The Alipore Zoo - Kolkata (Calcutta)
Alipore Zoo is situated right next to the national library and provides a great place to have some fun. Most of the time the Alipore Zoo is packed with visitors. Alipore Zoo is famous for the Rpyale Bengal Tiger. Few years back one crazy person tried to award the royale bengal tiger with “mala” and got killed. So, if you are in the zoo, just watch them from outside and never try to get inside the fence.
The zoo dates back to 1985 and a must visit place for everyone. Here are some snaps of the Alipore Zoo.
Alipore Zoo- Kolkata
Present Director: Subit Chowdhury
Some Important News: Aditya 255 year old Tortoise died in Kolkata, 2006
Questions to think about:
- Do you need more room for the animals?
- Do you think the animals are well fed? (malneutrition problem?)
- Do we need netter management of the zoo?
- Do we need more awareness among the visitor?
Well, if you answer to any of the questions above, please feel free to reply.
Personally I think we do need more room place for the animals. The Zoo also needs better management as it is not well maintained and lacks cleanliness. The zoo is one the most prominet spot for the love couples to meet and chat. Not sure how much some of them care for the animals. Trash, papers bags are scattered everywhere and people having picnic in various places looks great but makes the zoo dirtier. Some of the animals really look sad too.
Well, here is a brief history that is talen and partially modified from wikipedia, for full article visit here.
History
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Governor General of Bengal established Alipore Zoological Gardens around 1800 in his summerhome near Barrackpore near Kolkata as a part of the Indian Natural History Project.When Wellesley returned toEngland with his brother Richard Wellesley the animals were then looked after by the famous Scottish physician zoologist Francis Buchanan-Hamilton.
The foundation of zoos in major cities around the world leads to the transition of managerie to a formal zoological garden. In 1873, the Lieutenant-Governor Sir Richard Temple formally proposed the formation of a zoo in Kolkata, and the Government finally allotted land for the zoo based on to the joint petition of the Asiatic Society and Agri-Horticultural Society.
The zoo was formally opened in Alipore - a posh Kolkata suburb, and inaugurated on January 1, 1876 by Edward VII, then Prince of Wales. (Some reports place the inauguration on an alternate date of December 27, 1875).[5] The initial stock consisted of the private menagerie of Carl Louis Schwendler (1838 – 1882), a German electrician who was posted in India for a feasibility study of electrically lighting Indian Railway stations. Gifts were also accepted from the general public.
The initial collection consisted of the following animals:
- African Buffalo
- Zanzibar Ram,
- Domestic sheep,
- Four-horned sheep,
- Hybrid Kashmiri Goat,
- Indian Antelope, Indian Gazelle,
- Sambar Deer, Spotted Deer
- Hog Deer
It is not clear whether the Aldabra Giant Tortoise Adwaita was among the opening stock of animals. The animals at Barrackpore Park were added to the collection over the first few months of 1886, significantly increasing its size. The zoo was thrown open to the public on May 6, 1876. It grew based on gifts from British and Indian nobility - like Raja Suryakanta Acharya of Mymensingh in whose honour the open air tiger enclosure is named the Mymensingh Enclosure. Other contributors who donated part or all of their private menagerie to the Alipore Zoo included the Maharaja of Mysore Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV.
The park was initially run by an honorary managing committee which included Schwendler and the famous botanist George King. The first Indian superintendent of the zoo was Ram Brahma Sanyal, who did much to improve the standing of the Alipore Zoo and achieved good captive breeding success in an era when such initiatives were rarely heard of. One such success story of the zoo was a live birth of the rare Sumatran Rhinoceros in 1889. The next pregnancy in captivity occurred at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1997, but ended with a miscarriage.Cincinnati Zoo finally recorded a live birth in 2001. Alipore Zoo was a pioneer among zoos in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century under Sanyal, who published the first handbook on captive animal keeping. The zoo had an unusually high scientific standard for its time, and the record of the Cladotaenia genus (Cohn, 1901) of parasites are based upon cestodes (flatworm) found in an Australian bird that died at the zoo.
Dispute:
Pressed for space as Kolkata developed, and lacking adequate government funding, the zoo attracted a lot of controversy in the latter half of the 20th century due to cramped living conditions of the animals, lack of initiative at breeding rare species, and for cross-breeding experiments between species.
The zoo has attracted a lot of criticism over the years for keeping single and unpaired specimens of rare species like the Banteng, Great Indian One-horned Rhinoceros, Crowned Crane and the Lion-tailed Macaque. Lack of breeding and exchange programs has led to the elimination of individuals and populations of environmentally vulnerable species like the Southern Cassowary, wild Yak, Giant Eland, Slow Loris and Echidna.
The cramped, unsuitable and unhygienic conditions inside the cages, and in the zoo in general has been criticized for long. A polar bear was kept in the zoo (in the 1960s) in the tropical climate of Kolkata with merely an electric fan to cool it. The death of a Great Indian One-horned Rhinoceros sparked off speculation about the veterinary efficiency at the zoo. ZooCheck Canada found conditions in the zoo unsatisfactory in 2004.The zoo director Subir Choudhury has gone on record in 2006 saying:
We are aware that the animals and birds are not well in the cages and moats. Efforts are on minimizing their agony.
In 2007, noted chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall was “appalled” by the condition of the chimpanzees in the zoo.
Other criticism directed towards the zoo has been due to persistence of practices no longer associated with zoos, like offering elephant rides. The zoo has also been criticized for the quality of its animal - visitor interaction. Teasing of animals was a common occurrence at the zoo, though corrective measures are underway. On January 1, 1996 the tiger Shiva mauled two visitors as they tried to garland it, killing one, and earning him the runner-up for the Darwin Awards. Another mauling leading to a death occurred in 2000, and in 2005 yet another visitor was found pulling the tail of a white tiger, but luckily was unharmed.
The zoo has also been criticized for its animal - keeper relations. A chimpanzee attacked and severely injured its keeper in Alipore Zoo, and numerous other incidents have been reported including the case of an elephant trampling its mahout to death in 1963 which had to be put down. In 2001, it was revealed that zoo staff drugged the Great Indian One-horned Rhinoceros into relieving itself more often than normal, which enabled them to collect the urine and sell it on the black market as an anti-impotence medicine. Besides such major controversies, the zoo has also attracted bad press for relatively minor offences like flouting of the ban on plastics.
Panthera hybrid program
The zoo attracted flak from the zoo community and the scientific community in general, because of cross breeding experiments between lions and tigers to produce strains like tigons, and litigons (see Panthera hybrid). The zoo bred two tigons in the 1970s — Rudrani (b. 1971) and Ranjini (b.1973) were bred from the cross between a Royal Bengal Tiger and an African Lion. Rudrani went on to produce 7 offsprings by mating with an Asiatic Lion, producing “litigon”s. One of these litigons, named Cubanacan survived to adulthood, stood over 5.5 feet tall, measured over 11.5 feet and weighed over 800 pounds. It died in 1991 at the age of 15. It was marketed by the zoo as the world’s largest living big cat. All such hybrid males were sterile. Quite a few of these creatures suffered from genetic abnormalities and many died prematurely. Rangini, the last tigon in the zoo, died in 1999 as the oldest known tigon from hideous deformities. The zoo has stopped breeding hybrids after the 1985 legislation passed by the Government of India banning breeding of panthera hybrids after a vigorous campaign by the World Wide Fund for Nature (then World Wildlife Fund).
Attractions
The zoo remains one of the most popular winter tourist attractions in Kolkata, but revenue earned is low as gate costs are highly subsidized. The ticket prices at the gate increased from Rs 5 to Rs 10 in the winter of 2003 (a doubling from approx. 12 c to 25 c in the exchange rate of the time). The footfall figures in 2005 showed an annual visitation of almost 20 lakh (20,00,000) — more than any other tourist attraction in Kolkata, and a peak of over 25,000 on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
The zoo displays a large number of crowd-pulling megafauna, including the Royal Bengal Tiger, African Lion, Jaguar, Hippopotamus, Great Indian One-horned Rhinoceros, Reticulated Giraffe, Grant’s Zebra, Emu, Dromedary Camel and Indian Elephant. Previously, other megafauna like the Panthera hybrids and the Giant Eland were present.
The zoo sported a large collection of attractive birds, including some threatened species up until the 1980s - large parrots including a number of Macaw species, Conures, lories and lorikeets; other large birds like Touracos and Hornbills; colourful game birds like the Golden Pheasant, Lady Amherst’s Pheasant and Swinhoe’s Pheasant and some large flightless birds like the Emu, Cassowary and Ostrich. However, lack of pairing and exchange programs have caused a significant decline in the populations, causing some of the populations to die out.
1. A Giraffe - You can never bear their hights! at Kolkata Zoo
2. Hippopotamus bathing at Alipore Zoo, Kolkata
3. Love Birds at Alipore Zoo , Kolkata
4. Simpanji at Alipore Zoo, Kolkata
5. Zebra at Alipore Zoo, Kolkata
For Complete Gallery, Plese Click the Link : PICTURE GALLERY OF ALIPORE ZOO - KOLKATA
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