Working at a zoo is a great career path for someone who loves animals and isn’t afraid of hands-on work. Through engaging text and fun fact boxes, readers discover what zoo workers do and how a person can prepare for a career in this field. Additional information is provided in a clear graphic organizer. Colorful photographs of zoo animals and the workers who care for them keep readers entertained with each turn of the page. It takes special skills to be a successful zoo worker, and readers discover what those skills are as they learn about this exciting career.

This report follows up on an interim report released in February 2004 that focused on immediate needs in the areas of animal care and management, recordkeeping, and pest control. The report finds that the zoo has made good-faith efforts to correct deficiencies noted in the interim report and has made some noticeable improvements in the past year in zoo operations and animal care. However, problems in areas such as staff training, workplace culture, and strategic planning still need to be addressed. Specifically, the report recommends that the zoo immediately develop and implement animal-care training programs to ensure that people who are directly responsible for the well-being of its animal collection are adequately prepared and competent. The report commends a zoo-initiated strategic planning process as a positive step, but recommends it contain a more detailed, comprehensive strategy of how it will meet short-term goals and that it should link plans to upgrade facilities with those to acquire animals. The zoo should also focus on improving communication among keepers, veterinarians, nutritionists, senior managers, and curators.

Zoos are places where STEM comes to life, including the science of caring for animals, the technology used in zoo security, engineering that keeps habitats habitable, and the math used to calculate ticket sales. Readers are encouraged to draw connections between the STEM subjects they learn in school and the way STEM is used in the real world. This curricula-driven text uses high-interest subjects to discuss STEM and also covers the STEM careers that help zoos around the world run successfully. Fact boxes and colorful images provide opportunities for additional learning.

From Caldecott Honor winning team Steve Jenkins and Robin Page comes an early introduction to one of young readers favorite places: the zoo! Just a few things that a zookeeper might do at their job to keep their animals healthy, well fed, and safe would be to brush a hippo's tusks, play soccer with a rhino, or pretend to be a vulture's mother.

A close-up look at the contradictions and wonders of the modern zoo Orangutans swing from Kevlar-lined fire hoses. Giraffes feast on celebratory birthday cakes topped with carrots instead of candles. Hi-tech dinosaur robots growl among steel trees, while owls watch animated cartoons on old television sets. In American Zoo, sociologist David Grazian takes us on a safari through the contemporary zoo, alive with its many contradictions and strange wonders. Trading in his tweed jacket for a zoo uniform and a pair of muddy work boots, Grazian introduces us to zookeepers and animal rights activists, parents and toddlers, and the other human primates that make up the zoo's social world. He shows that in a major shift away from their unfortunate pasts, American zoos today emphasize naturalistic exhibits teeming with lush and immersive landscapes, breeding programs for endangered animals, and enrichment activities for their captive creatures. In doing so, zoos blur the imaginary boundaries we regularly use to separate culture from nature, humans from animals, and civilization from the wild. At the same time, zoos manage a wilderness of competing priorities—animal care, education, scientific research, and recreation—all while attempting to serve as centers for conservation in the wake of the current environmental and climate-change crisis. The world of the zoo reflects how we project our own prejudices and desires onto the animal kingdom, and invest nature with meaning and sentiment. A revealing portrayal of comic animals, delighted children, and feisty zookeepers, American Zoo is a remarkable close-up exploration of a classic cultural attraction.

Uses more than 230 historic images to provide a pictorial history of Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, located fourteen miles west of the city's center and managed by the Chicago Zoological Society.

Metamorphoses of the Zoo marshals a unique compendium of critical interventions that envision novel modes of authentic encounter that cultivate humanity's biophilic tendencies without abusing or degrading other animals. These take the form of radical restructurings of what were formerly zoos or map out entirely new, post-zoo sites or experiences. The result is a volume that contributes to moral progress on the inter-species front and eco-psychological health for a humankind whose habitats are now mostly citified or urbanizing.

Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, Lisa Uddin revisits the familiar narrative of zoo reform, from naked cages to more naturalistic enclosures. She argues that reform belongs to the story of cities and feelings toward many of their human inhabitants. In Zoo Renewal, Uddin demonstrates how efforts to make the zoo more natural and a haven for particular species reflected white fears about the American city—and, pointedly, how the shame many visitors felt in observing confined animals drew on broader anxieties about race and urban life. Examining the campaign against cages, renovations at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the San Diego Zoo, and the cases of a rare female white Bengal tiger and a collection of southern white rhinoceroses, Uddin unpacks episodes that challenge assumptions that zoos are about other worlds and other creatures and expand the history of U.S. urbanism. Uddin shows how the drive to protect endangered species and to ensure larger, safer zoos was shaped by struggles over urban decay, suburban growth, and the dilemmas of postwar American whiteness. In so doing, Zoo Renewal ultimately reveals how feeling bad, or good, at the zoo is connected to our feelings about American cities and their residents.

Zoos take care of animals and welcome visitors of all ages, but that's not all zoos do. Author Patricia Newman and photographer Annie Crawley bring readers behind the scenes at three zoos to meet scientists working to save endangered animals. Meredith Bastian's experiences studying wild orangutans help educate both zoo visitors and the zoo workers who care for captive orangutans. Jeff Baughman breeds black-footed ferrets and reintroduces them into the wild. And Rachel Santymire examines poop from black rhinoceroses at the zoo and in their natural habitat to benefit all black rhinos. Find out how zoo scientists are helping us learn more about these remarkable, at-risk species before it's too late!