A wise zookeeper at a zoo in Fukuoka is on record as saying: “Animal Welfare is not well understood in Japan. Most Japanese people do not understand animals.”
Part of the problem is cultural. Most Japanese people do not understand animals, they cannot conceive of animals as sentient beings who can think and feel. Therefore animals in zoos are simply there as entertainment or as things to be played with.
Nagasaki Bio Park even has a notice asking people to wash their hands before and after “playing” with the animals!
As an indication of the warped cultural perceptions: Nagasaki Bio Park is often described as “A Paradise for Capybaras” even though the capybaras have no access to grass which should be the essential component of their diet, as it is in the wild and at good zoos throughout the world. At every zoo in Britain capybaras live in grass enclosures.
Animals are big business in Japan, especially if they are cute. When a new panda cub arrived at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, Kansai University estimated the cub had the potential to boost the Tokyo area economy by \26.7 billion yen over the course of a year.
At most zoos in Japan basic Animal Welfare requirements do not exist. International visitors frequently leave negative comments such as: “Cramped, tiny enclosures with concrete floors and stressed and listless animals.
In the case of capybaras, many, possibly most, zoos in Japan do not provide even the most basic requirements for this semi aquatic animal. You will find capybaras in tiny pens with concrete floors and a small plastic tub of water, barely large enough for one capybara to fit in. Capybaras are semiaquatic and very active and playful in water in their natural habitat. They need a large pond to exhibit these natural behaviours. It is heartbreaking to see them being given just a small plastic tub – a cynical and cruel acknowledgement that these are animals which need access to water.
You can see just how graceful capybaras are when they have the space to exhibit their natural aquatic behaviours in the video below. The pond in this video is at Nagasaki Bio Park and is excellent.
How Ryosuke controls Prune. Capybara Graceful Water Dance. 優雅的水舞カピバラの優雅なウォーターダンス
There are a few excellent primate facilities in Japan which meet international Animal Welfare standards.
The head of the Japan Association of Zoos and Aquariums, JAZA, acknowledges the problem and says he would like to see zoos move from being places merely for people’s entertainment to becoming facilities for teaching people about animals and the different species, and promoting respect and understanding for these animals. He also stresses the need to promote conservation and biodiversity, following Europe and America’s lead. However he appears to be doing little to resolve the Animal Welfare issue.
One of the biggest barriers to significant reform is that no specific laws exist to define the roles of zoos or govern their management.
As one professor of Animal Law at Nagasaki University told me: “We only have laws to protect pet animals, like dogs and cats”.
There is still no national system of accreditation for zoos and aquariums in Japan, even though they exist for institutions such as museums! This fact tells you how little importance is attached to animals in Japan.
Only about half of all zoos in Japan are members of JAZA. These number about 151.
There are many small zoos in Japan, often in city centre locations, where people can relieve their stress by being with or petting animals. The demand is great as Japan can be a very stressful society as indicated by the high suicide rate.
These small zoos are often in completely inappropriate places such as beside a busy, main road with only a fence separating the animals from the speeding, noisy traffic. Foreign visitors frequently comment that the animals in petting zoos look stressed and unhealthy because of all the attention and petting they receive, giving them no time to relax and sleep.
There is even an indoor petting zoo in a shopping mall where an adult male lion lives! Called the Meccha Suwareru Zoo it is inside the Pieri Moriyama shopping mall in Shiga prefecture.
It is not unusual to find large animals like alpacas in these small indoor petting zoos.
Many zoos in Japan invite visitors to handle and pet their animals, especially baby animals. This often breaks the bond between the mother and her baby, leading to behavioural and health issues both for the mother and her offspring as he grows older. I know of one case where the keepers’ handling of the mother’s newborn pups destroyed the bond between mother and her pups and led to the premature death of the mother only two months after she had given birth.
Nagasaki Bio Park used to boast, quite justifiably, that at their zoo the mother capybara looked after her pups who stayed with her in a separate enclosure for the first 6 weeks of their life and were not handled at all by the keeper. That has recently changed, presumably in the misguided intention of making the baby capybaras more receptive to being handled by humans! This was quite unnecessary as within 2 – 3 days of being released into the capybara herd, after being separated for the first 6 weeks of their lives, the pups were completely at ease being petted by the visitors.
Wild animals tend to be viewed in a two-dimensional and superficial way in Japan. Documentaries and other media promote these wild animals as “cute”. By promoting cuteness the media reinforces the view of people in Japan that animals are cute rather than real. There is usually no attempt to provide information about a species or to encourage people to take an interest in animals as sentient beings.
To rectify Animal Welfare issues zoos must understand the importance for captive animals to have some control over their lives and to be able to exhibit their natural behaviours. This means enclosures must be designed to provide the species with the space and facilities they need to exhibit these natural behaviours. In many zoos if a space becomes available, an animal is found to occupy that space regardless of whether the space is suitable for that animal.
One tragic Animal Welfare case focused the spotlight on Japan’s insensitivity to animal suffering when a petition was launched to try to rescue an elephant named Hanako, who had been kept alone in solitary isolation for over 60 years at Tokyo’s Inokashira Park Zoo, and send her back to Thailand.
Standards in zoos around the world, in Europe, Australia, and North America have been improving in recent decades. It is time for Japan to catch up.
But first Japan must embrace the latest research on Animal Welfare, including in my own field, Capybara Husbandry. In my experience most zoo directors, management and chief animal keepers have no understanding of animals and do not speak English. This means they are completely out of touch with modern Animal Welfare practice and the latest research on different species. The lack of English often means they have no concept of Animal Welfare and continue to promote their animals as entertainment.
As in so many traditional Japanese companies, the rules are enforced by very conservative people, often older men, who do not like to move with the times and do not feel comfortable with change. The zookeepers are also often what my friends describe as very conservative people, who often do not feel comfortable thinking for themselves in order to make the best decisions.
The way the capybaras are fed at Nagasaki Bio Park is deeply concerning. They are given two small “meals” a day of vegetables. For the rest of the day the capybaras have to beg for bamboo and pellets from visitors, some of whom tease the capybaras. This is a completely unscientific and unsatisfactory way of feeding an animal. Some capybaras are very successful at being fed by visitors while others get no bamboo or pellets at all. If they are hungry there is hay, but hay is very low in nutrients compared with the grass which they would eat in their natural habitat and at every good zoo.
Older animals need more nutrition and protein but Nagasaki Bio Park ignores this. The capybara keepers, in this rules-based society, follow the rules and only feed the capybaras twice a day even if this results in a capybara not getting enough to eat and dying prematurely.
Most importantly, the capybaras have no access to grass. As mentioned above it is a basic tenet of modern Animal Welfare that animals in captivity must be able to exhibit their natural behaviours and have some control over their lives. For capybaras this means being able to eat grass whenever they are hungry and to have control over when they eat.
One older capybara, Donut, does not get enough to eat. He eats very little during the day, if at all, as he is often either not in the visitor area, or he is sleeping when visitors offer him food . Also not many visitors offer Donut food. Also, Donut has a sore leg so he often spends a long time in the pond, resting his leg, away from the area frequented by visitors. When he is in the petting area he does not walk around begging for food because of his sore leg. Only a temporary keeper at the Biopark gives Donut the extra food he needs. This keeper is the son of a senior manager and is much more intelligent than the other capybara keepers.
If Donut could eat grass whenever he was hungry he would get the nutrition he needs.
The price of pellets went up after the pandemic so the capybaras are no longer given pellets and the pellet containers contain as few as 7 small pellets! The containers used to hold 25 – 30 pellets.
When I first visited Nagasaki Bio Park in 2012 the capybaras were given a much larger amount of vegetables such that there were always leftover vegetables for any capybara who was still hungry up to about midday or even 1 PM on occasions. In the past there was one chief capybara keeper who would give a thin capybara extra pellets, bamboo and a nutritious green plant during the day. She also let one slightly smaller capybara, Keiko, graze for half an hour or so outside the enclosure when Keiko managed to escape. She also took the most senior capybaras out for a walk for about 90 minutes to graze on the grass growing down the hill from the capybara enclosure on days when the Bio Park was not busy. Other keepers in the past would give the capybaras a mid afternoon snack of pellets.
However, there appears to be a new layer of management imposing rigid rules which control the behaviour of the keepers. This means that the keepers do not respond to the needs of each capybara but feel compelled to follow the rules. When you are working with animals you cannot impose rigid rules and expect the animals to thrive.
A good keeper would evaluate each animal based on his needs and ensure the healthiest outcome for each animal.
At Nagasaki Bio Park much of the capybaras’ enclosure is concrete which can lead to swellings and sores on the capybara’s “elbow” joints.
I have tried so hard to persuade the Biopark to hear the modern Animal Welfare science which experts in the field have developed. Others have contacted the Biopark asking them to listen to me. But heartbreakingly our efforts have fallen on deaf ears.
A friend wrote the following in response to this blog:
Just thought to send a few thoughts on this topic. I was browsing reddit some time ago, and came across a thread on animal rights.
What you said at the start of your article is so true- animal rights is not well understood in Japan, if at all. Animals are not thought of as sentinent beings, more of possessions/things that need to be ‘cute’ at all times, and quickly pass out of the thoughts of the ‘viewer’.
There are numerous accounts of the horrible treatment of animals at zoos (which you mentioned); and venturing out into the suburbs/countryside of Japan reveals the cruel treatment of even ‘pets’.
I remember going to stay in a ryokan inn in the countryside once, and I went outside to see the stars better from behind the inn. I heard some noise, and smelt the smell of old oil. After taking a few steps, I saw a kennel, illuminated by my phone light. There was a dog, chained to the kennel. The chain barely let him move more than his own body’s length out of the kennel. An old bowl of water was there, and maybe some discarded food scraps. The ground around the kennel was bare, the poor darling had nothing left to do. He wagged his tail at me, desperate for any interaction. I stroked his fur, and he was so, so desperate for human touch, and contact, that I was moved to tears. I showed the proprietress my oil-sleaked hand, and asked what was up with the treatment of the dog, saying that it was totally irresponsible, and animal abuse. She was like ‘oh, my husband used the dog as a hunting dog, so he’s just out there now because my husband passed a few years back. I feed him and give him water, so what is the problem?’
Imagine, going from being a hunting dog, all that exercise and stimulation, to spending YEARS attached to a two meter chain, unable to move, to run, to exercise, to do nothing but stare at the sky. And I am sure it snows heavily in that region. The only thing that protected it from death during those years I am sure is that kennel… Decaying, hole-riddled piece of wood it was.
This was just heartbreaking. The old lady proprietress somehow didn’t get what I was saying, and only apologised for the state of my oily hand. That was all that she was concerned about. That poor, poor dog.
PSA- do not google what Japan does with unwanted dogs, because I believe they top the world with that particular horrifying statistic. Add to that all of the pet stores where the animal has barely the space to move or stretch, and is surrounded by people and artificial lights and newspaper all day long…
On the topic of animals not being housed properly, the other day in the countryside I saw a MEERCAT in a cage in a pet store. Sold for dirt cheap, the poor darling could barely move. Never mind that it is illegal trade for sure, it is not against the law in Japan to own exotic animals.
There are heaps of videos in Japanese on YouTube of people owning multiple exotic animals in shanty cages, nocturnals next to predator next to prey, all under artifical lights, being fed dog food or some shit… and all of the comments in Japanese are POSITIVE! Oh, so cute! Look at those colors! How adorable! NOTHING, NOT A WORD, about how cruel it is to do that to poor animals. The mistreatment becomes an active sales point. It is an absolute tragedy.
It is good that there are associations such as JAZA here. Unfortunately, the issue seems to be that the law is very grey around this. Even though animal abuse is outlawed, good luck getting a prosecutor to take the case (even if there is clear cut evidence, they are probably overloaded, given Japan’s 99% successful prosecution rate… gotta love those forced confessions).
Other places just simply do not care, due to the outdated attitudes that you very clearly described.
It is heartbreaking to hear of the changes in breeding in Nagasaki Bio Park- what a stressful and horrible practice for the poor babies. I find that most dogs/cats in pet stores here too also are sold at 1-2 months old, far too young to be seperated from their parents.
What ended up happening to poor Hanako? I cannot believe such a beautiful animal, especially one with such socialisation necessities, was kept alone for such a long time… I hope she managed to escape.
The directors and managers etc could even try to at the very least Google translate some of the animal welfare content produced in English, if they were even interested, that is. But they are not, and want to stay in their insulated bubble. Like one of the previous emails I sent, many Japanese think Japan is the center of the world, and do not want to even concern themselves with world affairs outside Japan, because it is ‘irrelevant.’ I remember when the Capitol was stormed, my fellow foreign coworkers and I were all over the news, worried about such a cataclismic event happening, while our Japanese coworkers didn’t know/care why this was such a big deal, and told us insensitively just to get back to work and ‘stop doing non-work related things.’ It is so sad that the capybaras are going hungry, and have to ‘perform’ to visitors for their little pellets that they need for their nutrition… It is inhumane and disgusting. Poor babies. Especially poor Donut… as an older capybara, as you stated, needs more attention and nutrients, and he is being just left alone with his poor sore leg… how you have not lost your temper and raged at these people I do not know.
capybaraworld 