Lions, Tigers, and Wolves, Goodbye! After Hard Farewells, What’s Next for the Como Zoo?

Essays Lions, Tigers, and Wolves, Goodbye! After Hard Farewells, What’s Next for the Como Zoo? As the city of St. Paul’s free zoo evolves, so should the way Minnesotans engage with it. By Abraham Teuber 10:52 AM CST on November 12, 2026 Add Racket to Google 2 Comments My whole childhood, I dreamed of working at the Minnesota Zoo. Heaven was in Apple Valley, where my grandma and I would gaze at animals to our heart’s content in the state's most sprawling zoological gardens. When we returned home, I talked her ear off about my future as a primatologist while she plated fish sticks and applesauce on a Hefty Zoo Pal. I eventually branched out to more human hobbies, told one too many times that most zookeepers are underpaid poopscoopers. But a year after college, dissatisfied with my first two attempts at converting my English degree into income, I gratified my inner child and applied for a visitor services position at the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory. In my interview, I fumbled through hypotheticals about escaped gorillas and vaping teens and the death wishes of unsupervised children. As I read the job offer, a dormant facet of my personality awakened, ready to memorize more facts and intrigue strangers at parties. But I soon learned that a job at St. Paul’s modest urban zoo doesn’t inspire such awed reactions. “Is Como the sad one?” After a brief pause, haunted by the possibility of disappointing my new coworkers, I would relent that yes, Como is the sad one. As much as I feel called to remind skeptics that Como does essential conservation work, that it’s one of the only free zoos in the country, that the Association of Zoos and Aquariums accredits it with the highest standard of care, it would be insincere to dismiss the emotional truth at the heart of these critiques. In comparison to the vast 485-acre Minnesota Zoo, Como occupies a mere 14 and a half, and its enclosures are designed accordingly. Animals eat, sleep, poop, and pace within the conspicuous confines of concrete, glass, and chainlink. Smells accumulate. It’s not the prettiest sight, a far cry from the wilderness where these creatures’ cousins roam. Yet Como also has many iconic large mammals that the Minnesota Zoo lacks, like lions, snow leopards, giraffes, zebras, sea lions, gorillas, orangutans, and polar bears. Curiously, the better-funded zoo sports more obscure animals, whereas the smaller, less-resourced zoo cares for more charismatic megafauna that humans are most conditioned to anthropomorphize and pity. The Como Zoo began in 1897 as a simple fenced pasture for three captive deer, growing in the next decades to include other North American hoofstock. FDR’s New Deal heralded a new era for the zoo in the 1930s with the construction of bear, monkey, and farm habitats. Outside the main office building, you can still see the diminutive cages that once displayed massive predators. In the last 16 years, Como has renovated its polar bear, sea lion, and gorilla habitats to be more immersive (and well-received by the general public). It’s been ranked as the state’s third most popular attraction , surpassed only by the Chain of Lakes and the Mall of America. Very soon, the zoo will get another major upgrade. Last spring, the Minnesota Legislature approved $9.3 million for the first phase of a significant renovation to Como’s big cat building, which will repurpose the old wolf enclosure into a modernized home for lions. The catch: These improvements require the permanent relocation of many of the zoo’s most-adored animals. Gray wolves Nicky and Cerberus have already moved to a sanctuary in Washington state. Maji the lioness, widowed after the death of her companion Mumford, now lives at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Soon, the cougars, snow leopards, and tigers will relocate too, though the timeline depends on the attainment of funding for the project’s next phase. I no longer work at the zoo, but in the year that I did, I grew attached to many of the animals there. There’s Neil, the ancient and perpetually drooling polar bear. Tyler is an attentive Patas monkey who raises his eyebrows at each passing visitor. I’m most fond of Jasper, the eyeless cougar who can still bound up sheer cliffs with finesse. This is the type of mundane miracle that most amazes me about the zoo: a completely healthy apex predator in captivity that would be lucky to survive longer than a day in the wild. Subscribe to skip ads Advertisement Soon after spending extended periods at the Como Zoo, I stopped seeing the animals as generic symbols of their species, getting to know them as unique individuals in the strange position of constantly representing something quite abstract to humans. “Each cage is a frame round the animal inside it,” writes cultural critic John Berger in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” “Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next. Yet in the zoo the view is always wrong.” When a visit to the zoo is approached with this mindset, the observer forces an expectation of entertainment, intrigue, cuteness, or ferocity on each animal. (If you’re patient and curious, they will deliver!) But it’s not just incidental that these animals don’t act like they’re in the wild. Every condition of their existence is artificial. Many have never seen life outside a corner of Como Park. The ability of a zoo to convincingly replicate nature is not analogous to its ability to ensure the wellbeing of its animals. It is amazing the ease with which visibly disgusted parents, chowing on factory-slaughtered chicken tenders, dismiss a never-before-seen creature as bored, miserable, and cruelly treated just because it’s taking a nap. Several times a week, I would explain to visitors that no, these monkeys were born in captivity and not in fact captured from jungles or savannas. I can easily imagine a future where civilizations look back with horror at our casual and omnipresent cruelty towards animals. But while human neglect causes thousands of species to decline, I find it hard to be pessimistic about the little ol’ Como Zoo, especially as it constantly strives to improve. When I patrolled the big cat building, I always rolled my eyes at the irony of a Charles Darwin quote written on a banner in the entrance: “The love of all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.” I think at the zoo, though, this delusion is believable. Accredited zoos are a paragon of empathy for animals compared to the many ways we slaughter, maim, neglect, and abuse all forms of life outside of them. Is a room with constant food, enrichment, and vet care that much more inhumane than crating a castrated labradoodle for eight hours a day? Than Netflixing, Doordashing, and ChatGPT-ing your life away in a studio apartment? Than incarceration or poverty or homelessness? Not to get too Intro to Sociology about it, but we haven’t really figured out how to take care of ourselves or each other, either. At my most hopeful, I see the zoo as an homage to the art of survival, each animal embodying a long-proven method of endurance on this brutal and beautiful planet. More and more, though, animals in the zoo serve as a living reminder of their ongoing extinction. Once, when clearing out my camera roll, I panicked after deleting a blurry video of an orangutan, realizing that my own image of the swinging orange ape may soon be a precious relic. There are likely more plush orangutans in zoo gift shops than actual animals left in the wild. “Though it might be nice to imagine a time where man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction , which argues that our current era of climate change is the first major extinction event caused by humans. Archeological evidence suggests that the ideal vi