Renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough is fronting a campaign to raise millions of pounds in a bid to save London Zoo from "extinction" amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The appeal aims to raise £12 million to help the London site and its sister zoo, Whipsnade, after the facilities owned by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) were forced to close for twelve weeks because of the Covid-19 crisis.
The money from the fundraising campaign will go towards a £25million rescue package for both sites.
Despite being permitted to reopen as of a week ago, bosses have warned the zoos still face financial ruin as a result of lost income in recent months and ongoing restrictions on visitor numbers.
London Zoo is home to more than 18,000 animals, with the monthly food bill for the facility totalling about £43,500, while Whipsnade, in Bedfordshire, houses more than 2,000 animals.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Sir David, 94, said: “What happens if you can’t raise the money to keep the animals? What happens if you can’t afford the food? Are we supposed to put them down?”
“The immediate prospect of the zoo going financially bust is too awful to think of. Are we, or are we not, a civilised community that it can’t support a zoo?”
ZSL, which is a charity, works with the Government on a range of issues - including combatting the illegal wildlife trade, researching zoonotic diseases transmitted from animals to humans and helping to reintroduce extinct species to the wild.
However, the organisation is not eligible for a government bailout amid the Covid-19 crisis and ZSL's director-general Dominic Jermey has admitted London Zoo and Whipsnade remain in "dire peril" as a result of the pandemic and its fallout.
As a result of social distancing rules rolled out by the Government, ZSL is required to cap visitor numbers at 2,000 in London, about a fifth of its maximum capacity.
Whipsnade is meanwhile permitted to admit 3,000 visitors, compared with a normal maximum capacity of 12,000.
Sir David, whose association with London Zoo stretches back to 1954, when his illustrious broadcasting career began as part of the BBC series Zoo Quest, said the sites must be preserved as they had a key role to play in educating future generations about the natural world.
"No television programme can replace the actual reality of standing close to an elephant or for a child to understand what an elephant is," he said.
"When you stand alongside the thing, where you can smell it, you can hear its stomach rumbling - the reality of what wild creatures are. To see the size of a giraffe is something extraordinary and . . . to be reduced to an electronic picture would be a terrible thing.
“A zoo is a very important thing scientifically. London was the first scientific zoo in the world, founded nearly 200 years ago, and has been at the forefront of technology and advances ever since then. If this country can’t support it, it would be a scandal.”
