Waking up in our children the love of nature is a responsibility we have as parents and we do not always know or can live up to it.
That they are the main interested in caring for and protecting the environment is a necessity for their own future and all the effort we put into it will be well used.
Books, movies, excursions and visits to zoos? Is taking the children to the zoo educational for them? What do you think?
It is clear that today's zoos are not the ones “Houses of beasts” from a few decades ago, where the cages followed each other and the animals badly lived in painful and extremely complicated conditions but still, Feelings when visiting zoos are sometimes very contradictory.
There are zoos and zoos
Yes, that is undeniable. Some of the zoos in our cities have become simply obsolete, many of them need an economic investment that seems to never come to adapt them to the needs of animals but also there are other ways to bring animals closer to visitors of these facilities and especially the children who come to them.
There are friendly environments like that of the Cabárceno Park in Cantabria that must be traveled by vehicle to be able to see African elephants in semi-freedom and then in another habitat completely different from brown bears, for example.
There are parks that develop environments where they are not seen (or almost not seen) or the bars, or the cages, or the screens as in the Bioparc of Fuengirola or Valencia, where animals can feel the animals closer than they really are.
The feeling in these centers for children is a kind of immersion, it is we who are going to see them "at home" and have less impact than other more conventional zoos and that little by little they have perhaps remained somewhat limited in the space they dedicate to each specimen that lives there.
The unseen work
It is also true and it is fair to point it out and make our children know, that The work of zoos is not only to expose animals, there is a conservation work that often escapes usIn fact, there are species that thanks to this work we can only see in captivity, or what is the same in the facilities of a zoo in some city in the world.
To give just one example, the Madrid Zoo Aquarium actively participates in the ex situ conservation program of the giant panda bear, a species classified as being in serious danger of extinction, which is estimated not to reach 2000 specimens that live in freedom and In these days it has managed to fertilize one of the females that lives in its facilities, something that is vital for the survival of this species.
Species that disappear
It is hard but it is a reality, there are more and more animal species that owe their survival as such to the work that is done from different zoos.
Species to which the human being is leading them to disappearance As the Desert Addax which harasses the tourism sector, the Okapi which was believed missing in 2006, the "Asian unicorn" as the Saola, one of the animals with the highest risk of disappearing, the Mountain gorilla that survives poaching thanks to the rangers risking their lives to protect them, the Siberian tiger of which an estimated 400 individuals remain, the Amur Leopard of which there are barely 50 copies in the wild and about 200 in captivity, the Vaquita Marina which is one of the smallest cetaceans in the world and there are only 97 specimens remaining in an imminent state of disappearance because of the human being, the Golden Mantle Kangaroo also in critical danger of disappearance, the Sunda Pagolin only mammal with scales on the skin or the Aye Aye Of which it is estimated that there are only 2,500 live specimens in the world.
It is very complicated not feel a deep sadness when we look into the eyes of some of the animals that live in the captivity of zoos in any country, but it is also very true that for many of our children it is a way of knowing nature, to get her out of textbooks and drawing films, to love her even and above all and most importantly, to defend her since they are children and throughout her life.
Photos | iStockphoto | Zoo Aquarium Madrid
In Babies and More | Zoo, yes or no? | For a planet without animal abuse, children do what they see | Taking care of the planet is learned from an early age: tips on World Environment Day
