A closed zoo presents keepers with a dilemma. Animal care isn't cheap. You can't furlough a flamingo. You can't lay off a lion.
Belmont Park shuts down and nobody gets to ride the Giant Dipper roller coaster. Legoland closes and tiny plastic bricks don’t get fashioned into buildings at Miniland USA.
By then, butterflies shipped as pupae from Central and South America were already here, some 40 species. They’d been unpacked from boxes in a climate-controlled room at the Safari Park, and pinned upside down to hang in special cases while they did their chrysalis-cracking. It’s not the same as going there, but it’s something: By Friday, people had viewed the butterflies online almost 350,000 times.Together, the 100-acre zoo in Balboa Park and the 1,800-acre Safari Park near Escondido are home to more than 6,300 animals from 1,000 species, as well as more than 700,000 plants in 600 species and subspecies.
No plans, then, to do what a zoo director in Germany said his facility might be forced to consider: Slaughter some of the animals to feed to others. Verena Kaspari, who heads Tierpark Neümunster, located about an hour’s drive north of Hamburg, called that a worst-case scenario in an interview last week with the German News Agency DPA.
The organization employs about 3,800 people, according to its 2018 tax filings. On Monday, furloughs begin for an undisclosed number of them in visitor-services jobs and other positions not related to animal or plant care.Those still working are doing it in staggered shifts to minimize contact with each other in the locker rooms and as they move around the zoo and Safari Park to clean habitats, prepare food, trim plants or do training and enrichment with the animals.
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