CAZA may be pulling accreditation from the Mountain View Conservation Centre, multi-millionaire Gordon Blankstein's private zoo in Langley, BC. A good question however is why they haven't already done that long ago. After two giraffe died at his zoo in a cold snap, Gordon Blankstein bragged to the media that he has never provided his giraffes heat in the cold Canadian winters. That should have been enough right there to trigger CAZA to instantly pull accreditation while a review was carried out. Then it turned out that the first necropsy to come back showed that one giraffe died of a mix of both the cold AND improper diet. That should also have been enough on its own for CAZA to pull accreditation even without the first issue as well. Then there was the giraffe with the grossly overgrown hooves; CAZA must have seen the same photos and video of that back in November that the rest of us saw all over the newspapers. That also should have been enough for CAZA to pull accreditation, even without all of the earlier issues, but definitely more than enough if you count those earlier issues. The SPCA gave the Mountain View Conservation Centre an order in November to trim the giraffe's hooves, which the zoo chose to ignore. Three months later (during which time the hooves got that much worse, hard as that is to believe, from what the photo/video shows), the SPCA forced the zoo to conduct an emergency hoof trim because it had gotten so bad, and the giraffe died (as was expected at that late stage) because its health concerns had been ignored for so long. That should have been enough for CAZA right there as well, without adding in all of the many earlier factors. And then Gordon Blankstein apparently refused to provide law enforcement officers with copies of the necropsies, forcing them to go to court to get warrants for them. That should have been another good indicator to CAZA that this roadside zoo is not following any kind of reasonable standards of animal care at all. Yet none of these things were major problems to CAZA apparently, since the Mountain View Conservation Centre still is accredited by CAZA, despite being charged by law enforcement officials for several counts of animal abuse (which they have admitted will be followed by more), over 30 staff providing evidence of over 50 cases of animal abuse including photographic and video evidence which have been spread publicly through the media, and Gordon's own proud admissions of guilt. What exactly would it take for CAZA to pull accreditation from a zoo, if not that? It sounds like the claims in this article about how useless CAZA is and how it's just an organization set up to protect its members is true, if this level of abuse with so much proof is ignored by them.
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