In 1967, Los Angeles Zoo began breeding mountain tapirs from one pair, and the effort still shapes the species today

Mountain tapirs are among the hardest animals to breed in a zoo. One of the earliest successes was documented in a study in the International Zoo Yearbook: the Los Angeles Zoo's program that began in 1967 with a single breeding pair. Decades later, the founding pair remains central to the way mountain tapirs exist in zoos today.

The start of the breeding effort