Bears do it. Bees do it. It has been known for some time that even educated fleas do it. Yet the media is continually amazed at the propensity for zoo animals to fall in love and produce new zoo animals as a result.
This week alone we’ve had a new elephant calf at Dublin Zoo, two other elephants getting their names, and a red panda at Fota Wildlife Park that will stay without one until the public suggests something suitable. You can imagine the red-panda parents telling the neighbours, “Well, we thought it might be Trevor for a boy panda or Stacey if it was a girl panda, but the human children are going to decide, so it’ll probably be some play on ‘Kung-Fu . . .’ ”
The Dublin elephant calves were named at a ceremony this week that was covered widely by the press, although the pregnancy and birth had already been covered in a depth normally reserved for senior British royals.
They joined a recently arrived giraffe and zebra, and over the past couple of years there have been other giraffes, elephants, a tapir, a bongo and a sea lion. During this time the birth of an animal at the zoo has become the cat picture of the print media.
It feels a little like stepping on the tail of a sick puppy to point out that the “zoo baby/name that animal” report has become one of the most successful, regularly repeated PR tricks of recent times. But it has, and it’s easy to see why.
It contains several cornerstones of the good-news story. New life. Cuteness. A widely loved tourist attraction. Something for the kids to get involved in. It has universal appeal, as obvious by just how many newspapers around the world are running a variant on this story right now.
There’s a baby alpaca at Sewerby Zoo, in England, that needs a name to go with a face straight out of a Disney cartoon. There’s a giraffe at Whipsnade, a tiger cub at Indianapolis Zoo and an elephant in Arizona, none of which can apply for a passport until the public coughs up a name.
Feeding news stories
In this part of the world, zoos have managed to push themselves away from being seen as commercial enterprises, usually charging high prices in order to maintain the standards necessary to keep the animals in proper care or to develop the breeding programmes that in turn feed these news stories.
There’s a reason why Dublin Zoo has become one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, and spikes in visiting numbers around new births help. The animal-rights group Peta called the PR drive behind Dublin Zoo’s new zebra foal as representing nothing but a spotlight on the “incarceration” of such animals, but that voice is largely lost beneath the clamour for more pictures, more naming competitions, more cuteness.
Dublin Zoo and Fota Wildlife Park have developed almost unparalleled relationships with the media, through behind-the-scenes TV programmes and the constant feeding of good-news stories to the press. You cannot fault them for that approach, and both have done so while developing outstanding attractions.
They have also, though, identified just how easy it is to exploit the formulaic nature of the daily press. It doesn’t matter that one baby elephant looks pretty much like the last baby elephant: they are pretty much guaranteed to get a good splash. Since the days when the world became obsessed with the sex lives of captive pandas, the reproductive results of zoo animals have become a trope of modern media.
Looking again at the past month, there’s been Ballyrory the new giraffe at Belfast Zoo, and the newborn monkey being reared by its handler because its mother rejected it. There was a baby hippo at Taronga Western Plains Zoo, in Australia; another one in Copenhagen; a bonobo in Columbus, Ohio; three hyenas in Denver, Colorado. They’re all at it, all the time, each time producing not just a new animal but an Identikit story and a Facebook-friendly picture for the local press.
As for the humans, most of us arrive in this world unnoticed. Attention tends to be reserved for those born to a British royal, to Brian and Amy, in a car on the way to the hospital, or a minute or two after New Year’s Eve. Although coverage would be so much more fun if the public were allowed to name each of these new arrivals too.
shegarty@irishtimes.com @shanehegarty