Saving the animals
By : Juliet D. Golden
Attempts to make life better for Poland's zoo animals is putting pressure on facilities across the country to raise funds from the private sector to pay for needed expansion and refurbishment.
Often cramped in small quarters or housed in dilapidated buildings and cages, Poland's zoo animals in the near future may also benefit from stricter European Union (EU) guidelines governing how animals are treated and how much room they have to roam. The EU regulations, which were introduced in the economic bloc this year, are expected to eventually put further pressure on Polish zoos to improve their animals' living standards.
"I know that if (EU) inspectors came today and they saw how the hippo is living, they would say, stop," said Maciej Rembiszewski, director of the City Zoological Garden in Warsaw.
Rembiszewski said that if zoos eventually had to remove their hippos, or other main attractions such as elephants and tigers when it joins the EU in 2003-2005, then they would likely see ticket sales dry up, Rembiszewski said. The Warsaw zoo, which attracts roughly half a million visitors a year, counts on ticket sales for 40% of its annual budget.
Over the past 10 years, zoos in Poland have been scrambling to upgrade their facilities not only to improve living standards for the animals on exhibit, but also to make viewing improvements that would help to pull in larger crowds. With finances at the zoos' main benefactors, local governments, stretched to the breaking point, zookeepers are looking at ways to fill the gaps themselves. One of the most successful programs for bringing in those extra funds has been corporate sponsoring of particular animals. The Warsaw zoo began such a program almost a decade ago and now the sponsorship money pulled in is equivalent to 2.1% of the facility's annual budget, Rembiszewski said.
Other zoos, however, have had mixed success with the sponsorship idea. Wroclaw zoo, for example, attracts only marginal amounts of money from company donations. Now the zoo is trying to balance the pressure to improve its facilities with its strained finances. If the EU laws came into effect here, the Wroclaw zoo would likely have to shut its doors, Director Antoni Gucwinski said.
What corporate donors have helped with, though, is food for the animals. Hypermarkets such as Hit, Auchan and Geant regularly donate fruit and vegetables, which helps keep the zoo's food costs down. Many zookeepers said that this mix of public and private partnerships provides Poland's zoos with their only chance of modernizing.
"In Poland, private sponsorship is not as widely developed yet (as in other countries.) It exists, but there is also sponsoring in the form of gifts of other animals from other zoos," said Jozef Skotnicki, director of the Krakow zoo. "This is a measurable form of help."
Looking for help
While zoos across Poland are feeling the pressure to upgrade facilities, the worst off is Wroclaw, home to the country's largest zoo. Here, 6,000 animals are cramped into historic buildings dating back to the mid-19th century. Some large animals are limited to areas of 10 square meters.
While the directors Antoni and Hanna Gucwinski have managed to get sponsorship to minimize costs in feeding animals, they have done little to modernize and catch up to zoos in Western Europe. The Gucwinskis are famous for their weekly television program "Z kamera wsrod zwierzat" ("With a camera among animals"), which has been on the air since the 1970s.
"I think (Polish zoos) have caught up a lot, but perhaps the least is Wroclaw," said Warsaw's Rembiszewski. Rembiszewski also serves as chairman of the national advisory board of zoo directors a group that includes the heads of 11 zoos nationwide. "They have put in the least effort in taking a modern view of zoos, which is too bad."
Mainly supported by the City of Wroclaw, the zoo has a budget of zl. 8 million ($1.95 million) this year. The zoo itself raises about 30% of its annual budget, or zl. 2.4 million ($585,365) through ticket sales. Other than receiving about one ton of food daily from local supermarkets such as Hit, Tesco or Geant, Wroclaw does not rely on sponsorships to cover its costs nor has the zoo set up a foundation into which individuals or companies can make donations.
But now the pressure is on to improve and the Gucwinskis know that they will have to start refurbishments if Wroclaw zoo's gates are to stay open. Areas for elephants, tigers and rhinos will need the most investment, as the animals live in spaces five times smaller than acceptable EU norms, Gucwinski said.
But lack of funds is not the most pressing problem for Gucwinski. His main concern is shortage of land. The zoo is located on 34 hectares of prime Wroclaw real estate along the Dora river. With two sides of the zoo bordering the river, the facility has little room to expand in its present location.
To make matters worse, the only available piece of land next to the zoo was sold last year to a private investor. Now Gucwinski is battling Wroclaw to re-zone this particular six-hectare parcel of land exclusively for zoo expansion. Gucwinski hopes that re-zoning the land will force the investor to sell it back to the city, or to the zoo directly.
Gucwinski said the land originally sold for zl. 1 million ($243,902), which he said was below market rates. He said the zoo or the city would potentially have to pay zl. 4 million-zl. 5 million ($975,609-$1.22 million) to get the land back.
If Gucwinski manages to pin down the land, he then wants to pull from the zoo's history as a German institution and request funds for upgrades and expansion from the Polish-German Cooperation Foundation. Gucwinski said that he has no idea how much money the zoo needs.
About a quarter of zoo visitors are from abroad, which Gucwinski hopes will assist in getting significant donations. "Germans come here to remember their youth," Gucwinski said. "That's another reason why this showcase should be in good shape."
Building on foundations
The Warsaw zoo started looking for ways to raise extra money 10 years ago. It was then that director Rembiszewski founded Panda, a foundation for the development of the Warsaw Zoo. The zoo's program of having companies adopt animals is coordinated through Panda, which in turn is run almost exclusively by volunteers. Individual and corporate sponsors pay zl. 50-zl. 2,500 a month to support an animal at the zoo.
Those sponsorships bring in a total of about zl. 150,000-zl. 200,000 annually a relatively small augmentation to the zoo's overall annual budget of zl. 9.3 million ($2.67 million).
"This isn't a large sum (of money), but it's a very comfortable sum for us," Rembiszewski said. "We don't have to ask permission to use it; we decide internally."
One contributor to both the Warsaw and Gdansk zoos is Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (Era GSM). The company supports the penguins at both zoos, although the firm would not disclose how much money it donates annually.
In exchange for the sponsorship, Era has billboards mounted in the penguin pen and at the main entrance of the Warsaw zoo. "This creates an image that Era is not just involved in making telephone connections, but that it plays a charity role as well," said Bogdan Markiewicz, deputy press officer at Era GSM.
While corporate sponsorships are not large on an individual basis, over time the money adds up. Rembiszewski estimated that over the last decade the donations to the Panda foundation have spawned some zl. 1.5 million ($365,853) in investments. But that is not enough for the zoo to declare full independence from city hall. Nor is it enough to bring the facility up to EU standards.
Rembiszewski lobbies city officials hard for funds from the local government. When two of the zoo's elephants died last year from old age, Rembiszewski successfully lobbied Warsaw Mayor Pawel Piskorski for an additional zl. 10 million ($2.44 million) to build a new elephant house. The new facility, due to open in 2002, will have 700 square meters of indoor space for the elephants and 4,000 square meters of outdoor roaming space. The current elephant house doesn't provide the animals with any chance to move around indoors. Given those conditions, international zookeepers last year told Rembiszewski that the Warsaw zoo would not be able to receive a new herd of elephants until it built a new pavilion.
"What's a zoo without an elephant?" Rembiszewski said.
In addition to the elephant exhibit, the zoo has an additional zl. 8 million-zl. 40 million ($1.95 million-$9.76 million) to invest over the next five years to bring the zoo completely in line with Western European standards, Rembiszewski said. Not only do the mid-sized cats and the hippo need a new home, Rembiszewski has plans to build a large restaurant on the zoo grounds. Through food sales, Rembiszewski hopes to gain further financial independence from the City of Warsaw. Zoos in Western Europe are able to cover up to 20% of their annual budget through food sales from restaurants, he said.
Delivering groceries
While just about half of the animals in the Warsaw zoo have been adopted by sponsors, at the Gdansk zoo only 30% of animals have private supporters. But even at that level corporate sponsorships bring in about zl. 200,000 a year, which is equivalent to 3.3% of the zoo's annual budget of
zl. 6 million ($1.46 million).
The zoo did manage to raise an additional zl. 1.5 million ($365,853) for investment purposes this year. One of the benefactors of the money will be the zoo's female tiger, which will no longer have to pace behind bars. Now she will have a glass enclosure in which to roam, with 100 square meters of space double the amount she had before.
Enlargements for all the predator cats' cages will cost zl. 100,000, said Michal Targowski, director of the Gdansk zoo.
"(In the EU) animals aren't displayed behind bars or in cages unworthy of the animal," he said. "This is a challenge for some Polish zoos to escape from these types of exhibits. To escape you have to have money to invest."
Like Wroclaw, Gdansk also benefits from direct donations of fruit and vegetables from local hypermarkets. Those contributions help the zoo save on food costs, particularly in the summer when fruit and vegetables are plentiful.
While the amount and frequency of deliveries are sporadic in Gdansk, in Wroclaw these deliveries make a real difference to costs, saving about zl. 50,000 a month on food purchases, Gucwinski said. Wroclaw's zoo receives almost a ton of mainly fruit and vegetables a day from Hit, Tesco and Geant. Another 150 kilograms of bread comes from local bakeries.
"We bought special delivery vehicles for this purpose," Gucwinski said. "Our animals never had such good fruit and vegetables as now. This is a great solution."
