Why do zoo animals have to be moved around?
The main reason is to prevent inbreeding and promote genetic diversity. Say you have a male and a female animal, and they have a baby. If you leave the baby where it is once it’s grown up, it will breed with its parents. This can have all sorts of detrimental effects, and is going against the very aim of zoos, which is to breed endangered species with as much diversity as possible. Therefore, the baby will be sent to another zoo, where there is a suitable mate for it. Sometimes the move is permanent, but sometimes an animal will just go to another zoo on loan – for example, a male may go to another zoo to mate with a female, and return to his original home once she is pregnant. Zoos all over the world co-operate like this for breeding programmes. The genetics of each animal is known, so the best possible mate can be found for each one. This means that, should an endangered species become extinct in the wild, there will be enough genetically variable animals in captivity to be reintrodu
