This weekend came the long overdue news that Manuel Mollinedo has finally resigned as executive director of the San Francisco Zoo. Our sources say he was forced out by the San Francisco Zoological Society Board of Directors after the union representing many zoo workers overwhelmingly approved a no confidence measure against Mollinedo, who has presided over the steady deterioration of employee morale and the conditions under which the animals are kept. But it’s been difficult to get anybody talking on the record because of legal warnings about how loose lips could hurt the society’s efforts to fight lawsuits related to the fatal tiger mauling in December, which Mollinedo couldn’t have handled worse.
The Guardian has been warning for many years that the privatized zoo was bad for the city and worse for the animals. Unless the Zoological Society can use this opportunity to take the zoo in a drastically different direction — with more focus on animal welfare, greater pay equity between the director and employees, and a commitment to more public accountability — maybe it’s time to start talking about reclaiming the zoo as the public institution that it once was.