion and renovation. Conservationists complain that these establishments give their animals too little space.

Zoos can serve as a good and lively venue for education on a wide range of issues of current concern, from zoology, biology, environment, wildlife ecology to biodiversity. In fact, quite a few zoos in the country have done a lot of research in some of these areas.

However, few schools have made zoos their frequent destinations for field studies, not because students do not like zoos, but because current teaching practices focus too much on textbooks.

As a result, only a few ordinary or safari zoos are able to attract steady flows of tourists and sustain themselves, given their limited government funding.

Zoo crisis still looms here and there, and it will take good management and strategy from government agencies and zoos themselves, as well as changes in schools' curricula, to resolve the predicament.

Email: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/09/2006 page4)