Captive wildlife
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:
The Audubon Institute in
Algiers, Louisiana, broke ground June 1 for
the $15 million Audubon Center for
Research of Endangered Species, a high-
tech laboratory intended to complement the
adjacent Freeport-McMoran Audubon
Species Survival Center. The next planned
Audubon facility, an insectarium to be built
in the French Quarter of New Orleans, is
getting a mixed reception from future neigh-
bors, but appears certain to be approved by
municipal authorities, in part because it is
expected to attract 600,000 visitors per year.
Singapore on May 23 opened
Night Safari, a $38 million state-of-the-
art zoo for nocturnal species. The facility
has already achieved successful breeding of
18 of the 43 resident species, including the
russet-coated Asian wild dog, the fishing
cat, the Malaysian tapir, and the striped
hyena. The zoo took seven years to build.
Protracted negotiations over the
fate of Ivan the gorilla, kept for 27 years in
solitary confinement at a shopping mall in
Tacoma, Washington, were reportedly
concluded June 9 with an agreement that he
will be moved as soon as possible to Zoo
Atlanta, to join a colony of 19 other goril-
las. The Zoo Atlanta gorilla staff gained
experience in rehabilitating long-isolated
gorillas with Willie B., the original Atlanta
gorilla, whose first companions arrived in
1987 after a major zoo expansion.
Mark Schoebel, 40, owner of
the R-Zoo game farm near Neshkoro,
Wisconsin, attracted police and media
attention on May 6 when he shot an escaped
bull hippopotamus who had taken refuge in
the Mecan River––and again just 11 days
later, when one of his black antelopes
escaped from the Menominee Park Zoo in
Oshkosh. Schoebel was fined $1,000 in
1986 for selling bears to Korea, where their
body parts are used in folk medicines.
China has recalled Ming Ming,
a female panda who spent the past three
years at the London Zoo, because she failed
to mate with a male from the Berlin Zoo and
did not conceive by artificial insemination.
Bim, a Philadelphia Zoo orang-
utan known for his love of fingerpainting,
died June 4 at age 21.
