Midbarium provides a home for 100 species, among them, the rare white lion, and serves as a hospital for animals in the region. But can keeping animals in captivity ever be justified – even to preserve near-extinct species?
Naama Riba. Mar 21, 2024
One of the busiest places in Midbarium, the new Be’er Sheva zoo, is the Guinea baboon compound. A year-and-a-half ago, this group of 30 baboons arrived from a zoo in France to their new home, previously located elsewhere in Be’er Sheva and known as the NegevZoo. It appears that their new residence in Midbarium stimulated the troop’s dominant male Palo and the adolescent male, Taka. Both started to produce many offspring and today the troop numbers 25.
Midbarium’s director, Ziv Reshef, who also managed the old zoo, says that the baboons in the garden are part of a global conservation and breeding program. “The International Union for Conservation of Nature has designated them an endangered species. There is a coordinator for them who manages their movement and preservation,” he says. “We told him that the conditions here seem to be so good that they can’t stop reproducing and a third round of pregnancies will soon begin. He issued an order to stop this.”
‘We have endangered animals here, such as tigers, and injured animals – many birds without wings, and you can also see a deer and a wolf with three legs,’ says Midbarium’s director, Ziv Reshef.
The solution to reducing the birthrate was a feminist one: “The males were given subcutaneous implants that secrete hormones that suppress reproduction. We did this instead of giving a hormonal solution to a large number of females.”
The baboon compound is just one part of the new Midbarium (Desertarium), which, as its name suggests, is located on the edge of the desert. Covering 140 dunams (35 acres), it houses about 100 species of animals, including eagles, lions, hippopotami, zebras, giraffes, meerkats and crocodiles, cheetahs, turtles, snakes and much more.
The opening of a new zoo is a rare event in Israel. The Israel Zoo Association has just six members, which include the Ramat Gan Safari Park, Jerusalem’s Biblical Zoo, Gan Garoo in Nir David, the Haifa Educational Zoo and Hai Park Kiryat Motzkin.
In contrast to other attractions, which require large amounts of land and closed cages, the Midbarium’s distance from the city has enabled planners to create a more natural environment away from urban noise. The animals live in a kind of big desert kingdom of different habitats. The main ones are called Canyon, Arava, Oasis and Savanna. The feeling you get upon entering is of a different word created to mimic the animals’ natural surroundings.
‘One of the most important things at a zoo is that people should be able to see the animals, so their living space is small compared to nature.’
By Israeli standards, the Midbarium is about average in size. The Ramat Gan Safari Park covers 900 dunams and houses 180 species and the Biblical Zoo is spread out over 250 dunams and is home to 200 species. “The zoo was born after an eight-year gestation and contains desert animals appropriate for the location,” says Reshef. “The premise is that if we don’t do something now, these wild animals will become extinct within decades.”`
The establishment of the site was made possible by a pooling of resources, with the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation being the main backer. Additional money came from Mifal Hapayis, the tourism and housing ministries and the Be’er Sheva municipality. The total cost was about 250 million shekels ($68 million). The animals include those that were moved here from the old zoo, as well as others that came from the Ramat Gan Safari, the Biblical Zoo and abroad, among them, injured animals. “We have endangered animals here, such as tigers, and injured animals – many birds without wings, and you can also see a deer and a wolf with three legs,” says Reshef.
Salad and mice
We visited the zoo before it opened to the public in late January. The eagle compound is also a place for breeding and rehabilitation. “We received three pairs of eagles, some of them disabled, that came from Ramat Hanadiv [a sanctuary in Zichron Yaakov]. For each pair, we designed a nesting area with room for up to seven pairs. Each cave has a camera that monitors their nesting and egg-laying. After rehabilitation, they are supposed to return to nature,” says Reshef.
Behind a transparent screen, you can see special lions – two females, Flora and Fauna, and Marcus, who is Fauna’s brother. “This is a white lion,” explains Reshef, “a species we got from another zoo and cannot be released into the wild. It’s no coincidence that they almost don’t exist outside of cartoons.” Alongside each animal in the zoo is a QR code that links to an informational video. The one about the white lion says that this is a “rare genetic phenomenon whose origin is the Kruger National Park (in South Africa). These lions struggle to survive in nature because they can be seen so easily at night.”Open gallery view
Not far from the lions is a mob of meerkats, whose most famous representative is Timon, theanimated star of the Disney hit “The Lion King.” They seem excited to meet us. “This mob has been with us for many years and began as a pair of that breed,” says Reshef. “They eat salad, mice and chicks. What this animal does most of the day is dig – they have ditches and a network of tunnels below ground.”
The Midbarium lasso has hippos, which spend most of their time deep in the water. “We got two, Chipopo and Shmulik. They were the leaders of the bloat until a younger hippo began to abuse them. They left and found a home with us.”
The Nile crocodiles live in the zoo’s Oasis section and can be viewed while walking on the bridge built over the reeds. Fifteen of them were brought here as examples of the extinct apex predator from the Crocoloco Crocodile Farm in the Arava. All of them are males of about the same size – three meters – in order to avoid quarrels.
The well-equipped Midbarium animal hospital allows visitors to see the veterinarians at work through the large glass windows. There are X-ray machines as well as operating and treatment rooms here. Reshef points out that there are animals that veterinarians have not yet learned how to operate on. “It is very difficult to operate on a giraffe. It has a very big heart because of its long neck and the need for blood to reach its head. If you anesthetize it, it could die.”
In addition to providing medical services to the zoo’s animals, the hospital also functions as the main center for the care of wild animals of the Negev. Israel Nature and Parks Authority rangers bring in animals from all over the region as do ordinary people who come across an animal in need of care.
The Midbarium was designed by Dutch architect Erik van Vliet, who has designed about 70 zoos in 36 countries and is also the one who advised Hai Park Kiryat Motzkin. Detailed planning was handled by the Israeli firm Zur Wolf Landscape Architects. The firm’s Ora Hacham Rafael says that it was one of the most complex projects the office had ever planned.
“It involved several principles – that the interaction between the visitors and the animals would involve as few fences as possible to allow an unmediated encounter and that the visitor would experience the animals in a place that simulates their natural environment,” she says. “For example, the Canyon, the place of the eagles in the zoo, simulates the rocks in the Timna area. The Savanna complexes have rock formations found in the African savannah. The artificial rocks were built using huge metal grids on which concrete is sprayed. An artist paints them to give them a natural look. Many people are involved in this – we plan it, a modeling company makes the rocks and an artist paints them.”
How do you balance the needs of the animals and the visitors?
“There are three different users here with different needs – the visitors, the animals and the animal care team. We spoke with the zoologists about the needs of each animal, then we thought about what would be the optimal way for visitors to experience them. It was playing with the angles of view. The animals enjoy excellent conditions here.”
The design will face new tests during the hot summer months ahead, but Hacham Rafael says it was a key part of the design. “There is a dense and branching system of paths here that runs alongside ravines and walls that provide shade. There are also a lot of trees, about 1,500, some of them mature. Among the trees that were planted are the prosopis, which grows quickly and provides shade; sweet acacia; pistacia atlantica; jujube trees; and others. I believe that in five years we’ll have good shade coverage.”
Lucy, a sad case
Zoos have a dicey history and sometimes the question arises as to whether they have a right to exist. Animal protection non-profits have petitioned the courts against activities at Hai Park, citing pony and camel rides they claim violated the animal welfare regulations.
Zeev Levy and Nadav Levi, respectively a philosopher and his biologist son, discussed problems of morality in the field in their book “Ethics, Emotions and Animals“. In one of the chapters, they dealt with imprisonment of animals in zoos. They accept the argument that in order to preserve species, sometimes it is worth keeping them in captivity but they ask: “Is keeping them in captivity indeed preferable to their loss and disappearance? What is more moral? Allowing animals to become extinct in nature or to hold them in captivity contrary to their nature and for the most part with no possibility of returning them to nature, in which man has brought about changes that would impede their acclimatization?”
In the book, which was written 20 years ago, the two agree that there is no turning back the wheel and because many natural habitats have already been harmed, some zoos that work as rehabilitators are important. Moreover, returning to nature is a complex process and few species that have been returned have managed to rehabilitate themselves. They offer as an example the story of Lucy the chimpanzee, who learned human sign language and grew up in human society.
At a certain stage the people who raised her thought it would be better to return her to nature in Africa. Some time after her release her skeleton was found without hands and feet: She had been hunted and killed. “There is no doubt that the fact of her birth in captivity is the result of a regrettable moral evil, but freedom is not only a matter of physical space. Rather, it is also a matter of the possibility of living a meaningful life and pleasure in a loving environment,” they wrote.
Zoos existed even in antiquity. In 1490 BCE the Egyptian pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut, brought animals for display, apparently from Somalia, including a giraffe. The Persian word paradeisos, the origin of the word “paradise,” referred to a large, walled park in which animals were held free to move around, for the king’s pleasure. There were also zoos established for research purposes, like the one Louis XIV built in the gardens of Versailles where scientific studies were conducted. That zoological garden was destroyed in the French Revolution on the grounds, according to Zeev Levy and Nadav Levi, that “zoos must be destroyed when humans have no bread. It is scandalous that animals live well while around them people are dying of hunger.”
Zoos as they are known today were founded mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most veteran modern zoo is the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna, which was established as a royal compound in July of 1752 at the initiative of Franz I, Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire, who wanted a royal zoo at his summer palace. On July 14, 1908, the first elephant ever born in a zoo came into the world there.
A pioneer in the attempt to improve living conditions for zoo animals was Carl Hagenbeck’s zoo in Hamburg that was established in 1907. Hagenback aimed at creating a natural environment for the animals, got rid of cages and separated the animals from the visitors by water channels and natural elements. He called this design “a paradise for animals,” where “”animals would live beside each other in harmony and where the fight for survival would be eliminated.”Several years later, he designed a similar zoo in Rome.
Lawyer Yossi Wolfson, a human rights and animal liberation activist, agrees that there has been an improvement in the way animals are held in captivity but, he believes, “Every zoo is problematic.” The claim that zoos today are rehabilitative, he says, doesn’t hold water. “Zoos are not a good place for animals. To say that nature does not exist anymore and if there would be no zoos then the animals would disappear is an exaggeration. It’s true that there are certain animals who have been injured or who were born in captivity and have no other option. The alternative is rehabilitative farms where the animals are at the center. To justify animal rehabilitation economically, they add the element of entertainment that exists at every zoo.” But it is true, he says, “this is no longer the zoo of the 1980s where animals were held in small cages.”
So what is the main problem with zoos?
“One of the most important things at a zoo is that people should be able to see the animals, so their living space is small compared to nature. The noise and activity there also cause the animals distress. If I want to educate toward familiarity with animals I can, for example, go to observe the wild goats at Mitzpeh Ramon or Nahal Zin. In such a case I would have to come at certain times of day, before they vanish, and therefore I would have to adapt myself to them. At the zoo, they create an environment for us that ensures we will not miss seeing the animal. Presumably I will not see the animal’s natural behavior here. Another point is that the animals are displayed as examples and not as individuals. They don’t tell us when the lion we are looking at was born.” (In this context, at Midbarium there is indeed an attempt to provide specific information about the animals: their name, year of birth, country of origin, parentage and so on.)
‘There are three different users here with different needs – the visitors, the animals and the animal care team. We spoke with the zoologists about the needs of each animal.’
Despite the criticism, the visitors and the workers at a zoo usually really love animals.
“That’s true, but in the end a zoo is a demonstration of control. Even the best zoo is bad. Today, the day zoo workers love most is Yom Kippur. There is a structural conflict between wanting to look after the animals and letting in the visitors, who always want to get close. Wild animals don’t really want this closeness and they are harmed. I think there are better ways to learn about nature. It is possible to go out to the wadis or to nearby urban nature and observe salamanders or birds and learn to be quiet without moving. This is preferable to a tour of the best zoo.”Open gallery view
Natural air-conditioning
The route of our tour of Midbarium ends at the entrance, which is also the exit. There is also an architectural achievement here. Places of this kind – huge areas enclosed by a fence – are usually marked by a rather dull entrance. Architect Asaf Lerman, a fan of concrete buildings (who is responsible, among other things, for the Teo Center in Herzliya), designed a concrete thicket formed like a shape of giant wings, on an area of 1,800 square meters (19,375 square feet). This is apparently the largest pergola in Israel. It consists of tall poured concrete posts, the intersections of which create triangles and the movements of the sun throughout the day create a delicate fabric of shade.
Lerman relates that he aimed to create an alternative to the “the well-known Brutalist toughness of Be’er Sheva.” He designed the pergola together with structural engineer Refael Bet, whose firm planned the municipal building and the university library in that city. “The entrance building aims to connect with the architectural heritage of Be’er Sheva, and propose a contemporary interpretation. The concrete is stretched here into a delicate sail, a kind of lace, and marks off the public event that is the entry space.”
Beneath the pergola are a variety of facilities with different functions: passageways, ticket booths, rest rooms, a shop, a theater, corners for sitting and information. “The movement of the visitors, the effect of the shade and the huge dimensions of the pergola create a platform for a public event,” says Lerman. Next to the entrance there is also a classroom structure spread over 1,200 square meters (about 13,000 square feet). To save money, the passageways between them do not have electric air-conditioning. “To create a pleasant feeling in the classroom building we planned the angle of the external wing of the pergola, so that it directs fresh air into its corridors and the openings in its sides. This is an ecological structure for educational and office use. Only small parts of it are air-conditioned while the rest is aired by channeling air in accordance with existing desert planning.”