News

In the belief that World Pangolin Day has already entered public awareness and that the media would provide information about it in copious amounts, I devoted the last Director’s View to the recent birth of a male giraffe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Despite the fact that just four days before, the...

The first official ride of the new Wandering Bus took place in Cameroon. This will lead to nature conservation for the next generation of children in the surroundings of the Dja Biosphere Reserve in the east of the country. Not only will it give them the opportunity to see the gorillas at the Méfou Rescue Station, but they can...

After climbing 565 stairs in the Indian town of Tirukalukundram, we reached the top of the mountain, which features a Hindu temple complex known as the Eagle or Vulture Temple. This has gained fame outside of the state of Tamil Nadu because it was on these cliffs, with a broad view of the surrounding countryside, that the...

On Wednesday evening, Ginni, an Asiatic lioness originally from the Indian state of Gujarat, underwent artificial insemination. This was carried out in Prague Zoo by a team led by Professor Thomas Hildebrandt, from Berlin’s Leibniz Institute, in cooperation with Prague Zoo’s veterinarians. The sperm used for the procedure...

My fairy tales featuring gorillas from Prague Zoo were written for my children years ago. Later, they reached many other Czech children in book form. In the end, however, it was in Central Africa that they celebrated their greatest success. Twenty thousand copies of Gorilla Fairy Tales – some of which were written by Tereza...

In the last issue of the journal The Science of Nature, we published a paper summarizing the results of our research on how people evaluate the beauty of the mammals in Prague Zoo. Beauty here is related solely to appearance, with no consideration given to movement or any other activities of a given species or the presence of...

Prague Zoo has started giving financial support to the Pesisir Balikpapan Project, which has been running in the Balikpapan Bay on the island of Borneo under Czech leadership since 2007. Its aim is to protect this highly valuable natural area, which is home to, among other things, a population of about 2,000 Proboscis Monkeys,...

It’s quite incredible. In a rather dingy department store you take the lift to the top floor and it opens onto one of the most appalling menageries in the world. It is located in Bangkok, Thailand, on the top floor of the Pata Department Store. I first visited this menagerie more than three years ago and at the time I wrote:

The Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, held last week in London, was hardly mentioned by the Czech media. It was as though the protection of elephants, rhinoceroses, pangolins and other species threatened by poaching and illegal trade were not our concern. Of course it is, which some of Czech zoos as well as other...