Andy Beer has a lifelong association with Animal production and management through involvement with the Agricultural Industry and latterly the UK and European Zoo communities. He graduated with an Honours degree in Agriculture from the University of London (Wye College) in 1980.
He was at Sparsholt College Hampshire between 1982 and 2019 lecturing extensively in a range of animal management and science subjects including pasture management and forage quality, nutrition, laboratory techniques and genetics. From 1987 to 1997, he was responsible for validating and managing a Higher National Diploma course in Agriculture (Production and Management). This four-year course incorporated two long periods of work placement to facilitate vocational skill development.
In 2000, he formed a working group with Marwell Zoo to develop a Higher National Certificate in Zoo Resource Management for team leaders and curators in Zoos and Wildlife Parks. This eventually morphed into a Foundation degree in Zoo Resource Management validated by the University of Portsmouth.
In 2002, the College was invited by the Federation of Zoological Gardens of Great Britain and Ireland (now the British and Irish Association of Zoos & Aquariums) to partner them in developing the keeper and aquarist training programme now known as the Diploma in the Management of Zoo and Aquarium Animals. It is a level 3, two-year distance learning course which enables keepers who are employed in zoos and aquariums to study on location at their zoo /aquarium. Regional centres were established at the outset in the following Zoos Blackpool, Bristol, Chester, Dublin, Dudley, Edinburgh, London and Marwell in 2003 and resulted in a great many keepers (> 800) from the Zoo successfully complete it as part of their personal and career development. Andy wrote, developed and oversaw the validation (and revalidation) of this qualification which has achieved both national and international recognition and credibility. A recent revalidation giving the course approval until 2024 means he has personally steered 21 years of curriculum design and delivery of the course. In 2014, he was conferred the Honorary title of Director of Zoo Management Studies. In this role he organised the international programme and is an invited speaker at international zoo conferences (e.g. EAZA, SEAZA, AZAA).
In 2016, a new bespoke training course was developed in conjunction with the Chartered
Management Institute – the CMI Diploma Zoo Leadership which comprises 6 units on staff and
resource management for team leaders. This will recruit for the third cohort and has been praised by the delegates who have completed (including all three current team leaders from Dublin Zoo). Between 2016 and 2019, Andy was a UK collaborator in a Erasmus funded project led by EAZA to develop a European Zookeeper Qualification Framework to assist the standardisation and parity of Zoo keeper training within the EU in coalition with partners from Croatia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and The Netherlands.
Between 2009 and 2020, he was employed by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland as their
Nutritionist in residence. This role included the responsibility for convening regular nutrition meeting with colleagues to impart and share information, scrutinise dietary formulations, review and evaluation for the Society’s animal collections at Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife Park.
During this time, he oversaw the bespoke formulations of compound feeds (Edinburgh Browser & RZSS Vitality Browser) for grazers and browsers. These products have been widely adopted in UK and European Zoos and Wildlife Parks. Additionally, the Society ran an analytical facility for the analysis of forages (principally hay – grass & Lucerne plus browse species) using Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) and the calibrations for the latter were developed exclusively for these materials. This facility is also available on subscription for forage analysis by other zoos in the UK and Ireland. More recently, the work has centred on the analysis of bamboo shoots, foliage and stems as an important factor in Giant Panda nutrition and breeding. He also presented the first two-day Zoo Nutrition Workshop in the UAE in 2016 where lectures and practical demonstrations were given to 50 delegates from private and public collections.
He is also the Nutritional Advisor to the EAZA Tapir, & Suidae TAG and to the BIAZA Mammal Working Group. (In this capacity he will be co-presenting a review of Xenarthra nutrition at their meeting at Dublin Zoo in October 2018. Sparsholt College developed a contract with a large Safari Park in Guangzhou SE China (negotiated through Andy) via which consultancy on a wide range of species is provided. This project ran until2019 on his retirement from the College.
Research interests. These centred around diets for herbivores (grazing and browsing ruminants and non-ruminants). Specifically, a major interest is developing the potential of preservation techniques to facilitate the feeding of browse during the winter. Additionally, reviews of nutritional composition of eucalyptus for koalas has been carried out and will be developed to look at olfactory cues within eucalypt leaves which trigger selection and consumption. Collaboration with other nutrition research partners inScotland has been developed as part of the Giant Panda project. One major focus was on the analysis of bamboo (the major dietary constituent of the pandas) evaluating how composition may affect intake during different seasons of the year and to look particularly at the composition of bamboo shoots in the breeding season. Currently, the focus is on working with Aunir to identify consumption of bamboo species from faecal samples using NIR rather than behavioural observation. This collaboration also involves the China Research Centre for protecting Giant Pandas (CRCPGP). He has also written the nutrition section in the Husbandry guidelines for Beavers and co-authored a
research paper on Beavers with other RZSS colleagues.
Current Activity.
Since 2019, Andy has developed freelance activity within the Zoo Sector specifically on diets and nutrition. This consultancy operates across all species but particularly with herbivores (browsers and grazers), carnivores (felines) and omnivores (bears and canids) primates and reptiles for a select range of Zoos and Safari Parks.
He is also a Board Member of Dublin Zoo and the Zoological Society of Ireland – having been
nominated and appointed in 2019 for a three-year term and was unanimously re-elected at the 2022 AGM for a second three-year term. He currently chairs the Conservation and Research and the Ethics sub-Committees of the Board.Additionally, he also sits on Ethics Committees for the Zoological Society of Hertfordshire, Cotswold Wildlfe Park, West Midlands and Blair Drummond Safari Parks. Andy is also a core member of the European Nutrition Group (a sub group of the EAZA Research Group) and which incorporates the nutrition interests of European Zoo Members.
