TOP TEAM
PAUL BOYLE, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR CONSERVATION, EDUCATION & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
PAUL BOYLE What does your role involve?
We’re looking at furthering practices and standards to ensue high quality animal care and welfare as well as the future of the populations of animals that are in zoos. As wildlife becomes more threatened,
the living collections at accredited zoos and aquariums are becoming more important, as they’re the public’s portal to understanding wildlife. We’re planning their futures for the next 100 years to ensure zoos still have healthy, vibrant collections of animals into the long-term future.
How can you plan their futures?
One of the things we’re developing is ani- mal care manuals. These are essentially
AZA offers training for everything from husbandry technique to aquarium management
handbooks for looking after particular spe- cies – we have almost 300 so far. They’re updated constantly and pull
together all the knowledge of nutrition, their space and housing requirements, husbandry, veterinary practices, breeding, every aspect of keeping an animal alive far into the future. It’s a complex process. A steering committee looks at breeding
arrangements throughout AZA accred- ited zoos and aquariums. This is to ensure genetic diversity so that as many species as possible are carried on into the future.
Which animals are vulnerable?
We have a very strong focus right now on amphibians. Frogs, toads and salaman- ders are being threatened globally with 250 times the normal rate of extinction. Their skin is very moist and permeable. There’s a fungus disease of the skin, Chytride, which has an effect on their heart and can rapidly take whole populations of amphib- ians out of existence. It’s spread to many places of the world and is a terrible threat. It’s not the only threat to amphibians because climate change is affecting them. They’re like the canary in the coal mine. They’re very susceptible so we’re in collaboration with many institutions around the world and those in the fi eld to try and save our amphibians.
How can you educate the public?
AZA is developing ‘animal care manuals’ – handbooks for looking after species
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We’re working with our education depart- ments in all our accredited zoos to develop common messages that speak in a unifi ed tone about things like climate change. The
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public is tremendously confused about climate change, partly because the way good-minded, hard working scientists, have talked about this complex subject, in complex ways to the public. We’re distilling down rather than delivering messages that leave people feeling blamed. Many conservation messages used to
talk about the scale of problems and how huge they were and left people feeling blamed for the problems. Some survey work I’ve been doing for
the past 10 years has taught us that often people feel that the environmental problem is at the scale that’s beyond their capacity to do anything meaningful and that’s not true. We’re communicating that individual people’s actions can make a difference. We aim to engage people in taking owner- ship of solutions for climate change.
What training do you offer?
We’re always looking to promote the next generation of zoological conservation- minded leaders in zoos and aquariums, so we run training programmes in differ- ent venues. Traditionally these have been week-long, face-to-face courses offered for college credits. They cover everything from husbandry techniques to zoo and aquarium management, the development of successful public exhibits of animals and specifi c courses on amphibian biology and reptiles and other wildlife. In the next couple of years we’ll be offer- ing an online professional development programme with many courses and certifi - cate programmes for people in the fi eld.
AM 3 2010 ©cybertrek 2010
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