Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  LIFE AT THE

  ZOO

  LIFE AT THE

  ZOO

  BEHIND THE SCENES WITH

  THE ANIMAL DOCTORS

  Phillip T. Robinson

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2004 Phillip T. Robinson, DVM

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-50719-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Phillip T.

  Life at the zoo: behind the scenes with the animal doctors / Phillip T. Robinson. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 10 0–231–13248–4 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 13 978-0-231-13248-0 (cloth : alk.paper)

  ISBN 10 0-231-13249-2 (pbk. : alk.paper)

  ISBN 13 978-0-231-13249-7 (pbk. : alk.paper)

  1. Zoos. I. Title.

  QL76.R64 2004

  590.73—dc22

  2004043893

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. Intern at the Zoo: An Eclectic Orientation

  2. Too Early for the Autopsy: Fitting in at the Zoo

  3. Growing Pains: Educating the Menagerie Makers

  4. The Keepers: Nurturing the Health of Animals

  5. Zoo Babies: Promoting Motherhood

  6. Exhibit Making: Creating Zoo Ecosystems

  7. Creature Comfort: The Power of Microenvironments

  8. What’s This Thing? Searching for the Normal

  9. Holding the Tiger: Zoos Say Yes to Drugs

  10. Finding the Sick in the Zoo: Seeking Out Disease and Discomfort

  11. Feeding the Ark: The Nutritional Wisdom of Animals

  12. Getting Closer to Animals: Judas Goats and Alpaca Coats

  13. So, You Work at the Zoo? Employees, Visitors, and Fence Jumpers

  14. Animal Cases and Chases: And Some Things Better Kept to Myself

  15. Zoo Regulars: Coworkers Without Titles

  16. Ethical Captivity: Animal Well-Being in Zoos

  17. What a Zoo Should Be, And Ought Not Be

  Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works on Zoos

  Index

  Photo Credits and Attributions

  PREFACE

  Zoogoing is one of America’s favorite pastimes. In fact, more Americans are reported to visit zoos and aquariums annually than attend all major professional sporting events combined, with present numbers approaching 140 million. Worldwide attendance at zoos and aquariums is estimated at 600 million people. The motives of zoogoers range from simple curiosity and amusement to educational and spiritual growth. Americans are fascinated with animals. This is clearly reflected in our annual expenditure of billions of dollars to purchase pets, supplies, and animal medical care. Cats, dogs, birds, ferrets, lizards, snakes, and tortoises have become common household companions for people, causing a huge growth in the pet industry worldwide. Television programs involving animals are at an all-time high, representing one of the most popular segments of the communications and television entertainment industry.

  Perhaps no area of veterinary science is as intimidating or demands as much versatility as the practice of zoo animal medicine. At times it requires a taste for the kinds of body slams, physical and mental, that might be found elsewhere only in the World Wrestling Federation. After all, zoos are made up of both animals and people—and people usually bring the most uncertainty to the running of a zoo.

  Quagga in London Zoo, 1870

  The evolution of zoos is ongoing, at times painful, and fraught with some lingering anachronisms involving purpose and ethics. Along with the public’s growing awareness of environmental degradation and species extinctions, the expectations of zoos have risen steeply. In addition, animal welfare concerns have placed zoos under the public microscope, questioning the care and conditions of animals under their stewardship. Responding to these influences, the zoo profession has undergone a steady transformation over the past thirty years, changing many of its values, priorities, and programs.

  Given the global urgency to protect wildlife and wild places, some people look with optimism upon the capabilities of the new zoological gardens to help provide security for the survival of nature. The quagga, a now-extinct relative of the South African plains zebras, epitomizes a dwindling population of creatures that escaped the grasp of modern civilization. In 1873 the last, nameless, individual died in captivity at the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam, Holland. While the collective capacity of zoos and aquariums to offset the steady losses of animal species in the wild is far too small for the global problem at hand, zoos’ contributions to conservation biology are significant, and growing. Zoos have enormous potential to educate the public about environmental conservation and are collaborating in the field and the laboratory to help address problems of animal extinctions.

  My purpose for writing this book is to share some hard-earned insights into the dynamics of caring for and conserving wild animals in captivity, as well as to consider a few broader implications for how we view nature and animals in our society. Truthfully, when I left zoo work I never had an exit interview, and, in part, this book fulfills that exercise. This book will not tell you how to run a zoo, but it may give you a better idea of what to be pleased or perplexed about when you visit one in the future. It is written from my personal perspective as a staff veterinarian at the San Diego Zoo, a university research veterinarian, a wildlife biologist, and a nature lover. The experiences described are mostly my own, but the insights and knowledge therein have been honed by my fortunate association with many talented, dedicated professionals throughout my zoo career. I have filled in some of the blanks with supplementary research about zoos, which becomes hard to attribute in detail without citing sources like an academic treatise. Comedian Michael Wright put it this way: “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

  This book recounts some of the thinking and thoughts that go through a zoo veterinarian’s mind when visiting animal patients in a zoo. My focus, as zoo medicine should be, is more on keeping animals healthy than on the technology of treating preventable conditions. In sharing my experiences and ideas about zoo people and zoo animals, I have struggled to balance the inclusion of personal opinions and the cataloging of esoteric facts and diseases; I am not always sure which prevailed.

  Most of us in the zoo-doctor profession believe that it takes a quirky combination of science, art, and good fortune to practice successfully. My own experiences corroborate just that—especially the quirky parts. Through their dedication and perseverance, zoo veterinarians have advanced the knowledge of animal keeping, health, reproduction, and conservation, as well as the humane well-being of wild animals in captivity. In doing so they have fundamentally altered the course of zoos, bringing them along—sometimes kicking and screaming—into this new millennium.

  It may be the blend of art, science, and pragmatism of zoo medical practice that makes it a unique and rewarding career, but it is the romantic fantasy of working in a zoo that somehow captures everyone’s imagination, including mine.

  Family, friends, mentors, and associates have all helped me over the years on my zoo and conservation journey, and, thereby, in the preparation of this book. I am sincerely grateful to them all. My lively, loving mother, Marge Robinson, has always encouraged me to pursue whatever occupations or projects inspire me, but she never anticip
ated that she would end up referring to me as “the monkey doctor.” Several individuals in particular have actively encouraged, tolerated, and assisted me in refining my efforts to articulate my thoughts on the written page, especially Katherine and Shane Robinson, Dr. Rollin Baker, L. James Binder, Donn Stone, and Dr. Duane Ullrey. Marvin L. Jones provided helpful comments on the final draft. I also have been fortunate to benefit from the skills of my helpful editors at Columbia University Press.

  As a veterinarian, I have often been joined in my efforts to improve the lives of zoo animals by the generous collaboration of zoo directors, curators, keepers, biologists, physicians, researchers, and architects. While only a few of them have been mentioned by name, many of them have made significant contributions to the field of zoological medicine and deserve the public’s gratitude and admiration.

  INTRODUCTION

  In every generation there are restless souls who cannot be made to fit the common mold. A few of these are valuable in keeping their communities and professions in a ferment by their constant challenge to the existing order of man’s thoughts and actions.

  —Memorial to Dr. Richard C. Cabot (1868–1939), the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust

  I opened up a cardboard box that had been taped shut and tucked away in a storage closet. When you move on to a new position, it is easier to set up housekeeping in your next office from scratch than to salvage aging supplies from your old desk. After a while, most of the objects in a desk become so invisible to the consciousness that one unthinkingly pushes familiar things aside while hunting through drawers to find an item that you know is in there somewhere. I fumbled past a stack of old business cards, a little metric ruler, a favorite calculator to convert ounces to milligrams, and a broken ostrich egg that could be shaped into an interesting tie tack some day—if they should ever return to fashion. I wondered where that nifty paper wheel gadget was from the horsemeat company that could be used to calculate the pregnancy due date of anything from an aardvark to a squirrel. Struggling to make sense of the forensic remains of my own zoo career in this box of junk, I also wondered whether, if a volcanic eruption smothered my house in ash, an archaeologist in the next millennium could figure out what I had done for a living, or would simply write me off as an eccentric pack rat.

  A small cupful of paper clips looked like a mini-museum collection in itself; their variety reminded me of the curious displays of “Barbed Wires of the Old West” seen hanging on walls in country restaurants and southwestern tourist traps. These little fasteners had been detached from letters sent to me over the years from all over the world. Wide boxy types (Dutch, I think), funky colored plastic clips, vinyl-coated ones, a circular model, and some foldable, silver-foil discs originating from a private animal collector in Switzerland. The least pretentious ones of the lot were thoroughly rusted, attesting to their humid equatorial origins. I doubt that any cheaper paper clips existed; these were from Nigeria, where recycling has been practiced since time immemorial.

  Comatose pens clogged with ossified ink filled an old pencil box, and the only one that still worked was a lonely Bic ballpoint—a stark contrast to the Nigerian model of quality control. I rediscovered the old fine-point Rapidograph pen that I had used to mark labels with indelible ink for a collection of small-animal museum specimens during my graduate field research days in Africa. In the bottom of the box languished a few unused paper museum tags with strings still attached—their unemployment bore witness to the spared lives of several obscure tropical rodents, whose less fortunate relatives now resided within white steel cases at the Michigan State University Natural History Museum, mothballed into perpetuity.

  Next, I spied a rubber leg and a head from a small desktop model of a horse—a heartfelt gift from a graduate of Beijing University veterinary school. The rest of the horse, mounted in a standing position on a lacquered wood base, had strayed off somewhere else. Little red dots on its body labeled with Chinese script identified the useful acupuncture points to remedy lameness, colic, and equine liver ailments. I remain impressed that the horse has merited centuries of neurological research.

  Finally, digging into a manila file folder, I extracted a long-forgotten letter that I received while I was the director of veterinary services at the San Diego Zoo. It was addressed to “Chief Veterinary Doctor, Zoo Hospital.” The undulating penmanship detailed a most peculiar and dangerous medical condition that the writer’s doctors were “too incompetent to properly diagnose.” The patient was confident, however, that it could easily be remedied if I would personally intervene on his behalf. He pleaded, “Doctor, I have a live rattlesnake inside my stomach and without assistance from a serpent expert like you, these people are sure to kill me when they try to take it out!” The return address was: “Psychiatric Unit, Veterans Administration Hospital, Salt Lake City, Utah.” The archaeologists are going to have their work cut out for them. But first, let me start toward the beginning.

  As I made my way down the tree-covered lane toward the San Diego Zoo hospital for the very first time, I came upon the peculiar spectacle of two medieval-costumed swordsmen engaged in a heated battle near the hospital’s front steps. They briefly emerged from their Shakespearean characters, shifted to the roadside to let me pass, and resumed their bloodless encounter. Strewn around the perimeter of this cul-desac were fragments of a stage set for the Old Globe Theatre’s production of Hamlet. Moving past the actors and through the tall iron gates, I entered the equally surreal world of wild and exotic animals at the San Diego Zoo.

  Just a few short weeks before, clutching my freshly inscribed veterinary diploma, I rushed home to pack after June graduation ceremonies at Michigan State University. With all my worldly goods secured in a horse trailer, minus the horse, I hooked it to my car and headed for California. After climbing over the Rockies and gazing into the Grand Canyon, I angled southwest across the Sonoran Desert through a blur of creosote bush and ocotillo. With the car’s temperature gauge in the red zone and the heater on high—my last-ditch effort to keep the coolant from boiling over—I impatiently switchbacked up the grade from the desert floor and entered the coastal mountains of eastern San Diego County. Little did I know that this fifteen-month internship would take me fifteen years to complete.

  Earlier in the year, I had received the welcome news that I had been selected as the new veterinary medical intern at the San Diego Zoo. It was pure serendipity that I had ever learned of this opportunity to begin with, since it was a new program—the only zoo medicine internship in the world. My zoology academic advisor, Dr. Rollin Baker, director of the MSU Natural History Museum and a colleague of the zoo’s curator of mammals, had learned of this opening in correspondence. I applied immediately.

  My longstanding goal was to work in wildlife conservation research in Africa, a career for which I had learned Swahili and completed BS and MS degrees in wildlife biology. I had no occasion to use my Swahili-language training on the opposite side of the continent, where I spent most of a year doing field research in the Republic of Liberia, a destination for freed American slaves in the nineteenth century. There I trekked through rainforests with native hunters and lived in remote villages while studying the habits of the pygmy hippopotamus for the World Wildlife Fund. I made recommendations for its conservation in the wild. Thirty-five years later, I am still attempting to implement them.

  I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which hosted a small municipal zoo that I rarely visited. The only zoo of any real size was near Detroit on the opposite side of the state. I had always been put off a little by what I had seen and read about zoos, with their closely confined animals and circus-like atmospheres. After returning from Africa I combined my wildlife biology interests with veterinary medicine and was accepted into veterinary school at Michigan State. I expected that San Diego would be but a brief educational detour on the way to other places.

  As a student, I had several zoo experiences, but nothing vaguely resembling those awaiting me in southern California. In veteri
nary school, I went on rounds with an MSU faculty member to the Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, Michigan. The most memorable medical cases involved problems with lice on donkeys at the zoo’s farm exhibit and roundworm parasites in their bobcats—but at least that was a start. In the winter of my senior year in veterinary school, I ventured to Chicago to work with the staff at the Lincoln Park Zoo. There I encountered a whole new level of zoo medicine. I began on the first morning with a previously arranged meeting with the zoo’s director, Dr. Lester Fisher, at the baby animal nursery, where the zoo’s longtime veterinarian and administrator had stopped by to check on his charges en route to his office across the park’s grounds. Well-spoken and well-dressed in a smart suit and tie, he carried himself as if he were the mayor of Chicago, and he probably would have made a splendid one at that.

  In the morning, Dr. Fisher worked as a zoo veterinarian, then shifted to the role of chief administrator and afternoon host of a local radio program about zoo animals. He often ended the day at fundraisers and meetings with civic leaders and politicians. Today he listened to the heartbeats of a baby tiger, checked the rectal temperature of an infant chimpanzee with a cold, and chatted in a fatherly manner with the nursery staff about the magical little creatures in their care. Several zoo visitors stood outside in the cool, misty drizzle, straining at the window in hopes of getting a mere glimpse into the exotic little world inside. I couldn’t help but beam internally because I was on the more interesting side of the glass.

  Dr. Fisher thoroughly enjoyed his limited, but continuing, hands-on contact with the animals. Dr. Erich Maschgan, however, saw most of the cases that surfaced on a daily basis, dividing his time between his own private pet practice in Chicago and the zoo. We visited his patients in the lion house, monkey house, reptile house, and various behind-the-scenes locations on the zoo grounds. I was awed by the unassuming, competent manner with which he evaluated and treated animals that showed up on the sick list. A monkey had been in a tussle, and its ear was split by a bite. After a dose of an anesthetic, he scrubbed the ear clean and neatly trimmed away a hopelessly dangling piece of skin and cartilage, returning the animal to a holding cage for follow-up antibiotics to be administered by a keeper. I didn’t realize it then, but I would see many monkey injuries in the coming years, the results of squabbles over food, females, sex, and resting space.