Dubai Zoo Loses New Land

Just when animal lovers breathed a collective sigh of relief with the long-awaited announcement of the relocation of Dubai Zoo, the project has hit yet another snag. The zoo has lost the land allocated to them in the Dubailand project.

"In late June or early July we were told that the zoo will no longer be part of Dubailand," says Dr Abdul Hadi Siddiq Pasha, Head of the Architectural Unit of the Project Design Section at Dubai Municipality's General Projects Department.

"Sadly that means that all the planning and studying that went into the final design will have to be scrapped and redone," says Pasha.

Moved more times than a Bedouin's tent, the project is rumoured to have been hanging in limbo for almost two decades. "This project has been pending for as long as I can remember," says Pasha.

"First it was supposed to be Mushrif Park, then it was to be the extension of Mushrif Park, finally we were given a plot in Dubailand and we all thought this was it."

Pasha went on to say that they had already begun setting up a scaffolding fence, which was to be a giant intricately designed billboard, when they were told to relocate.

"At the moment details on this project are very vague," says engineer Abdullah Ahmad Al Najjar, Head of Projects Construction Section.

"Anything can change any day now, it could even be done away with altogether."

Though he wouldn't specify, Al Najjar did say that they were currently looking at a possible location, "The new location we are contemplating is ecologically better and can be more animal-friendly than the previous location [in Dubailand]."

Earlier, Rashad Bukhash, Director of the General Projects Department at Dubai Municipality had announced: "Construction of a huge new zoo will start in August."

At the time he said all the animals at the existing Dubai Zoo in Jumeirah would be moved by the end of this year to the new and much bigger zoo being built in Dubailand.

"We have to speed up plans for the construction of the new zoo and the core zoo will be built within three months after construction starts in August," he had said.

The Dubailand location was reported to have been 350 hectares. The zoo was planned to be built in stages and fully completed by early 2009.

*Should Dubai have a zoo? Vote in our poll.

Big Collection

Set up in the mid-1960s by Otto J. Bullard, an Austrian engineer working in Dubai, Dubai Zoo boasts of a few unique traits.

It's the oldest of its kind on the Arabian Peninsula, the first Arabian zoo to breed the chimpanzee and the Arabian wild cat and has an impressive collection of endangered species, including Bengal and Siberian Tigers, Arabian Wolves and Scimitar-horned Oryx.

Though it has been the subject of much vitriol on the internet with numerous online petitions asking for something to be done about the conditions, the current zoo conditions are the best they can be with such limited resources.

Between 1998 and 1999 it reached its worst point – the zoo had about 1,800 animals and was struggling for space for them all.

The current size of the zoo is five acres, of which about three acres are for the animals and the rest for logistics and offices. The zoo currently houses approximately 230 animal species.