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Tue 31 Aug, 2004 12:51 am
Quote:Bear gets on its bike at Berlin Zoo
By Tony Paterson
31 August 2004
Staff at Berlin's internationally renowned zoo were working to restore public confidence yesterday after a 110kg South American bear escaped from its enclosure and spent more than half an hour frolicking in a children's playground before being knocked out by a tranquilliser dart.
The bid for freedom came at the same zoo where a gorilla, Bokito, recently escaped from his cage but was captured and returned without anyone being hurt. Juan, the Andean spectacled bear, astounded visitors at Berlin Zoo on Sunday when he manoeuvered a tree trunk to the edge of his fenced bear-pit and clambered up it and over a wall into a hastily withdrawing crowd of adults and children.
"The important thing to do in this kind of situation is to keep cool and fortunately that is exactly what people did," said Heiner Kloes, Berlin Zoo's deputy director, yesterday.
Juan made straight for the playground, took a ride on a roundabout, slid down a slide and lounged for 10 minutes on a climbing frame. Zoo keepers attracted his interest by placing a bicycle in his path. As he was puzzling over it, the keepers put a spoke in his wheel with the tranquillising dart. Seven men had to lug the unconscious bear back to its pit on a tarpaulin.
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Aw.
I don't think I'd like to be locked up in a zoo, either, if I was a bear. More bikes & playthings in their cages, please!
Best story for a long time here in this categorie.
msolga wrote: More bikes & playthings in their cages, please!
:-)
well, anyway. Also bears should play, if they want.
I think sentiment is going to be with the Ms. Olga and the bear.
Bear slides! this is a playbear designing bear, very cool demonstration.
A university back here in the Netherlands is doing a study on how zoo's influence animals' behavior, and early conclusions say that zoo's have a real negative impact on animals. Just to let you know.
Rick d'Israeli wrote:Just to let you know.
not only in Netherlands also in other Europeans countries and cities, but still only a few.
zoos are mean
I mean, yeah it's great to get to see these animals but how can a polar bear be happy in MI (Detroit Zoo for example)? Zoos just do not recreate the natural habitat of most animals.
He just wanted a little fun...and that bike looked fun!
Poor BPB. That looks like it was one nasty gig.
I too don't particularly like to look at animals in cages. That said, my kids and I have had some great days at the zoo.
And the big cat feeding is amazing.
cavfancier wrote:Poor BPB. That looks like it was one nasty gig.
I have been waiting for BPD to find this thread, cav.
I have mixed feelings. I appreciated seeing zoos as a child. I got a whiff of horror when I saw a black jaguar in a cage at the LA zoo, a long time ago. It might have been temporary, but I was looking at a jaguar/leopard, ok, very big black cat, at least eight feet long, or so it seemed to me.... in a perhaps twenty five foot apparatus. Gulp.
Since then I have worked a bit on zoo design, though my business partner now was more involved then. Let's say I am for the morphing of zoos to take care the best they can, and that probably has a ways to go.
Zoos aren't the height of the dilemma, I don't think; I don't mean to sound condescending re millennia of culture, but the
folklore about certain animal parts is decimating those animals.
In my humble opinion, my being neither an animal scientist nor 1000 year old concoction purveyor.
As far as zoos go, osso, I'm quite taken with aspects of the zoo here in Melbourne. There are whole areas where the humans walk through cage enclosures to observe the freely roaming animals. Well, as "freely roaming" as an animal can be in a zoo!
The zoos of my childhood were very icky. I suppose the latest zoos now will be thought of the same, which I guess is good. Some of the best now play a key role in the rescue fold. I am not so conversant on it, but listening.
Omigosh, Walter. Thanks for posting those pictures and the story. Really great to read that the bear had, at least, a few moments of freedom. He'll think about it the rest of his life (and probably continue to plot ways to get out).
He seemed to be a fairly well-behaved bear -- nobody eaten or threatened.
Juan, that's his name, is meanwhile back with his parents Isabell and Navarro in the open-air enclosure (after being 'caved' for two days).
The zoo wants to sell him to another zoo - which is, however, nearly impossible: no-one wants to get a pubertating six xears old bear (with such a "history", I add).
But wait, I tell you, that bear has talent, savvy, has a sense of design, playground layout, and more. I am not entirely kidding.
that bear is cool. I'll take him myself, we could discuss playground slides and the climbing bars. Whom do I write to in order to awaken attention to the savvy of this bear, representing other bears?
Zoo Berlin
z. Hd. Herrn Heiner Klös
Hardenbergplatz 8
10787 Berlin
Germany
[phone: 004930254010]
:wink:
Thanks, Walter. I'm calling right now. :wink:
msolga wrote:Thanks, Walter. I'm calling right now. :wink:
Wait at least ten minutes - no-one will answer before 8 o'clock local time
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