Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  “This,” Jane Goodall explained, “is why I find the story so symbolic. If a chimpanzee, and a chimpanzee that has been so badly treated by mankind, can reach out across the species barrier to help a human friend in need then surely we humans with our supposedly deeper capacity for compassion and understanding can extend a hand to help chimpanzees and other creatures with whom we share the planet.”

  Afterwards I waited patiently at the edge of the inevitable scrum that envelops her on these occasions before managing to exchange a few words – on my part totally banal. But her presence lingers on, that of an immensely courageous and dedicated woman who years ago in a remote part of Tanzania, had lived amongst a group of wild chimpanzees and ultimately demonstrated how small the dividing bridge between them and ourselves is.

  A WORLD BEHIND BARS

  A Robin Red-breast in a cage

  Puts all heaven in a rage

  - William Blake

  Can there be a more tasteless and tacky newspaper than the Daily Mail when it comes to inciting discord and racial disharmony? The ‘formula of daily hate’, as Polly Toynbee trenchantly observed in the Guardian, no doubt at the end of yet another long week of immigrant-bashing and slagging off Muslims, gays and transgenders by the Mail’s hacks. I was pondering this after a friend had directed my attention to a news-story under the headline, “British woman savagely assaulted by sea lion in Spanish zoo.” It was, of course vintage Mail stuff, cleverly combining a low-key mix of nationalism and xenophobia. The lady in question it implied, would never have undergone such an experience in a British zoo. What would the dear newssheet have to bleat about, I wonder, without all those pesky foreigners? But now having incited the nation to vote for Brexit and the subsequent controls of foreigners entering its green and pleasant land, one of their prime targets of vilification will be removed.

  But enough of the Daily Mail and its louche and unlovable columnist Richard Littlejohn. Rather, let me continue with the subject of zoos which, along with circuses, I deplore. Indeed, it is a subject I stand squarely alongside the late Canadian best-selling novelist Farley Mowat who wrote that on becoming president his first act would be to go around opening up all the zoo cells in the world.

  Zoos are as unacceptable in 2017, as are aquariums and Sea Life centres. They are relics of a Victorian past and arguments to justify keeping animals in captivity no longer stand up, if ever they did. These are not my words. They appeared in a recent post on its website by the UK-based travel company Responsible Travel, announcing it had stopped promoting trips that include visits to zoos because there was no justification for keeping animals in captivity. The company also cited the low investment ploughed by zoos back into conservation (around three per cent) and the fact that over ninety per cent of animals in zoos are not remotely endangered. The Ab-Fab actress and animal rights activist Joanna Lumley was one of the first to publicly applaud the company’s decision: “To hear a travel company in 2017 saying that it is unacceptable to keep animals in captivity for our entertainment is absolutely fabulous.” The company’s stance was endorsed by Trip Adviser, one of the world’s largest travel websites, who have now ceased selling tickets for attractions where tourists were allowed direct contact with captive wild animals or endangered species.

  Let’s be clear here. Zoos exist first and foremost as entertainment for people and not for the benefit of animals. For a start, animals don’t want to be stared at for eight, or more, hours a day with crowds oohing and ahhing at them and cameras constantly clicking in their faces. Well, would you? Zoos are businesses, pure and simple. Their owners regard animals as commodities, to be bought, bred, sold and traded for profit without regard to considerations of their welfare, or for the relationships they may have established with other inmates. Cute babies bring in crowds and profits but the cute babies grow up and new homes must be found for them away from their families.

  And so, with these precepts in mind here is a list to consider before you next visit a zoo with your kids.

  Zoos Cannot Provide Sufficient Space

  No matter how large zoos try to make their enclosures and no matter how many trees or plants they place in them, the space provided cannot begin to compare with the freedom that animals would enjoy in their natural habitat. This is especially true of larger species like elephants who typically travel forty to fifty miles a day and yet who in zoos are confined to spaces 1000 times smaller than their wild domain. And in the case of polar bears it becomes even worse with their space 1,000,000 smaller than their Arctic territories.

  Captive animals exist in a sterile vacuum bereft of everything that is natural to them. As a result, they become bored, frustrated and lonely leading to a condition known scientifically as ARB – Abnormal Repetitive Behaviour. This can be observed in the way animals pace up and down their enclosure, bobbing their heads, swaying from side to side or even sitting motionless biting themselves. They are traits, it goes without saying, that are never seen in the wild. This condition, sometimes refered to as ‘zoochosis,’ is so prevalent that zoos give their animals mind-altering drugs, like Prozac, to disguise their conditions from visitors who might otherwise be distressed by the animal’s deviant behaviour.

  Giving animals Prozac! How bizarre is that? But is has now become commonplace. Not so long ago, Humboldt penguins at Scarborough Sea Life Centre in the north east of England were prescribed anti-depressant drugs because of their state of mind. And it gets even weirder. Laurel Bait, in his book Animal Madness describes a constantly sobbing captive gorilla and a compulsively masturbating walrus. The ‘madness’, as the author points out for those who may still not have got the point, is caused by humans forcing animals to live in artificial conditions.

  Whist writing this, my thoughts turned to Hanako. Hanako is a sixty-eight-year-old Asian elephant who has lived in medieval conditions at Inokashira Park Zoo in Japan for sixty-one years of her life. Completely alone, isolated in a cramped concrete enclosure her life has been one long sterile treadmill, lacking company or stimulation or any environmental nourishment. In a website post that made one want to simultaneously laugh, cry and gasp in disbelief, the zoo showed Hanako performing her ‘specialty dance’, rocking from side to side on her 68th birthday. Incredibly, the authorities, despite all their years in zoo management, were so lacking in knowledge of animal behavioral mannerisms that they did not recognize this was a classic symptom of stereotypic behaviour, induced by lack of motivation and space.

  Somewhat naively, I suppose, I had never considered zoo animals being on prescription for drugs and I asked a vet friend if this was really the case. He acknowledged that this was indeed so. “It’s the accepted treatment for stereotypic behaviour. You would find it hard to find a zoo where psychopharmaceuticals are not in everyday use,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “And the pharmaceutical companies go along with this?” I asked.

  He shot me an amused glance.

  “It’s a massive business for them as well as being an inexpensive way of laboratory testing. But don’t expect the zoos to admit it. Nearly all keepers are made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Which is hardly surprising. The last thing people want to know is that the giraffes or bears or zebras they are looking at in the enclosures are on Valium, Prozac or anti-depressants.”

  The next day I made some enquiries and learned that in 2015 the animal pharmaceutical industry’s global annual revenue amounted to a whopping $6-billion.

  Zoos Don’t Serve Education Or Conservation

  Zoos are depicted by zoos as places that raise awareness of animals among children together with the assertion that they save endangered species by breeding them in captivity. But today, the scope and quality of nature documentaries like Frozen Planet and Life on Earth enable young people to view wildlife in real time and in their natural habitat in a way that watching animals endlessly pacing up and down some artificial enclosure can never begin to replicate. As far as the second argument is concerned, nearly all the the succ
ess stories surrounding the captive breeding of endangered species, and their return to the wild, are carried out in specialised centres to which the public are not admitted. For the most part however, zoo breeding programmes are designed to maintain stock for the zoo industry.

  Surplus Animals Are Killed

  Excess animals are regularly ‘culled’ in zoos. They are either killed and fed to their fellow inhabitants, or sold to other zoos or wildlife dealers. In 2006 an entire pack of wolves at Highland Wildlife Park were shot after the social structure of the pack had broken down. A year earlier, two wolf cubs and an adult female were shot dead at Dartmoor Wildlife Park. The vet’s report read: “Selective cull due to overcrowding and fighting in the pack.” and added that a further cull of cubs was needed. Early in 2014, there was global outrage when Copenhagen Zoo killed a healthy young giraffe called Marius. The event triggered a worldwide debate on culling in zoos and it was admitted by zoo whistleblowers that thousands of animals were deliberately killed in European zoos alone each year.

  Think Safari Parks Are Better Than ‘Traditional’ Zoos?

  Woburn Safari Park was found to be keeping its lions locked into small enclosures for eighteen hours a day. A government zoo inspection report in 2010 said: “The animals were very crowded and there was no provision for individual feeding or sleeping areas. Lions were found kept in cramped, unsuitable enclosures for eighteen hours a day. Even in a park so highly regarded as Woburn, there was no visible environmental enrichment. Some of the lions exhibited skin wounds and multiple scars of various age, some fresh, some healed.” Later, it was discovered that staff had been training elephants using 4,500-volt electrical goads. In 2012, another safari park was shamed when West Midland Safari Park was exposed for providing white lion cubs to a notorious wildlife dealer for sale to a travelling circus in Japan.

  The Circus Connection

  It is no secret that zoos are a conduit for the sale of unwanted or surplus animals into circuses. Britain likes to think it is a nation of animal lovers, yet one of the most archaic forms of animal exploitation is still permitted. To be fair to the public there is overwhelming support for a ban with 94 per cent of people in England and Wales supporting it and over 98 per cent in Scotland. And with good reason. Even by the most basic animal welfare standards, the treatment of circus animals is inadmissible from training by intimidation and punishment, to confinement in cramped, barren cages and wholly unacceptable travel conditions undertaken in overcrowded trailers between venues over distances up to fifteen or twenty hours at a time,

  None of this however appears to unduly bother Christophe Chope, MP for Christchurch in Dorset who over the last few years has persistently blocked government legislation framed to prevent wild animals performing in circuses. In 2014, Chope came under criticism from parliamentary colleagues for his stance which he justified on a technicality: that the EU Membership Costs and Benefits Bill should have been called by the clerk before the circus bill was heard. He was, he insisted, only making a point of order but one that given the demands of parliamentary time, meant that a further reading was indefinitely delayed.

  I wrote to Chope asking him why he persisted in blocking the bill in which the government stated it felt “duty-bound to recognize that wild animals have intrinsic value, and respect their inherent wildness and its implications for their treatment.” It is a concept that Chope evidently has difficulty in either understanding or agreeing to, for I received a typically anodyne parliamentary reply on embossed House of Commons notepaper, the contents of which made it clear that he had no intention of acceding to a debate on the bill, either now or in the future. I was not wholly surprised. As can be seen from his entry in Wikipedia, I was writing to a man who appears to have little sympathy or compassion for poor or underprivileged humans, a trait that can often embrace animals as well.

  This not to say that that all zoos are worthless, or that some have not contributed significantly towards the conservation of endangered species such as the Arabian oryx, the Condor eagle or the black-footed ferret – all saved by captive breeding programmes. An obvious example of this is Jersey Zoo in the Channel Islands founded in 1956 by the pioneer animal conservationist, TV personality and writer, Gerald Durrell, with the explicit aim of “the breeding of rare creatures, especially those threatened with extinction in the wild state.” At the time it was established, Durrell himself was bitterly critical of zoos. “The average zoo is pretty bloody,” he told a friend. “It might pose under the wonderful banner of a scientific society, but it’s nothing more than a three-ring circus, run by businessmen or illiterate showmen.”

  It is worth remembering that when Durrell first realised the need for a zoo to propagate threatened or endangered species in the mid 1950’s, public awareness of subjects like conservation or the environment rarely figured in most peoples’ consciousness. Both in his credo and growing awareness of the remorseless tide of destruction we were beginning to inflict upon our planet, he was far ahead of his time. Years later, with Jersey Zoo established globally as an agent of species survival, he replied to someone who questioned the morality of keeping animals in captivity by observing that if animals were not endangered, or on the brink of extinction, there would be no need for zoos.

  Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, was also light years ahead of her time when in the 1930’s she wrote of two giraffes she had seen on the deck of a rusty German cargo ship in Mombasa harbour bound for Hamburg. They had been captured in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) and were destined for a travelling circus.

  Watching them, she pictured the future that awaited them. “They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing,” she later wrote. “For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains: they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold stench, smoke and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening.

  In the long years before them, will the giraffes sometimes dream of their lost country? Where are they now, where have they gone to, the grass and the thorn trees, the rivers and waterholes and the blue mountains? The high sweet air over the plains has lifted and withdrawn. Where have the other giraffes gone to that were side by side with them when they cantered over the undulating land? In the night where is the full moon?”

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” she ends. “I wish that for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the noble little heads that are now raised against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone in Hamburg where no one knows of Africa.”

  LIZARDS AND LEOPARDS

  Put forth to watch, unschooled, alone

  ‘Twixt hostile earth and sky

  The mottled lizard, n’eath the stone

  Is wiser here than I.

  - Rudyard Kipling

  On a random impulse – and experience has taught me never to ignore them – I decided to visit the Matobos. I hadn’t been there for nearly twelve years and a friend suggested I stay at the Farmhouse Lodge on the edge of the national park. “It may not be in the Blue Guide” he smiled dryly.” But if you’re looking to unwind in easygoing, informal surroundings you’ll be hard pressed to find better.

  My friend was right and as the car wheels crunched on the dusty, hard packed clay drive that wound its way up through the wooded incline to where the Farmhouse sprawled comfortably on its green lawns beneath a towering boulder strewn kopje, I experienced a quickening sense of anticipation. This, I felt, was my kind of camp.

  Starting life in the 1930’s as a dairy farm, the Farmhouse was purchased by John and Alison Burton in 1995. Today under their capable management the lodge combines a pleasing blend of efficiency and informality, in which house rules are kept to a minimum and guests are free to come and go as they please.

  My thatched Cape Dutch style cottage with bedroom, ensuite bathroom and lounge was roomy, simple and comfortable – a welcome change to the yuppie pretentions tha
t are an increasing feature of so many camps and lodges today. Only the other day I had read with mounting incredulity a feature article on a top-ten list of safari camps in an up-market American travel magazine. Included in the necessary ingredients for client satisfaction were gold-plated jaccuzis, gift-wrapped soaps, mimosa-scented non-allergenic pillows and hermetically sealed air-condition bedrooms that insulated you from the sounds of the African bush. Whatever happened to wood-fired hot water in six-foot canvass bath tubs and drinks around the campfire as you listened to lions, hyenas and jackals tuning up under the African stars?

  Imagine then my delight in being able to lie snugly in bed at night listening to the scurrying of rock hyraxes back and forward on the thatched roof above me. What I wondered sleepily were they doing? A little bit of late night revelling after dining out on the Farmhouse’s lush lawns before returning to their rocky retreats? Or perhaps they felt safe here, secure for another night away from their deadly foe the leopard. The Matobos has the densest population of leopards anywhere in the world, a figure that is abetted by the abundance of these tiny, furry mammals, the closest living relative to the elephant, and which makes up over fifty per cent of their diet.

  The Farmhouse is situated close to the north-east boundary of the Matobos National Park, which forms the core of the Matobos Hills, an area of granite kopjes and narrow, wooded valleys rising above the granite shield that covers much of Zimbabwe. Massive two-billion-year-old granite boulders, sculpted by wind and sun, climb chaotically upon each in vivid lichen spattered hues of greens, yellows, reds and purples, like some surrealistic dream-mirage by Salvador Dali. Psychedelic lizards dart dexterously among the rocks and caves where some fifteen thousand years earlier southern Africa’s first inhabitants, the San, began to paint people and animals in rich ochres, yellows and reds using pigments mainly from iron oxides in the surrounding hills.