AT HOME WITH ZOO ANIMALS CFE 3212V

Transcription

1 AT HOME WITH ZOO ANIMALS CFE 3212V OPEN CAPTIONED NATIONAL GEOGRAPIC SOCIETY 1992 Grade Levels: PS-6 15 minutes

2 DESCRIPTION How do zoos make animals feel at home? Good zoos try to re-create animals native environments and provide the right food in a natural manner. Animals need the right amount of space. Good zoos also help endangered animals survive through captive breeding programs and reintroduction into the wild. Compares animals in captivity with those in the wild. ANIMALS AROUND YOU SERIES. INSTRUCTIONAL GOALS To present zoos as a viable alternative for wild animals. To present the process of creating an appropriate zoo environment. To explore a variety of animal habitats. To compare wild animals with those in captivity. To encourage visiting zoos. BEFORE SHOWING 1. Read the CAPTION SCRIPT to determine unfamiliar vocabulary and language concepts. 2. Find London on a world map. Point out that this video was filmed in England. Some people have accents and several references are made to the London Zoo. 3. Report that zoo animals come from a wide range of climates and habitats around the world. Many of these animals would not likely be found together. 4. Discuss past personal experiences at the zoo. 5. Remind viewers that every living thing has a home and that zoos are homes, too. 6. List eight to ten common zoo animals. Identify what countries they are from in the wild and in what type of environments they live. 1

3 DURING SHOWING 1. View the video more than once, with one showing uninterrupted. 2. Point out whether animals are living in groups or alone. 3. Point to food sources and zoo structures that replicate those found in natural animal habitats. AFTER SHOWING Discussion Items and Questions 1. Define habitat. 2. Discuss what it means to feel at home. 3. Survey what is most important to a home, inside and out. Share the results. 4. Consider some of the animals that are not seen in zoos, like cows, sheep, and dogs. Discuss why these animals are not seen at zoos. 5. Express opinions about the advantages of wild safari zoos for the animals, for people visiting zoos, and for zookeepers. Applications and Activities 1. Cooperatively, build a zoo model in the classroom. a. Draw a blueprint of the zoo, being careful to keep areas proportionate to the animals and to each other. b. Using oil-based modeling clay on a wooden board, create hills, crevices, caves, and ponds for a variety of animals. c. Add plastic animal figures or make some from clay. d. Make a map of the classroom zoo. Include animal structures and shelters. 2. Write to local zookeepers asking for a list of current zoo animals and corresponding daily diets. Request a map of the zoo and visit. While there, note 2

4 animal habitat features and numbers of animals living together. 3. Write to the following for information: a. American Association of Zoological Parks & Aquariums Oglebay Park Route 88 Wheeling, WV (304) b. National Zoological Park Smithsonian Institution 3000 Connecticut Ave NW Washington, DC (202) Play a game of mongoose hide-and-seek. Hide plastic crickets while the mongoose leaves the room. 5. Imagine being confined in one s house for a lifetime. a. Adequate water, food, shelter, and activities are provided. b. Friends may visit, but the person confined is not allowed to leave. c. Write feelings and experiences after one hour, five hours, two days, and a month. d. Share and discuss if zoo animals experience similar feelings. COMMUNICATION SKILLS 1. Without using specific signs, dramatize a zoo animal while others guess the animal being characterized. a. Use body language and positioning to clearly portray the animal. b. For a more difficult game, add more animal actors to interact. Dramatize feelings of hunger, fear, hurt, and loneliness. 2. Create sign language stories with sequential handshapes spelling animal names. 3. Play a game of Who Am I? with zoo animal names. 3

5 a. Write the name or draw a picture of a zoo animal on a sticky note. Place on the back of someone who is unaware of what is written. b. That person asks questions about the animal s features. c. This game is useful for individual or group play. The game is finished when all participants correctly guess their animal s identities. 4. Find the opposites of these words: wild, predator, singular, danger, natural. Discuss how each is relevant to zoos. 5. Write sentences from beginning letters of animal names. For example: children are mostly excellent learners (camel). 6. Lions live in prides. Find the names of these animal groupings: elephants, ducks, birds, geese, monkeys, kangaroos, and so on. 7. From the list of animals created before showing the video, associate three adjectives for each. a. List all adjectives and locate the most and least common words used. b. Ask a person outside the working group to guess the animal associated with the three adjectives created for it. 4

6 CAPTION SCRIPT Following are the captions as they appear on the video. Teachers are encouraged to read the script prior to viewing the video for pertinent vocabulary, to discover language patterns within the captions, or to determine content for introduction or review. Enlarged copies may be given to students as a language exercise. (female narrator) Zoos have always been popular places. In the past, large animals were often kept in small cages or in pits. Visitors were allowed to feed the animals and sometimes even teased them. Today's zoos try to be enjoyable places for both the animals and the visitors. How do zoos make animals feel at home? There are many different ways, but all involve creating living conditions similar to those in the wild. Let's look at some of these. some animals live in groups, like these penguins. Living in colonies, thousands of penguins may occupy one stretch of beach. Penguins spend much of their time swimming in chilly oceans, hunting for fish. In the zoo, penguins are always kept in groups. A solitary penguin would be unhappy. But in these specially designed enclosures, the penguins have all that they need: other penguins, water, and lots of fresh fish. The way a zoo cares for its animals also depends on where it is located. At London Zoo, reptiles must be kept indoors. Why? 5

7 Because London winters are cold, and these reptiles need to be warm all year-round. In the Reptile House, there are complex heating systems that keep the temperature perfect for the animals. A lot of other important work also goes on behind the scenes. Food preparation is crucial. Fruit, vegetables, rabbit, and rat are on the menu in the Reptile House. The zoo must provide the right food for each animal to keep it healthy. It's feeding time for the python. pythons hunt for small animals but only eat perhaps once in several weeks. In the zoo, the python is fed a dead animal. The keeper must fool the snake into thinking 6 its food is still alive. If the prey doesn't move, the snake won't attack. Other reptiles are fed live prey. The bearded dragon lizard has spotted a cricket. Lizards need a more regular supply of food, so crickets live in the tank too. These are some of the simple ways zoos make their animals feel at home. But there are others too. some animals need large open spaces. Lions live on Africa's spacious grassy plains, where they have room to roam and find food. They need space to hunt zebra and other animals that are their prey. In a wild animal park, animals are given much more space than in a regular zoo. The conditions here are similar to those in the wild. The lions may wander freely

8 in large enclosures. They don't need as much space as they have in Africa. Because their food is provided for them, they don't need to hunt. they live in groups called prides. In the wild animal park, they do also. Here the animals are free, and the people are locked up, in their cars. Wild animal parks have tried to re-create the animals' natural existence as closely as possible. For some animals, zoos must provide more than space and food. The zoo in San Diego, California, where the climate is warm and dry, has created a densely wooded, humid environment-- a tropical rain forest. Inside this structure, people can wander around to see the plants and wildlife. 7 A misting system creates the damp conditions of a rain forest. Spray from fine jets of water makes the air moist. Here, we can get an idea of what it's really like in a rain forest. Without these conditions, many exotic tropical flowers could not survive in San Diego. Tropical rain forests grow in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. In all these places, they provide rich habitats for animals. In the rain forests of southeastern Asia, gibbons live. These apes are natural acrobats and excellent singers. [gibbon singing] Gibbons spend most of their time in small family groups, high up in giant trees. This gibbon is in a zoo.

9 Separated from other zoo animals, it lives with other gibbons in its own miniforest. The dense foliage makes the gibbon feel more at home. Animals need more than space to be happy. They need the right kind of environment. As we have seen in the wild, gibbons live in trees. In this zoo, they also have trees in which to swing. The trees enable them to behave more like wild gibbons. The dwarf mongoose lives in an enclosure much like its wild habitat, but something else is needed to make it feel at home. dwarf mongooses spend much of their time looking for food. A mongoose would become bored if it were only fed once a day. To prevent this, some zoos 8 have invented ways to keep their animals busy. The keeper makes the animals hunt for their food by hiding it around the enclosure. Crickets are a source of protein for the mongoose. They are hidden in a coconut shell. The leftover crickets are hidden elsewhere. A special dispenser drips mealworms onto the sand. The mongoose digs them up later. In this enclosure, there are crickets, mealworms, and meat paste. Now it's up to the mongoose to find the food. Keeping busy searching for food, the mongooses can behave more like animals in the wild. (man) Welcome to London Zoo. This is a large bird-eating spider. This is Belinda. She's an adult female--

10 a bird-eating spider from Mexico. She's about 14 years old, but they have been known to live for 30 years. (narrator) Zoos are not just places to see exotic animals. They are also good places to learn about or touch the animals. We can learn valuable lessons about the natural world. After getting to know some of these animals better, we may have different feelings about them. Zoo visitors aren't the only ones who learn about the animals. Zoo employees learn too. This cottontop tamarin monkey has been hurt in a fight. the animal would probably die. Here, people can care for injured animals, so most animals in zoos live longer than in the wild. All zoo animals get regular 9 medical checkups, even if they are healthy. The information learned is useful in working with zoo animals and their wild relatives. Soon the tamarin will recover and return to its enclosure. Zoos help individual animals and can even help save a whole species. This bird is a dodo. There are no dodos today. They have become extinct. Today, many animals face extinction. Tigers... orangutans... and Asian elephants could all disappear like the dodo. They are called endangered animals-- animals in danger of extinction. The southern white rhino was also endangered, hunted almost to extinction for its valuable horn. How do zoos help endangered animals? One way

11 is by captive breeding. This baby rhino was born in a zoo. It was captive-bred. As more animals are born, they help the species avoid extinction. Captive-bred animals can be sent to other zoos. These zoos can have animals of this kind, too, without having to take them out of the wild. Many zoo animals are now captive-bred. Some may eventually be released back into the wild. This is called rehabilitation. These small South American monkeys are called golden lion tamarins. They are endangered by people who take their land and clear it for homes and farms. To save the species, zoos around the world joined together in a captive-breeding program. Zoos even helped save part of the tamarin's natural habitat in the coastal forest of Brazil. Some captive-bred animals were released. The tamarins had to learn to survive in the wild. They had to find food and shelter and get around in the dense treetops. Good zoos don't just put animals on display. They try to re-create their natural conditions. They breed the animals so they don't become extinct, and zoos may even be able to rehabilitate them. Funding for purchase and captioning of this video was provided by the U.S. Department of Education: PH: (V). 10