London zoo party nights ‘threaten animal welfare’

Sources raise concerns about impact of drunken behaviour following incidents with tigers and penguins at Zoo Lates. The welfare of animals at London zoo is being put at risk by drunken visitors at its Friday night parties, including one incident in which a man poured beer over a tiger before being thrown out by staff.


Another incident this month saw a man strip off and attempt to enter the penguin pool, forcing staff to intervene. There are also unconfirmed reports that a drunken woman tried to enter the lion enclosure in June. Sources at the zoo have raised serious concerns about the impact on animals’ sleep and stress levels from the lucrative Zoo Lates sessions, which are advertised as an “after party with the animals”.


The world’s oldest zoo has been hosting sessions on Friday night for several years to attract a younger demographic, generating £800,000 a year to fund its prestigious and pioneering conservation work.


Sources told the Guardian that staff concerns about the events have been raised with management. “If an animal escaped [on a Zoo Late], it would be catastrophic,” said one person with knowledge of the zoo’s workings. “During the day, welfare and conservation is of the upmost priority. In the evening, that seems to go out of the window, and the animals become a commodity. That’s not what zoos are about, but there’s a lot of money in it.”


London zoo confirmed the tiger and penguin incidents, but said there was no record of the story of a woman trying to enter the lion enclosure. The zoo also said that two years ago, snakes had to be moved from a glass enclosure after the glass was cracked by a group on a night out. The snakes did not escape.


A spokeswoman said the zoo believed the events were safe. “We would ban alcohol if we thought it was necessary but at the moment we see no need to do so,” she said, adding that only three people were ejected from the events during 2013 and 2014.


The evening sessions, which take place on Friday nights during the summer with tickets costing up to £35, also feature a silent disco where visitors are given headphones to dance to without disturbing animals. However, people regularly sing loudly at the time many species would normally be beginning to go to sleep.


On a Friday evening in July, the Guardian witnessed crowds shouting in the gorilla area beneath a sign reading “respect our home, be thoughtful, be quiet, be kind”. Security guards only intervened when flash photography was used.


One zookeeper at the penguin beach was asked by a man leaning over the glass barrier, “Which penguin can I fight?” while another zookeeper radioed a colleague to say a few people had been “a bit touchy feely” with the baby penguins.


Rules intended to protect the animals appear to contribute to some of the heavy drinking. Drinks are not allowed in several of the enclosures, leading people to quickly finish off pints of beer. Free wine samples are given away in the early hours of the evening, which begins at 6pm and runs until 10pm.


Many visitors are in large groups, some celebrating birthdays, hen parties and work nights out, with hundreds dressed in animal onesies. However, most visitors were not rowdy and were respectful around the enclosures.


The night culminates in a cabaret that is greeted by loud applause, whoops and shouts just metres from enclosures for apes and other primates. One zookeeper appeared to be monitoring volume levels from the cabaret, while another was overheard saying: “It’s a bit loud at the white tent [cabaret venue] tonight.”


More than 6,000 people attend each Zoo Lates event, according to the zoo’s marketing, and are largely composed of affluent 25 to 35-year-olds. With food and drink outlets dotted around the site, the nights are a vital source of fundraising to pay for the £28m annual running costs of the animal collections and £5m cost of the zoo’s conservation programme.


Chris Draper, programmes manager at the charity Born Free, which has analysed official British and Irish zoo inspection reports, said that the zoo should urgently re-evaulate the Zoo Lates scheme.


He said: “I am sure that London zoo’s management will offer reassurances that the animals’ welfare was protected and that steps were taken to minimise the impact of the events on the animals. However, it is simply not possible to actively monitor the welfare of all the animals during public events, nor to eliminate the potential for problems. In my opinion, hosting events that expose animals to additional and unnecessary stressors is unacceptable.”


The zoo’s spokeswoman said that animal welfare is of paramount importance, and that the small number of night-time incidents needed to be seen in context. “We think the 225,000 visitors to Zoo Lates over the past five years have generally shown the respect for animals that we expect – and the very few exceptions have been shown the door.”


One visitor to Zoo Lates in June, Samantha McConnell, who works in marketing, told the Guardian she saw a woman accidentally punching a bird in the aviary. “This girl, I don’t know how drunk she was but clearly she had been drinking for a while, she stumbled, and grabbing a branch she inadvertently punched the side of the bird and the bird took off, and she said, ‘Oh, sorry.’ I could not believe it.”


She added: “I saw animals being taunted, and saw people banging on the glass. One guy was rubbing himself on the glass at the snake enclosure. In the butterfly exhibit, people were so careless, crushing butterflies on the ground. I don’t think partying, alcohol and animals are a good combination.”Juveria Siddiqui, a trainee surgeon, told the Guardian of her visit last year: “There were a lot of drunk people. I never saw anybody do anything too terrible like climb into an enclosure, but people were tapping on the gorilla enclosure window and taking photos with a flash, and I got the feeling the gorilla wasn’t happy about that. I saw a few people shouting around animals, but not at them.”


Online reviews and social media users have raised some concerns. One student tweeted that “loads of drunk people roaming the zoo. Not sure if its too fair on the animals tho, gorillas were throwing poo,” while Channel 4 presenter and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine scientist Dr James Logan wrote: “great fundraising idea but wasnt keen on drunk people staring thro glass at animals.”


A reviewer on TripAdviser wrote last year: “I was surprised to discover that people were getting intoxicated and being loud. I am not a boring guy, I like to have a laugh like the rest of us but I do not think that getting drunk in a zoo is a good idea, I mean how does it affect the animals?”


A user signing themselves as the manager of support services at the zoo wrote back: “it is indeed a shame that some of our visitors choose an evening at the zoo for their drinking, and I can assure you that it is definitely not in the spirit of Zoo Lates, and on the whole we find the majority of the visitors are respectful and well behaved.”


They added: “Our keepers also closely monitor animal’s [sic] behaviour during the event and we can assure that we have not seen any negative effects on them in the past 3 years…”