Deleting Animal Records in ZIMS

Animal Dispositions are the primary way to remove animals from your records, deleting a record is a rare requirement.

As a general rule in ZIMS, 'deleting' an animal record only occurs when you have created false information on accident.

An example: an animal that was unexpected arrived over the weekend and your lead keeper on staff accessions the animal. On Monday your registrar arrives as sees the weekend paper work and accessions the animal a second time. Immediately afterwards the registrar notices the error and before adding any additional husbandry data they wish to delete the duplicate record.

Another example: you are looking over historic records and there are a series of very similar records from long ago. There is no paperwork supporting the multiple animals, they have similar pedigree and no characteristic data that help to identify them via transactions, identifiers, ect. The curator wants to clean up these historic duplicates and there is no record of other dispositions/deaths so these will be deleted.

Deleting records:
1) Verify that other modes of Disposition are not more appropriate.
2) Understand that deleting an animal record impacts all the data that has been added to this record and effects any linked pedigree.
-Ask does this animal have parents/children/siblings?
3) We recommend taking a copy of all data from the animal record via Specimen Report .

4) Find the animal from your inventory and under the actions menu, choose 'delete'.

5) Confirm that you are ok with deleting this record and have copied the data accordingly.

6) Once deleted, you cannot recover the data except via the Transaction Monitor .

Revised 5 March 2025
* Species360 Organizational name change added on 07/18/2016