While some animals, including lions, tigers and wild cats, have been rehomed to zoos in Poland, this is just not going to be possible for many species.
Details are starting to emerge on how Ukraine’s zoos are coping with the war. Some of the animals including lions, tigers and wild cats have been rehomed to zoos in Poland but this is just not going to be possible for many species. The current situation in Ukraine is having a drastic effect on the nation’s zoos, just as World War II did at London Zoo. Right now, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria and the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria are working to support the Ukrainian zoos as much as they can. There are three large zoos, Nikolaev Zoo, Kyiv Zoological Park and Kharkiv Zoo, in cities currently under attack by the Russian military, which have talked about how they are currently coping. Outsiders might think the best thing to do would be to evacuate the animals into a safer environment away from the war zone. But this is an incredibly risky endeavour. In a tense and difficult environment animals may be fearful of the sounds around them. Loading highly stressed animals into crates and transporting them across noisy and complicated conflict zones could cause severe illness or death, quite apart from the danger of being hit by gunfire. Zoo animals are used to a degree of noise when visitors come to their enclosures. Even human chatter has been shown to cause zoo animals to become stressed or change their behaviour. But mostly, the impact of visitors on zoo animals is negligible. Research on the effect of explosions near zoo animals, as is happening near some Ukrainian zoos, is not something that has been studied but we do have some possible comparisons to construction work. A study published in 2019 investigated how elephants, giraffes and emus coped with zoo construction work.
