Why does the San Diego Zoo send animals elsewhere? Zoos often share their collections with other zoos. With so many zoos in the country, animals are always moving from one zoo to the next. Conservation plays a large role in the transport of animals. New animals are sometimes required for breeding programs to support genetic diversity in offspring. Having good genetic diversity makes a population of animals less vulnerable to genetic defects and less susceptible to diseases. Animals are also transported place for many other reasons: they are loaned, or maybe sent somewhere else while the zoo builds a new exhibit. This requires lots of cooperation between the zoos because animals’ health must be assessed prior to and during the move. For that reason, keepers or veterinarians are involved with the moving process.

When the San Diego Zoo has to transport animals, the first thing to be done is to get the animal off-exhibit. Even though moving animals doesn’t always require vets to tranquilize the animal, vets are always on hand to monitor the stress level and health of the animal. In the past, Zoo veterinarians like Meg Sutherland-Smith DVM might have had to tranquilize animals at a distance using a compressed-air gun. But keepers now have applied some of the behavior management skills we learned about last week to train the animal to go into a crate. This is safer and much less stressful for the animals. Training animals takes a long time; it took months to get the elephants in Elephant Odyssey ready for their move. (Although it would have been really cool to have the elephants walk from the Wild Animal Park to the Zoo!) The work the keepers do with the animals pays off in surprising ways sometimes. When several Siberian musk deer jumped out of their exhibit, and were wandering in the bushes at the Zoo the keepers managed to coax them back into their exhibit with food.

Once the animal is off-exhibit, animals are also moved to the Zoo’s private quarantine facility. Here, incoming and outgoing animals are kept and monitored for a short time. Outgoing animals require a check up from Zoo veterinarians. For Dr. Sutherland-Smith this is one of her favorite parts of her job because she gets to work outside of the Zoo’s hospital. At the quarantine area, she often works with hoofstock at a contraption called the tamer. This contraption cradles hoofstock so veterinarians can examine them. A blindfold is put on the animal to reduce their anxiety during the examination.

The San Diego Zoo was involved with the re-introduction of addax and scimitar-horned oryx and had a program to breed these animals at the Zoo and Park. When the Zoo was releasing these animals to a captive reserve in Tunisia, numerous individuals had to go through the tamer to receive veterinary clearance. Both the addax and scimitar-horned oryx are critically endangered animals that live in the parts of North Africa. These animals are also tested for diseases like foot and mouth or blue tongue disease. This is important because these diseases could threaten the livestock in Tunisia and hurt their economy. The disease could even hurt wild populations of addax or scimitar-horned oryx. This way, veterinarians are essential to conservation because they are able to monitor and take care of the health of threatened animals.

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