Cpe Proficiency Listening Part 2

"At Hadley Zoo, we’re at the stage where all our big cats and apes were born in captivity and not taken from the wild like previous generations. They’re still wild animals, but they’ve grown up in the presence of humans in a controlled environment. From years of observing the apes’ interaction with the public, I’d say they display tolerance rather than an attitude of fear."

"So the orang-utans can actually play with the public using toys which can simultaneously be controlled by the public outside the enclosure, and the animals inside."

"In the past handling the more dangerous animals was only possible if they were immobilised or tranquilised which understandably they didn’t like...........The situation is different today because we can train the animals from a young age. One way we do this is to train the animals to press against the mesh of their enclosures to receive injections. The goal is stress reduction so that the lions and tigers become used to being handled and can be given injections without the need for tranquilising."

"These days zoos are having to fight harder for the public’s attention......... they don’t want to treat it just as a rare spectacle. So the buzzword is no longer ‘conservation’, although that remains the mission of all zoos, it’s ‘connecting’ – so it’s about relating people directly with nature.

"We went through this phase in the 1980s as a profession that because some of these animals were so rare, they were displayed to the public in zoos in such a way as to make visitors feel that they were looking at works of art, because they were looking at something like a tiger that’s a rare and endangered species.

"When I began work as a keeper in 1987, the elephants were kept in chains in their cages at night. And when the elephant manager made the decision ten years later to leave them to move around freely in their cages, the fear was that it might make them harder to handle. But in fact because their feet were in better condition, and because they could socialise in a better way, it actually made them easier to handle."

"But all zoos have found that the problem with trying to build a natural environment for some of the larger animals, is that when you provide a large area with plenty of shelter and vegetation, visibility becomes an issue to the visitor."

"As a zoo keeper, I’m involved in developing programmes for the animals. ..................... They’re still wild animals, so for example we might make them forage for their food, or work for it in some way, which gives them the sort of stimulation they’d miss if we just handed it over.

"When I started out, what was of paramount importance wasn’t trying to create an environment which would allow animals to behave as they would in the wild.................... but it was actually making sure that disease was kept at bay.