The Wellington zoo has been undergoing some changes… Nadine Isler met with Karen Fifield, CEO, to find out what’s planned for our city’s most animated asset.

TAKE 500 SQUAWKING, grunting, snuffling animals, 13 hectares of Wellington land, and 170,000 visitors per year, and turn them into a city asset, and profitable business. Not an easy task. Enter Karen Fifield, enthusiastic veteran of zoo management, and she’ll show us how it’s done. 

After years managing Taronga and Western Plains zoo in Australia, she headed here in 2006 and after a brief stint with a local insurance company, she heard about the opening for CEO at the Wellington zoo, and grabbed the opportunity.

Karen’s been busy managing the recent change from Wellington City Council Business Unit to a Charitable Trust, which happened in 2003. “It was a really sensible thing to do” says Karen, “we can access so much more funding now than we could as a Wellington City Council business unit.” Now the zoo has a 10-year business plan, involving 21 million dollars. Seems like a lot, but not if you compare it to Melbourne and Victoria zoos which have planned 115 million over 10 years, or Taronga Zoo’s master plan which involves 365 million over 20 years. Wellington Zoo have raised a quarter of their capital development money themselves – that’s over five million dollars. They’ve also been able to come up with 44 per cent of this year’s operating costs; The remainder is given to them by WCC.
Wellington Zoo opened in 1906 with a single lion and a handful of staff. Since then it has housed hundreds of species, and now attracts almost half of all Wellingtonians each year.

Karen believes the boost in funding shows that the zoo is finally being invested in as an asset. “Before the change to a Trust, nothing had been done for years. It was hugely underinvested in terms of people, resources, and as an asset. It had no history of corporate sponsorship at all – and these relationships take years to build up.”

One relationship that proved itself worthwhile lately was that with Landcorp. Due to the recent droughts, the zoo began running out of hay, and weren’t sure they could get any more. They called on Landcorp, who promptly arrived with fresh hay and helped them out. 

And then there’s Arataki Honey, who sponsors the zoo’s sunbear Sean, who was was rescued by Free the Bears from a grisly fate of becoming bearpaw soup in a Cambodian restaurant. Since then he has been the first from the programme to breed in captivity.

Wellington Zoo are very keen to ‘think outside the box’ to be able to achieve their goals. Take their possum project for example. Victoria University have been running a research project for the last 10 years which aims to find a way to sterilise wild possums, to keep the population down without using 1080. The possum-housing facility at Wallaceville closed down, and so the zoo stepped up, offering their old giraffe house as their new home. This isn’t exactly the sort of thing a zoo would usually be involved in, but it’s a good example of how they do things just a little bit differently here.

Another project already under way is the building of the new vet hospital onsite. Once it’s finished, it will replace the tiny existing one, and allow for the public to come and watch the animals being operated on.
When it comes to staffing, Karen tells me how they have had to think outside the square too – they ‘grow their own’ zookeepers – paying for their training and hosting them as residents on site in monthly rotation. 
They also make sure new ideas are continuously trialled to raise interest. There is ‘Neighbours night’ where their Newtown neighbours get to go to the zoo for free for an evening and meet the staff, Valentine’s night, where adults only, are allowed to wander through the zoo, stopping at candlelit picnic tables. 

“I never get bored in my job, and I need that. I can’t just sit at my desk and type things, I need to get out. I also love the people; zoo people are all crazy, I think you’ve got to be a bit a bit weird to work in a zoo! And a lot of them are world experts in their field. I love our visitors too – they say never work with kids or animals, but we work with both! You just never quite know what’s going to happen.”

There are so many things that need to be considered when running an operation as huge as a zoo. For example, the basic need for a zoo to acquire animals. Wellington Zoo has two full-time positions that work just on securing animals which are exchanged, rather than sold. It all has to be done scientifically, by studbook keepers who keep track of who has bred with whom, to ensure no animal is over-represented in any one region, and no related animals breed with one another.

“Something really important that we’re trying to do, is change the focus in zoos from pure ‘entertainment’ to ‘learning, fun and conservation’. We choose three conservation messages we want people to take away, which go consistently through all the keeper talks, info provided at the zoo. Reduce, reuse, recycle, use sustainable timber and responsible pet ownership. We could give out a million messages, but that would be an overload, we need to think of a few things that will really help the environment, here, and globally.” It probably helps that the chair of their board was once the CEO of Ministry for the Environment. “Zoos really have a lot of power to lead public opinion, and we need to be aware of that.”

Before dismissing the zoo as just a frivolous city expense, take a moment to consider the statistics. Across the Australasian region alone, zoos bring in 14.5 million visitors per year, which translates to two billion dollars contributed to the region. Zoos exist in every country in the world, in every culture, in some form. 10 per cent of the world’s population visit zoos every year – making them the most visited cultural attractions worldwide.

I ask Karen about the current ‘easing of the economy’ – is it a worry for them? 
“It may affect us” she says, “but my experience is that when the economy downturns, people tend to nest. They travel less, and are more likely to visit local facilities. So long as it doesn’t get so bad that the discretionary dollar isn’t something they can do, I think we might actually see an increase in annual memberships.” That’s what we’re hoping – we have to be positive.

And what about now? Do people already complain about the cost of visiting the zoo, when they are constantly being told how it is a city asset? “Yes, we do get that” says Karen. “But we have done a lot of price point research, and at the moment our admission price is the same as a movie ticket… But we have 500 animals to feed! Sometimes it seems like people think animals eat air!”

So what are the goals for the future of our zoo? “We’ve still got aviaries that were built in 1920!” exclaims Karen. “We want more staff, more money, new buildings… I want everything done yesterday! The dream is to be the best little zoo in the world, in the best little city in the world.”?