Overworked vets, untrained keepers -- India's beleagured zoos

Overworked vets, untrained keepers -- India's beleagured zoos
PRESS TRUST OF INDIA

NEW DELHI, JULY 9: As the hue and cry raised over the death of 12 tigers in one of the country's prestigious zoos rages, one question that haunts is -- what ails the veterinary system in our zoos?

Overworked vets, most of them not wildlife specialists, untrained keepers and uncaring authorities are some of the woes that meet the eye at almost all the zoos across the country.

"Zoos are important institutions, but very little attention is paid to them," laments an official in the Union Environment and Forests Ministry, adding that rules were flouted by a number of them by not even setting up a hospital.

Add to that disgruntled vets, who had no career prospects and were treated lower than the lowest scientific cadre and the picture is complete, he said.

"Wildlife trained vets are different from the other vets," Ashok Kumar from Wildlife Protection Society of India said, describing the situation in most zoos as "disastrous".

There are very few wildlife vets in the country, Kumar noted, saying this was a very specialised field and should be animal specific too.

An official in the Delhi Zoological Park spoke of the immense responsibility a slogging vet was faced with as he was single-handedly responsible for all the animals, right from birds to snakes, tigers, elephants and exotic species.

Moreover, the zoo vet had to depend on the keepers to inform him of an animal's well-being and if a particular keeper was not trained or not vigilant enough, it could end up with another life lost.

Apart from this, what exist in the name of hospitals are hardly equipped to meet modern standards.

Delhi Zoo, for instance, boasts of modern equipment and an operation theatre, but leaves much to be desired, certainly not in keeping with the number of animals it houses.

Major zoos like Chandigarh and Hissar did not even have a hospital and only a visiting vet, a ministry official said.

"Conversely, if there are hospitals, there are no doctors," he quipped.

It has also been a long-standing demand that the animal keepers be trained to take care of specific animals, even recruiting people from the area the animal is found.

One recommendation has also been to employ animal trappers and may be poachers, whose livelihood was affected by the ban on hunting and trapping of wild species.

Moreover, these people had been handling particular animals for generations and were specialists in their own right.

"It is one of the failures of the country's system that we do not have trained wildlife vets," Kumar said.