For many of us who don’t have the time or opportunity to explore the great outdoors, a zoo provides a good snippet of our amazing planet.
But few are the cities that have the resources to showcase exotic or native animals in a well-maintained public zoo.
Cebu City, according to the People for the Ethical treatment of Animals (Peta), is hanging precariously from the list of locales that take proper care of zoo animals.
They note how monkeys, snakes and crocodiles are crammed in cages, an unhealthy habitat for the long term. The animals are too close to each other such that they can easily transmit disease-carrying microbes to one another, as well as to human visitors.
That would blow up in the face of authorities who would have to spend more to buy animals as each batch of captive breeds succumb to sub-standard conditions.
The Cebu City Zoo has long been at the bottom of priorities of the city government. The zoo scrambles for funds to keep its small collection of fauna worth visiting.
In an urban metropolis, where the welfare of thousands of illegal settlers and urban poor require more attention than the menagerie in the Busay Hills, this is not a surprise.
The city’s Parks and Playgrounds Commission has welcomed the recommendations of Peta on how to improve the zoo. It remains to be seen whether renovation through a meager P10 million budget is enough to change Peta’s review.
Somewhere in a northern Cebu town, several hectares of mountain land have been populated as a preserve of exotic wildlife – birds and fowl, wildcats, monkeys, snakes, assorted jungle animals, even a tiger or two.
It cost a Cebu businessman several millions to import the animals and ensure they thrive in this sanctuary, which according to promoters, will be open to the public this year or next.
Mayor Michael Rama knows the gentleman whose past time of cultivating a safari-land in Cebu points to private resources available. Can the mayor ask his help for a big donation?
The city government can do only so much in throwing limited resources to make the City Zoo up to par. It’s novel Christmas offering of “snake massage” where pythons were allowed to crawl over visitors lying on a bamboo bench boosted visitor arrivals, but had to be stopped in March after animal rights groups protested the “exploitation”, not to mention the safety risk.
The city will hire more health workers first before finding a budget to train zoo keepers.
It’s main humanitarian project, a new Cebu City Medical Center, is a P1.5 billion dream that has absorbed the mayor’s attention. Adding more cages for captive animals, will not get as much commitment.
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