The Stationary Ark

by Gerald Durrell

  T.H. White, The Book of Beasts

  It was that brilliant gourmet, Brillat-Savarin, who said, ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are’. This simple rule unfortunately cannot be applied to animals. Neither can the reverse, because simply knowing what an animal is merely puts it into a very rough gastronomic category, which takes no account of its personal likes or dislikes, or indeed of our ignorance of its diet in the wild state. Thus you will get an animal, classified by the textbooks as ‘strictly vegetarian’, which has a tremendous hankering for fish or meat, and a ‘strictly carnivorous’ animal who will behave with drooling idiocy at the sight of a bunch of grapes.

  Until comparatively recently the whole question of diets in zoos had received scant attention and, to a large extent, it seems that its importance was not recognized. Anything unfit for human consumption must be ideal for animals, was the general line of thinking and still is today in far too many zoos. But the animal in the wild state, unless it be a carrion feeder from choice, gets the freshest of everything, and it was this simple fact that was not appreciated. I have seen in far too many zoos (some of them zoos of repute) stale meat and fish being fed to animals and with them rotting vegetables and over-ripe and mildewy fruit. This, put at its most mercenary, has always struck me as being a false economy. If you are a farmer and you starve your animals or give them inferior food, you do not expect to get a good milk yield or to breed stock successfully. Why, then, does a zoo director expect to get strong and healthy animals and good breeding results by feeding inferior food? To what extent in the past animals have been labelled ‘difficult’ simply because they have been wrongly fed, would provide an interesting, if depressing, line of investigation for zoo historians.

  Coupled with zoo diets (which were, in many cases, more harmful than helpful) there was, once again, the baleful influence of the zoo-going public. Going to the zoo to ‘feed the animals’ became the accepted thing, accepted, unfortunately, not only by the public, but by the zoos themselves. Feeding by the public, directly or indirectly, helped the exchequer. The fact that what the public fed was generally the wrong sort of food and in too great a quantity, resulting in sickness or actual death, was accepted by some zoo authorities as a fact of life. I know from bitter experience how difficult it is to prevent people from feeding in zoos, but in those days no attempts whatever were made to stop them; rather it was encouraged. There were a few rather feeble attempts made to get people – if they had to feed the animals – to feed them the right things, but by and large this was a failure. The public preferred to feed the deadly peanut, the chocolate bar and ice-cream (all purchased in the zoo shop) and the animals, gorging themselves like children on these delicacies, died of impacted bowels, enteritis, or thrombosis as a result.

  Today, in all the more advanced zoos, feeding by the public is forbidden, and quite rightly too. But it is one thing to forbid and quite another to prevent. The average member of the public seems to think that he has an unassailable right in any zoo to do three things without let or hindrance: to scatter litter around him like dandruff; to prod animals with umbrellas and sticks or to throw stones at them in order to stir them up if they are so ill-mannered as to be asleep or stationary; and to feed anything in sight that will accept what he has to offer, be it peanut or sugar-lump, lipstick or razor-blade. These latter items are not exaggerations. We have had them both fed to our animals, together with aspirins, bits of broken bottles, sheets of plastic and, once, a filled and lighted pipe. The public, on the whole, appears to have even less knowledge of what is dietarily desirable for wild animals than many zoo directors.

  It is a curious fact that animals which are extremely conservative about new foods as a rule will, when they get to a zoo, with unerring accuracy go mad for the one food that will either do them the least good or the most harm. If they displayed this trait in their character when they were newly caught, it would make the animal collector’s lot a much easier one, for he would then have something to tempt them with. The lack of this can try his patience severely, for long before the animal arrives at the zoo the collector has the unenviable task of teaching it to accept a new diet. This is a task as fraught with difficulty and disillusionment as trying to inculcate the elements of French cuisine into the average English boarding-house.

  At the extreme end of the scale, there are the animals who are monophagous. These demand a monotony of diet so extreme that even a medieval saint would feel that it was carrying the mortification of the flesh too far. Pangolins or Scaley anteaters, for example, hailing from Africa and Asia, exist happily on a strict diet of ants, in some cases the black, indigestible-looking tree ants, who reek of formic acid to the extent that your eyes water when cutting up a nest.

  In the clear forest streams of West and Central Africa lives a remarkable creature that rejoices in the name Potomagale velox, or giant Water shrew. This black insectivore – the only representative of its kind, though it has a distant relative in Madagascar – is about two feet long, with a dark mole-like fur and minute eyes, no collar-bones, a swollen muzzle, so that its head looks like the head of a hammer beforested with whiskers, and a tail that is flattened from side to side like a tadpole’s. It is nocturnal, aquatic and (at least in the Cameroons, where I caught it) lives exclusively on a diet of chocolate-coloured fresh-water crabs. It seemed to me when I caught my first Potomagale velox and examined it that anything so strong and otter-like, a creature adapted, apparently, to the pursuit of a wide variety of prey, could not possibly exist on such a restricted diet. Even the most fanatical crustacean addict would, I felt, occasionally want to have a chance of fresh fish or frog, or even a water snake steak. So I experimented and tried my Potomagale on large beetles, delicious fish in many shapes, sizes and colours, obese frogs, water snakes of varying lengths and baby birds and eggs. It was all to no avail. The Potomagale viewed with disdain these suggested additions to his diet and stuck to the scrunchy fresh-water crab. This, as far as I could see, contained practically no nutriment, since it was composed almost entirely of carapace.

  My problem was, of course, twofold: first, I could not take a large enough supply of fresh-water crabs on the ship with me (my Potomagale was consuming some thirtyfive crabs per night) and, second, no European zoo could provide such an esoteric diet. There is, alas, no zoological Fortnum & Mason where such gastronomic rarities can be purchased. Therefore this creature of limited taste had to be taught to eat something different. This was easier said than done and required the employment of a certain low cunning.

  I obtained from the local market a large quantity of dried fresh-water shrimps, used to add piquancy to curries, groundnut chops and other African foods. These shrimps, powdered up, I mixed with minced meat and raw egg. The Potomagale, at feeding time, was voracious and this, I hoped, might give me my opportunity. I killed a number of crabs and stuffed them full of my shrimp and meat mixture; then I gave him an ordinary, undoctored crab which he devoured in a few quick scrunches. Having thus lulled his suspicions, I threw him a stuffed crab. He was half way through it before he realized that there was anything wrong with it. He spat it out to examine it through a web of quivering whiskers, then, to my delight, he finished it off. Over a period of weeks, I managed to get him to the stage where he was eating my special mixture from a dish, with a scattering of chopped-up crab on top, just for the look of the thing.

  Another problem child is the Giant anteater, the largest of the group. With its long, icicle-shaped head, its pennant-like tail and its huge, bear-like claws for breaking up the rock-hard termites’ nests that provide its food, it is a spectacular animal. It was in the highlands of Guyana that I captured my first one, pursuing him on horse-back, lassoing him, avoiding his slashing claws while we bundled him, hissing like a gas-main, into a sack and transported him back to camp. Once there, I tethered him to a tree and put my mind to the task of teaching him a new diet. I knew that the diet worked out for Giant anteaters in
the past had been raw egg, mince-meat and milk. The tricky business of persuading the anteater to take this unlikely substitute in place of its beloved termites was the crucial problem and one that was glossed over in the few manuals on zoo-craft that existed.

  Sometimes animals are so hide-bound in their prejudices that they won’t try a new food; indeed, in many cases, won’t even approach closely enough to smell it. That this is pure prejudice I have proved by the fact that, at some later date, the animal will consume, with pleasure, the food that it had rejected with such horror when it was first offered. In some cases, the suspect food even becomes its favourite.

  My anteater was not quite as narrow-minded as that, but he did regard the first bowl of milk, with raw egg and meat floating in it, as being as suspect as a light snack run up by one of the less attractive members of the Borgia family. Then I had an idea. I broke open a termites’ nest and obtained a handful of the large, but singularly unattractive-looking inhabitants. These I scattered on a large green leaf, which I then floated on the surface of the milk. The anteater, perceiving his favourite food, unfurled his foot-long, sticky tongue and began to browse on the ants. Naturally, his probing tongue kept flipping under the leaf and within a few minutes he was lapping at the mixture as though he’d never eaten anything else in his life or wanted to. At the next meal, I did not even have to camouflage the food with termites. He licked the bowl clean, juggling the last fragments of meat into his tube-like mouth with his tongue in the most elegant fashion.

  Stubborn though newly-captured animals can be, there generally comes a point when they surprise you by doing a complete volte-face. When I went out to Sierra Leone one of my aims was to obtain a group of the Black and White Colobus monkeys. These handsome creatures are primarily leaf eaters and so the job was to get them to eat a different sort of leaf to the one that they were used to. Actually, the job was threefold; first we had to teach them to eat the local type of greens we could get in the market, then to eat the food we would give them on the voyage home and, finally, to eat what we could provide them with when we got to Jersey. With this in view, I put in cold-storage on the ship that we were going to travel back on, crates of lettuce, cabbage, carrots, spinach and other delicacies that I thought might tempt the Colobus. All this was arranged, of course, long before I even got to Sierra Leone and before we knew we were going to catch any Colobus, let alone get them down to the coast. However, we did finally catch seven specimens, successfully adapted them to captivity and got them to accept the various green stuffs that we could get in the local native market.

  We finally got down to the coast and on to the ship and immediately the Colobus went into revolt. All of the delicacies procured and transported at colossal cost to please them, our beautiful crisp cabbages and spinach, our carrots and tomatoes, were looked upon as though they had been so much deadly nightshade. It became a major problem to keep the monkeys alive. There was only one thing to do. My secretary, Ann Peters, was detailed to do nothing else all day but make the Colobus eat, while we dealt with the rest of the collection. It became a battle of wills between the Colobus and Ann, and luckily Ann won. She managed to persuade them, by cajolery and abuse, to take just enough food to keep them alive. Once we were back in Jersey, I felt that we would have oak and elm and lime leaves to tempt them with and things would be better. The moment we arrived in Jersey, however, the Colobus, who had been ticking over on a diet only a shade above starvation level, overnight decided that all the things we had been offering them were just what they wanted and that they could not eat enough cabbage, spinach, carrot and tomatoes.

  You can’t lay down any hard and fast rules, for the individual animals vary so enormously. Once, on a collecting trip to the Cameroons in West Africa, I managed to catch three Angwantibos. These are strange little biscuit-coloured lemuroids that look something like demented arboreal Teddy-bears and, up to that time, had never been brought back alive to Europe. Only one person that I knew of had ever kept one of these little creatures alive and so information on their habits was scanty. However I did know that, as well as fruit and buds, they would take small birds; so three times a week they had plump weaver birds included in their diet. Now all three Angwantibos had been caught within a five-mile radius of my camp in identical terrain and so one could be pardoned for thinking that their eating habits would not be dissimilar, but, when presented with his bird, Angwantibos number one would proceed to devour the whole thing, except for the feet and head; number two would eat only the breast of his; whilst number three would perform a skilful trepanning job on top of the skull, lick out the brains and leave the rest.

  Every day, with any collection of animals, you are learning, generally with surprise, that their tastes are just as varied, their likes and dislikes as firmly implanted, as the clientele of any large hotel. We had not been established long in Jersey before we discovered that two of the most unlikely species had a passion for the humble herring that knew no bounds.

  These were the South American tapirs, supposedly strictly vegetarian, and the lions, carnivores it’s true but surely unlikely to get herrings in the wild state? In the case of the tapirs, it made us wonder if (since the animal is partially aquatic in the wild state), when the streams dried up into pools during the dry season, trapping the fish, the tapirs did not go fishing. But that tapirs in the wilds are followers of Isaac Walton has never, to the best of my knowledge, been recorded. The idea of fish, especially herrings, turning up with anything like regularity in any lion’s wild diet is remote, to say the least. The smell of raw herring must have been so ambrosial that our lions could not resist adding them to their diet.

  Whatever the reason, in both cases we were grateful for this liking, for the herring is a useful and pungent vessel in which to conceal medicines, should the need arise. In meat or fruit a pill would be detected and spat out disdainfully, while lurking in the depths of a really ripe herring it is undetectable and swallowed with every evidence of satisfaction. The list of subterfuges of this kind which one has to learn seems endless. For example, spiders act as a laxative to some birds, whereas, in our apes, fresh pineapple has the same effect. One of our African civets always used to ‘kill’ his bananas (not other fruit, only bananas) using a method that presumably civets use in the wild state to kill their prey. He would first grab and shake the banana into what he imagined to be a state of semi-consciousness, then he would fall on it repeatedly with his shoulder until the banana was a flat squishy mess smeared over the ground. Satisfied that it was dead, he would then eat it with relish.

  Of course, when animals develop a great liking for some particular thing, you have to be careful, for they will sometimes start consuming it to the exclusion of everything else. One of the great things in keeping animals is to try to prevent them growing bored of their diets. Thus one is constantly trying out new things, introducing new sights, colours and smells into the diet to relieve the monotony. A grape, for example, contains nothing more nutritious than a small proportion of sugar and a great deal of water, but nevertheless, it is of inestimable value as a tit-bit, an exciting addition to the basic diet, like a jelly at a child’s party. But the danger of over-doing it, of inducing a grape-fixation, must not be ignored.

  We had a Douracouli once in South America, one of the most enchanting of all the monkeys. Owl monkey is another name for it and a most descriptive one, if you can imagine a fur-covered owl. It is also curious in being the only nocturnal species of monkeys. We had not had this delightful creature long before she went off her food. There seemed no particular reason, as she was in good health, but with dull and uninterested eyes she picked at the food we gave her with the dispirited air of a guest in a hotel dining-room which boasts an international cuisine. It was obvious that she needed something to stimulate her flagging appetite. My wife, by some alchemy and at enormous cost (we were in the Matto Grosso at the time), succeeded in obtaining a couple of tins of cherries, of all unlikely fruit. On
their being opened, we found they bore no resemblance whatsoever to the cherry one was used to; they looked as though they were an unsuccessful line in Christmas decoration, made out of inferior velvet and of such a virulent red that they would have made even Snow White hesitate before accepting one. However, our Douracouli took one look at these violently-coloured fruits and decided that this was manna from Heaven. So addicted did she become, in fact, that she eschewed all other food and it took us an enormous amount of time and trouble, not to mention money, to wean her back on to a more nutritious, if less colourful, diet.

  Once you have removed your animal from the wilds, one of the biggest problems you face is how to combat boredom. Animals spend most of their time in the wild searching for food and, once you have eliminated the necessity for the search and the stimulation of hunger, boredom can easily set in. It is like a man who, having worked for thirty-five years in an office or a factory, suddenly finds himself in retirement and faces an empty life. In many cases he dies quickly, out of sheer boredom. Animals suffer in a similar way, so you try to combat this by the introduction of new foods into the diet, even if they contain little or nothing of nutritional value, and by the careful spacing of those foods which are both favourites and of nutritional value. In the absolutely ideal collection, of course, each animal would be fed individually, so that you would know its exact food intake. In many cases, when it is necessary for the animal to be kept in groups, this is difficult or impossible. We are able to feed at least our apes and some other animals individually and we have found what an enormous help it is to be able, in case of sickness, to know exactly, down to the last teaspoonful, of what an animal’s daily intake of food consists.

  As I said, the animal spends a large part of its daily life searching for food. Even if the food is not forthcoming, the act of searching is of great importance. Therefore we have found that, for example, providing small mammals with rotting logs as often as possible has a very therapeutic effect. The whole process of relishing the smells of the log, the effort required to disembowel it, the hopeful search for something edible in the pile of rotting bark and wood, is of the greatest psychological help to the animal, even if it does not acquire much in the way of nourishment from its exercise. Ideally, of course, animals should be fed ten or fifteen times a day, but this would require a staff of such magnitude as to make the idea, however desirable, uneconomic. We have found, though, that with a great many creatures it is necessary to feed them twice or three times a day. To keep a group of animals occupied, however, it is not necessary to produce a three-course meal, three times a day. The scattering of a handful of corn or sunflower seed on the floor of the cage containing a group of monkeys or squirrels, for example, will provide little in the way of food, but will keep the animals occupied for ages, searching for the grains and bickering enjoyably among themselves as they do so.