On the other side of wire mesh, two large lions pace, shaking their shaggy manes and occasionally letting out a low rumbling, not quite a roar. They think – or perhaps hope – it is feeding day but their keepers have other plans.
“We sort of mimic what happens in the wild,” Meryl says. “They got fed on Monday.” It’s Wednesday, so Meryl is walking around the temporarily empty enclosure with a bucket and a shovel, looking for the outcome of that feed: lion poo.
The janitorial duties are a reminder that there is only so much a city enclosure can do to mimic the sprawling sub-Saharan savannah that is the predator’s natural environment. But providing appropriate habitat, social and intellectual enrichment, and encouraging natural behavioural expression in captive animals has been a welfare principle at Melbourne zoo for years now. Hence the lions’ intermittent fasting (they would not hunt every day in the wild) and the giant pile of scented leaves and hanging branches that their other keeper, Monique, has placed in the enclosure.
She sprays the leaves with lavender. “They really love different scents, so a lot of the enrichment we give is scent-based,” Meryl says.
Upon re-entering the enclosure, one of the lions, Ndidi, immediately finds the pile of leaves and rolls about in it like a puppy who’s just had a bath.
Melbourne Zoological Gardens, as it was first called, opened in 1862. Today, it is part of Zoos Victoria, along with Healesville sanctuary, Werribee open plains zoo and Kyabram fauna park. The organisation exists, like all zoos, in a constant state of tension between the huge environmental challenges of the modern era and the weight of its history.
It’s a dark history, inextricable from empire and colonialism. In its early years, the zoo bought animals from dealers and professional hunters. On site, the public could throw peanuts to the bears, ride an elephant or watch an orangutan smoke cigarettes and drink liquor.
Public expectations surrounding animal welfare have shifted profoundly since then, and many have questioned whether zoos ought to exist at all.
Zoos Victoria’s chief executive, Dr Jenny Gray, has made it a habit to sit in the centre of this disquiet. In 2009, after taking the helm at Zoos Victoria, she launched a new strategy: a complete transformation to a “zoo-based conservation organisation”. It acknowledged head-on what it described as “the ongoing challenges that arise from the paradox of holding animals in captivity while promoting conservation”.
Regular animal welfare surveys began, the first of which were “so confronting”, Gray says. “We found all kinds of things that were just obviously subpar. “These days … we see future risks, but we don’t have animals living without heaters or living without sufficient water points.”
More than 15 years later, the zoo has been reshaped around environmental awareness and conservation education, and the enclosures have progressively changed in the interests of animal welfare.
Some animals, like elephants, have just been moved out. Melbourne zoo’s nine elephants were transported last year to a 21-hectare habitat at Werribee open range zoo amid growing concerns about whether they can be accommodated at zoos at all. Those from other Australian zoos have been moved to the Monarto safari park in regional South Australia – except for two at the privately owned Sydney zoo, the only elephants still in city zoos.
Meanwhile, commercial activities associated with visitors who come to see “traditional” zoo animals are funding conservation work for less high-profile endangered native fauna.
Last year a Zoos Victoria breeding program led to the release of 3,000 critically endangered Baw Baw frogs. A similar program for guthega skinks is showing promising results. In 2021 the 30-year captive breeding program for eastern-barred bandicoots was wound up after successful reintroduction programs meant the marsupial was reclassified from extinct in the wild to endangered.
Lauren Hemsworth, an associate professor from the University of Melbourne’s animal welfare science centre, says Zoos Victoria is “recognised as being really quite progressive when it comes to animal welfare and being one of the first to really start to tackle it and be open to collaborating with universities and researchers”.
All industries that use animals are facing increasing public pressure to provide assurances about welfare standards, Hemsworth says. Research shows some animals find humans aversive or fear-provoking, and develop abnormal “stereotypic” or repetitive behaviours when in captivity “that don’t appear to have any clear function and that perhaps represent frustration and inability to cope with that environment”.
“So some of those ethical questions are really around how we can actually meet their needs within a zoo environment, or [whether there are] other ways that we can do it if conservation is the ultimate aim,” Hemsworth says.
Cooperative care
Choice and control have become central to animal care. In the back of house area at the binturong habitat, a keeper, Marcus, points out the crush, a mechanism designed to pin the animal to the mesh for procedures like vaccinations. It’s rarely used now in the brute way the name implies, he says.
“We tried to move away from restrained healthcare,” he says. “We’re training them to present their flanks to the side of the cage so it’s safer for the keepers, far less stressful for them, much better for welfare. We don’t force them to do anything they don’t want to do.”
Tugu, one of the two binturongs, curiously inspects the visitors, his wiry-haired tail swishing as it brushes past.
Gray says they saw the mutual benefits of this approach when a serval was bitten by a snake. Administering medicine was easy because the serval had been trained to “participate in his own healthcare”.
Another keeper, Jess, demonstrates this kind of training with Hutan, a Sumatran tiger. Hutan knows to press his thigh up against the mesh to receive vaccinations, and flick his tail through a gap in the fence if vets need to draw blood.
Today Jess is training him for his intellectual stimulation to interact with what appears to be a tiger-sized wobbler toy. When he taps the dome with his paw, he gets some fresh meat.
Tigers are also stimulated by scent. One of Hutan’s enrichment items today is a blanket that has been scent-marked by his sister, Indrah, and sprayed with perfume. (He particularly likes “the fancy ones”, Jess says, while Indrah’s favourite is Estée Lauder’s Cinnabar. The zoo often receives donations of perfume, especially after Christmas.)
Keeping tigers in zoos has also been the subject of welfare discussions, Hemsworth says, because their natural environment includes a large range.
“In a zoo environment, you obviously have a level of confinement,” she says. “Being able to meet a similar type of environment is particularly challenging.”
This is further complicated by the conservation goal. Sumatran tigers are critically endangered. With habitat loss limiting the scope of release programs, zoos provide an important genetic life raft. Genetics for rare and endangered species are carefully mapped and international breeding programs tracked in stud books, many of which are overseen by a single designated keeper under the auspices of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (Melbourne zoo holds the stud book for Goodfellow’s tree kangaroo).
There is a careful line that keepers and zoos must draw, and continually question: what’s the right kind of relationship for animals and humans to have?
“I guess there’s always a respect for the boundary,” a keeper, Alex, says.
Alex looks after ungulates, including the peccaries (which look like large wiry pigs), Felix the pygmy hippopotamus and the giraffes. A giraffe calf was born to the herd at Melbourne zoo just over a week ago, and Alex talks about it with the pride of a new parent.
Giraffes are friendly, calm animals, Alex says, and can develop strong relationships with individual keepers. “They can pick you out of a crowd, even if you’re not in uniform.”
When you are that close to an animal, “it can be hard to not anthropomorphise sometimes,” he says. “You just check yourself as much as you can … we are always here for their interest first and trying to always look through their eyes.”
• This article was amended on 15 February 2026. An earlier version said some animals had been moved to the Monsanto safari park in South Australia. The correct name of the facility is the Monarto safari park.
