“Let me get this straight,” I said in the bar. “It means taking a healthy animal from one part of the zoo, euthanizing it, and feeding it to a carnivore in another part of the zoo?”

The nutritionists nodded and explained: In the wild, lions don’t encounter tidy portions of boneless, ground meat lying conveniently under the bushes. At dinnertime, meat-eaters like tigers, hyenas, and cheetahs don’t find stainless steel bowls filled with ready-to-eat kibble. Eating in the wild is bloody and hard, and carnivores have to work at it. Their fangs and digestive systems have evolved to deal with hair, bones, and other obstacles. Activities like gnawing and licking occupy the animals physically, but also have psychological and social value. Some carnivores instinctively hide and hoard meat and return to eat it later. Others observe strict hierarchies of who in the group gets to eat first. In these ways, eating behaviors play an important role in the animals’ mental health.

In many European zoos, my companions explained, carnivores are fed carcasses to promote these healthy, normal behaviors; zoo staff have found that carcass-fed carnivores are calmer than those fed processed food. So instead of being served, say, some minced beef, as it might in a U.S. zoo, a Tasmanian devil might be given a piece of a kangaroo. Or a cheetah might get a gazelle instead of a ground-chicken patty. In Europe, these prey animals often come from other parts of the zoo—recycled, if you will, as food for the carnivores.

While animal nutritionists in the U.S. do enrich animals’ eating experiences with puzzles and games, they tend to feed their carnivores processed meat from an outside source. The difference in this approach roughly divides American and British zoos from their counterparts in Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.

Carcass-feeding isn’t the sort of thing that most zoos feature on the welcome page of their websites. But it’s not exactly a secret, either. On a recent visit to a zoo in the Netherlands, I saw picked-over remains in the enclosure of some European wolves. A placard nearby explained the drill.

Even knowing about the cultural differences in feeding, I, like many people around the world, have been following—with interest, dread, horror, and ultimately sorrow—the story of Marius the giraffe. It was impossible not to feel sad, confused, and even outraged on Marius’ behalf. Like others, I wondered why the zoo chose to euthanize Marius instead of sending him to one of several facilities that offered to take him in. Or why Copenhagen seemed so heartless and, frankly, in-your-face about their process. (In the name of education, the zoo invited the public to a post-euthanasia necropsy—an animal autopsy—of Marius. And they made no attempt to disguise the telltale giraffe-hide markings when his remains were given to the lions.)

Eating is not the only thing that European zoos encourage their animals to do in a natural way. Zoo visitors might see animals courting and mating. Giving birth and nursing young. Bonding with infants in a mixed-age community. Living in a social group with extended family. These are all “natural” behaviors that are part of many animals’ “normal” lives in the wild. While they do have strategic breeding programs, European zoos place importance on giving animals the unrestrained opportunity to experience these life stages and cycles. The downside of this approach, however, is over-population. Allowed to breed freely, animals produce offspring that zoos might not have room to house.

Most American and British zoos, by contrast, carefully manage the reproduction of their animals, in part through contraception. When mature females are housed with males, they are usually placed on birth control (pills, shots, or implants). Although some males are castrated, as with humans, long-term contraception is usually aimed at the females. This allows for it to be reversed if the animals are to be bred. A zoo that’s cautious about how and when animals get pregnant may have fewer individuals living in smaller, less biologically “natural” groupings. But there’s no over-population problem.

American and European zoos also differ in how they treat one particular animal: human beings. As we’ve seen, the Danish approach is rather dismissive of sentimentality. With science education as the stated goal, children (with parental permission) were invited to observe Marius’s necropsy. Some parents might prefer the G-rated approach of American zoos, which generally keep mating and death offstage. But other zoo visitors could make a case for the Danish lack of hand-holding.

So we have two approaches to eating and sex in zoos—both created by people who care deeply about the animals in their care. There is, of course, another philosophy—that zoos shouldn’t exist at all, that captivity itself is cruel. Some of the outcry over Marius certainly comes from that perspective. And fair enough. But if you do think zoos have a role to play in preserving species—especially with wild habitats disappearing at a rapid rate—the high-profile and sad case of Marius offers an opportunity to talk about which approach is best for animals in captivity and in particular, what constitutes, emotionally and socially, a “good life.”

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In opening the conversation—“Does L.A. Appreciate Its Wild Animals?”—panelists recounted how they had seen nearly every kind of wildlife imaginable in their work in the city, from bears, mountain lions, and coyotes to centipedes, snails, dragonflies, and toads. And all had memorable encounters between wild and built, non-human and human, to share.

Natural History Museum environmental educator Lila Higgins discovered a snail in the museum’s new nature gardens that was the first of its species to be found in L.A.—the southern flatcoil (with a shell that’s more disc-like than the spherical shape of garden snail shells). Beth Pratt, the California director of the National Wildlife Federation, said that her favorite L.A. animal experience was a non-encounter. Just being in Griffith Park, she said, and knowing that P-22, the mountain lion, was nearby, is a thrilling thing. And City of L.A. wildlife specialist Greg Randall told of his encounter with a man in the Hollywood Hills who fed the squirrels in his yard as well as a group of coyotes every morning—so they wouldn’t eat his cats. (This does not work, Randall added, and it’s a misdemeanor to feed predatory animals in L.A.)

On a larger scale, humans interfere with L.A.’s ecology by importing different non-native species frequently. How, asked Bowers, have these imports affected our natural community?

Pratt said that while people love having bullfrogs in their yards, bullfrogs aren’t from here, and they eat the native frog populations as well as small birds. “Do you kill a frog that has become part of the landscape to save the native species?” she asked.

The red fox and the eastern fox squirrel are also examples of outside species that were brought to L.A. with unexpected consequences. The red fox was brought over for fox hunts—it’s the type of fox hunted in Great Britain—and is now threatening the native gray fox. And the Eastern fox squirrel was kept as a pet by Civil War veterans living at the VA. The veterans let them loose after the hospital got wind of the squirrels eating table scraps—it was a misappropriation of government-issued food—and today the squirrels are all over the city. They are affecting the native tree and ground squirrels of L.A.

Bowers asked how you define a wild space in a place like Los Angeles, where human and animal spaces are so intertwined. What do you call an abandoned lot between two buildings where animals have made a home?

“I think anything can be a wild space,” said Pratt. “Someone’s apartment balcony can be a wild space.” The National Wildlife Federation has a program that allows people to make their yard, balcony, or even a hanging garden on their window a certified wildlife habitat, if they can prove they’re providing water, food, and shelter for wildlife. “Opening our eyes to what can be a wild space is how this urban-wildlife intersection is going to be successful,” she said.

Contrary to what we think, said Randall, Los Angeles is in fact a “wildlife habitat with homes in it.” Animals affected by wildfires in the mountains look down at our backyards and see something that looks like McDonald’s—swimming pools to drink from, trees with fallen fruit to eat, and brush piles to nest in. But by keeping our own spaces clear and securing anything animals can eat, from garbage to compost piles, we can keep foraging at a minimum.

Higgins said that one of the coolest wildlife spectacles she’d ever seen took place in the heart of downtown Los Angeles: over 6,000 Vaux’s swifts—tiny birds—spiraling into the shaft of the Chester Williams building near Pershing Square to roost for the night.

However, humans encroaching on natural spaces can also have disastrous effects on wildlife. The El Segundo Flower-Loving fly has historically lived in coastal sand dunes and was thought to be extinct from Los Angeles due to development. It had last been recorded here in 1965. In 2001, scientists found a small population in dunes near Palos Verdes—but most of its habitat has been degraded to the point where it can’t survive.

Bowers asked the panelists to talk about the best ways to encounter wildlife safely.

Randall said that when it comes to coyotes, raccoons, mountain lions, or bears (as long as they aren’t protecting their young), the best way to handle crossing their paths is to scare them away. Stomp your feet, make loud noises, and make yourself look bigger—most of the time they’ll run away. (A possum will just sit there, but unless you put your hand in its mouth, it’s of no danger to you.) “We’re not food to them, but they know we have food,” said Randall. But if we keep our food secure and keep our distance, we can all live together happily.

Pratt recommended starting a native garden to bring songbirds, amphibians, and snails—which “are very easy to have a safe relationship with”—while Higgins said that citizen science is a great way to get involved with L.A.’s wild creatures. The museum asks people to send in photos of the wildlife they encounter so they can get a better idea of what we’re living with, and people who aren’t formally trained in science can get a taste of it.

Before turning to the question-and-answer session, Bowers asked audience and panelists to call out their suggestions to name an official animal of the city of L.A.—who can best represent our culture, our history, and our wildlife.

Votes came in for the coyote, the peregrine falcon, the crow, the quail, and the Pacific chorus frog. Randall voted for the raccoon, and Higgins the harvester ant, which work in teams, build their own small cities, and pack a punch with a brutal sting.

“But do the raccoon or the harvester ant have their own Twitter account?” asked Pratt, who put in a call for the mountain lion. “P-22 does!”

The audience asked the panelists to talk about changes in L.A.’s bird population, the illegal sale of turtles by street vendors, the monarch butterfly—and for an update on Southern California’s favorite wildlife celebrity, Meatball, a.k.a. Glen Bearian, a.k.a. the Glendale Bear, who gained fame for stealing Ikea meatballs and scaring an unsuspecting texter who was caught on YouTube.

Meatball, said Pratt, is living at a facility in Alpine, in San Diego county. Relocation in the wild didn’t work for him, which is typical. Normally, he would have been killed, but enough money was raised to have him housed, and currently people are working on raising more in order to buy him a bigger pen. He’s next going to be seen in replica on Glendale’s Rose Parade float.

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