Animals: Hungry Zoo

When primitive tribes come upon hard days, their pets and beasts of burden go hungry too, are eaten up if the famine gets bad enough. Besides pets and beasts of burden, civilized men keep animals for the education and amusement of their children. In good times zoo animals pay for their keep with their offspring. But just now the zoo animal market is at a standstill. Many a city faces the problem of how. with humans starving in the streets, to find money to keep its zoo alive. Last week President Williams B. Cadwalader of the Philadelphia Zoological Society addressed to the City Council a plain statement of fact:

“In the city budget . . . for 1933 I have asked . . . that the City Council appropriate $100,000 for the maintenance of the Zoological Garden. … If this sum of money cannot be made available … it will soon become absolutely necessary to dispose of the animals and close the gardens. . . . You should clearly understand that the closing of the gardens cannot be easily accomplished. On account of the depression in the animal market it now appears to be impossible to dispose of the animals . . . therefore we will be faced with the only alternative … to destroy them.”

In the Philadelphia Zoo are some 3,000 animals. Its collection of apes, gorillas. monkeys, orangutans, marmosets, chimpanzees and other simians is the most famed in the U. S. Though the idea would have seemed natural in China, no one suggested feeding Philadelphia’s zoo animals to the unemployed.