London Zoo marks 200 years with new health centre plans
London Zoo has marked its two hundredth anniversary with the unveiling of “ambitious” plans for a new “world-leading” health centre, allowing visitors a chance to watch live veterinary procedures and conservation science. The centre was made possible by “the most significant donation” in the zoo’s 200-year history.
The new centre at Regent’s Park will deliver “world-class care” for the animals at London Zoo, as well as support its global science and conservation efforts. It will “bring veterinary science to everyone,” the zoo says, “with visitors to the centre able to watch live procedures, from penguin health checks to porpoise post-mortems.”
“For 200 years we’ve brought people and wildlife together in the spirit of understanding and discovery,” London Zoo said in a press release, “and the planned centre will continue that legacy with the UK’s first viewing gallery in a vet hospital.”
From employing the world’s first zoo vet in 1829, to building the first purpose-built zoo vet hospital in Europe 70 years ago, through to giving 250,000 children a “unique glimpse” into the veterinary world via its Vets in Action programme, the London Zoo says its “veterinary heritage is unrivalled.”
The anonymous donation will allow it to create a brand-new centre that integrates clinical care, a teaching hospital, and wildlife disease research. Central to the project is its “commitment to the One Health approach; recognising that the health of animals, people and ecosystems is fundamentally interconnected,” the zoo said, adding that with this endeavour, it will commit to its belief that “wildlife health is global health and must be treated as such.”
In its decades of studying wildlife diseases and their spread, it has managed to “build a global picture” of how they pass between species including to humans and how to mitigate them, including bovine tuberculosis and multiple viruses spread by bats and what affects their spillover to humans, hoping to “ensure a healthy co-existence between people and wildlife.”
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