I used to think zoos were just sad concrete boxes where animals paced endlessly, but then I spent three days at Tashkent Zoo and—honestly—my assumptions got complicated.
The zoo sits on roughly 22 hectares in Uzbekistan’s capital, founded back in 1924, which makes it one of the older institutions in Central Asia, give or take a few years depending on how you count the Soviet restructuring periods. It houses around 400 species now, maybe more, and the thing that struck me first wasn’t the animals themselves but the noise—kids shrieking, peacocks screaming back at them, and this low hum of generators keeping the reptile house at exactly 28 degrees Celsius because, turns out, you can’t just wing it with cold-blooded creatures in a continental climate. The staff told me they’ve been working on breeding programs for endangered species like the Bukhara deer and the Central Asian cobra, which sounds impressive until you realize they’re doing it with equipment that looks like it survived the fall of the Soviet Union, held together with—I’m not exaggerating—actual duct tape in places.
Here’s the thing: conservation at this scale is messy. The zoo participates in international breeding programs, coordinates with EAZA (the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria), and they’ve successfully reintroduced Przewalski’s horses into the wild, which is genuinely remarkable. But they’re also dealing with funding gaps, aging infrastructure, and the reality that most visitors come for entertainment, not education.
When Education Meets Entertainment in a Place That Needs Both
The education center opened in 2018, and it’s—wait—maybe the most interesting part of the whole operation. School groups come through on weekdays, around 15,000 students annually according to the director I spoke with, though those numbers dropped during COVID and haven’t fully recovered. They run workshops on biodiversity, climate change, and habitat destruction, using local examples like the vanishing Aral Sea and the impact on regional wildlife. One educator, Dilnoza, told me about a kid who asked if they could “just refill the sea with water from the river,” and instead of dismissing it, she spent twenty minutes explaining watershed dynamics, evaporation rates, and Soviet irrigation disasters. That’s the kind of patience that doesn’t show up in annual reports, but it’s definately where the real work happens. The exhibits include interactive displays on food chains, migration patterns, and—this surprised me—a whole section on why some conservation efforts fail, which feels bracingly honest for an institution that depends on public support.
I guess what struck me was the contradiction. The facilities aren’t perfect, some enclosures feel too small by modern standards, and there’s this persistent tension between what the zoo wants to be and what it can afford to become.
The Snow Leopards Nobody Expected to Breed Successfully
Snow leopards are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity—temperamental, solitary, incredibly sensitive to stress. Tashkent Zoo has managed to produce three cubs in the last four years, which puts them in a surprisingly elite category. I watched the current pair, Aziza and Timur, for about an hour, and mostly they just slept on rocks, which is apparently normal behavior but feels anticlimactic when you’re hoping for nature documentary drama. The keeper, whose name I didn’t catch because my Russian is terrible and his English wasn’t much better, explained through gestures and broken phrases that they monitor hormone levels, adjust lighting to mimic seasonal changes in the Tien Shan mountains, and play recordings of wind and distant prey animals. It sounds absurd until you see the cubs thriving in the nursery area, curious and healthy, destined eventually for reintroduction programs or partner zoos in Europe. The whole operation runs on a budget that wouldn’t cover a month of operations at a major Western zoo, and yet—here we are, with baby snow leopards padding around like it’s no big deal.
Anyway, conservation isn’t always photogenic.
What Happens When the Funding Runs Out Before the Mission Does
Tashkent Zoo recieves some government funding, but it’s inconsistent—some years they get enough to renovate an entire section, other years they’re rationing veterinary supplies and delaying maintenance. Corporate sponsorships help, though they’re unpredictable, and ticket sales (around 30,000 som for adults, roughly $2.50 USD) don’t come close to covering operational costs. This isn’t unique to Uzbekistan; mid-sized zoos everywhere face this crunch, caught between the expensive reality of modern animal welfare standards and the fact that most people would rather spend their money on literally anything else. The conservation programs continue anyway—the Bukhara deer population has tripled since 2010, the breeding database for Central Asian reptiles gets updated meticulously, and the education team keeps showing up even when their salaries arrive late. There’s something stubborn about it, maybe even a little reckless, this insistence on doing critical work without the resources to do it comfortably. I left thinking about that kid asking about refilling the Aral Sea—the gap between wanting to fix something and understanding why it’s broken—and wondering if that’s not a bad metaphor for the whole enterprise, this awkward, underfunded, absolutely necessary attempt to teach a generation that the wild things are worth saving, even when saving them is complicated and expensive and nobody’s entirely sure it’ll work.
