Dr. Maschgan was a kindly, modest man who genuinely liked animals. He had warm relationships with the animal care staff, many of whom had been doing this unusual work for years in the heart of Chicago, serving a zoo that had been open to the public since the 1870s. I wondered if every medical case in a zoo veterinarian’s career was different, since no two hours were alike during my entire visit there. It was a mystifying place, in the sense that living bits of animal nature from all over the globe had been assembled into a synthetic jungle. They carried on with their immigrant lives on foreign soil, through hot Chicago summers and icy winters, entirely dependent upon humans for their health and well-being.
As I watched the large carnivores and apes, I speculated on how heavy the cage hardware was and if these contraptions would really hold a powerful animal if it became excited or vexed. I examined the widths of the moats required to contain dangerous animals and the precautions that employees took when they came close to them. Who really knew whether a Jim Thorpe, Mark Spitz, or Michael Jordan of the animal kingdom might defeat barriers that were designed for just-average animals? An impala antelope in the wild can clear an obstacle eight feet high and forty feet wide, but zoo enclosures half as large are meant to contain the same animal in captivity.
Studying the padlocks, I imagined their crumbling inside from age and corrosion and the cage doors falling off one day, liberating their feral inhabitants. In fact, in the years to come, several cage locks did fall apart in my hands. As with an aging airplane, how do you know when to replace this stuff? In the interest of safety, zoos often adopt a two-lock design on the most dangerous doors, just as aviation mechanical systems provide for engineering redundancy. Such things are learned by good and bad experiences that have become part of the practical lore of zookeeping, learned the hard way by animal escapes, lumps, bumps, bruises—and a few plane crashes along the way. Yet, whereas the planes had operation and service manuals, no books existed then on how to run a zoo.
During my zoo career I would meet countless veterinarians, doctors, dentists, nurses, and other professionals in my attempts to diagnose and treat problems in zoo animals. In comparing and contrasting our professions, I usually asked the physicians to consider the following scenario: Your patient has a badly broken leg. It attacks you when you try to approach, refuses to tell you anything about its injury, resists all of your efforts to examine, x-ray, and diagnose the problem, requires you to forcibly sedate it for surgery, tries its best to tear off the cast that you put on their fractured limb after the surgery, and, finally, when awake, attempts to flee from the hospital, threatening the life of anyone who comes near. This is the nature of medical practice in the zoo. In some ways, I suppose it is like specializing in providing medical care to demented maximum-security prisoners.
Because of the scope and novelty of their work, zoo veterinarians have the pervasive sense of never having quite enough medical or surgical expertise to tend to every possible injury or disease in their practice. Indeed, it is their everyday job to discover and assemble solutions for these uncertainties on a case-by-case basis. A zoo veterinarian must be part epidemiologist, surgeon, ethologist, ecologist, detective, and shaman. Coping with these complexities is the fundamental conundrum that pricks the imagination and enthusiasm of individuals who make it their career.
No matter how humble the zoo’s staff or facilities, veterinarians must provide the 911 responses to all emergencies and be prepared to cope with any catastrophe that arises. They are the paramedics, anesthesiologists, trauma surgeons, and midwives. And when these efforts fail, they become the priests who administer last rites.
San Diego Zoo Hospital and Biological Research Station, c. 1930
1. INTERN AT THE ZOO
An Eclectic Orientation
The San Diego Zoo originated as a commonplace menagerie—a by-product of a small, temporary animal display that had been assembled for the 1915–16 Panama-California Exposition in the city’s spacious Balboa Park. The exposition commemorated the impending prospects for international commerce brought about by the newly completed Panama Canal. Its inaugural event was a grand midnight concert attended by fifty thousand people on New Year’s Eve in 1915, and its centerpiece attraction was the world’s largest musical instrument, a massive pipe organ, which had been installed in the new outdoor Spreckels Organ Pavilion. Newly caged but zooless animals listened nearby in the darkness to a musical performance that aptly began with Haydn’s The Creation.
A makeshift arrangement of enclosures had been erected to exhibit this hastily gathered hodgepodge of wolves, bears, leopards, and bison. They were displayed like a circus sideshow for the amusement of the visitors. The exposition ran for two years instead of the scheduled one. In 1916, as it began winding down, the idea of installing these animals, and more, into a permanent facility in Balboa Park took root with the birth of the nonprofit Zoological Society of San Diego. Dr. Harry Wegeforth, a local physician, scanned the dry, brushy hillsides and canyons in Balboa Park and envisioned animals from all over the globe living in a tropical garden. As a teenager Wegeforth had had a passion for animals and circuses and slipped away from San Diego for a time to become a tightwire walker with the Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Wegeforth’s initial zoo efforts drew upon his connections in city government and the business community to expropriate building materials and solicit donations and sponsors for animal acquisitions. He funded his passion a nickel and a dime at a time. Almost single-handedly, Wegeforth organized a plan to create his notion of a world-class zoo, and in 1921 the city of San Diego was finally persuaded to provide the permanent property for the zoo in the park. Thanks to innate wisdom, or, more likely, thanks to the protective leadership “Dr. Harry” wielded, city politicians seldom succeeded in meddling significantly with the zoo’s management or budget. This remains the case even today.
On the first day of my veterinary internship, I anxiously sought out the Zoo Hospital and Biological Research Station, a classic piece of 1920s Spanish revival–style architecture, built through the philanthropy of Ellen Browning Scripps, an heir to the Scripps newspaper fortune. Balboa Park had evolved into a grassy fantasyland of exotic eucalyptus, jacaranda, orchid, frangipani, and fig trees sprinkled around botanical gardens, reflecting ponds, fountains, and museums with quaint Spanish facades. The zoo hospital was completed in 1927—a simple, picturesque two-story building cloistered away on the zoo’s perimeter, now adjacent to the backstage entrance to San Diego’s Old Globe Shakespeare Theatre. Dr. Harry’s oversized head, cast into a commemorative bronze, rested on a pedestal next to the staircase inside the front entry hall. Later, as I learned more about him, I couldn’t help but think that it was inconsiderate to locate him so far from the hustle and bustle of the zoo entrance, where he would be pleased beyond his imagination at the income-producing queues at the ticket booths.
Roaming the zoo grounds on my own for the first time, I encountered weathered cement relics of generations of exhibits for the big cats, bears, and great apes. These antiquated structures were moldering reminders of the zoo’s rustic beginnings. There was a surprising absence of actual buildings of any consequence, aside from the restaurant, reptile house, gift shop, and administration offices. Scattered here and there, tucked inconspicuously behind exhibits, were various “keeper shacks”—small, makeshift workstations where animal foods were prepared and daily diaries logged. The animals I saw, all strangers to me then, would gradually take on names and personalities as I tended to their medical dilemmas in the coming years.
Unlike most other American city zoos in the early 1970s, the San Diego Zoo had become an enviable tourist destination. From a sleepy US Navy town in the 1940s and ’50s, San Diego was fast becoming a major, cosmopolitan city. The zoo’s annual visitor attendance was approaching three million, making it the envy of other mostly struggling urban zoos. San Diego was exuberantly proud of its zoo—the city’s official sacred cow. Its politically provincial and plutocratic Board of Trustees f
ought to keep it safe from the harm of bureaucratic encroachments and ran the organization like an elite club of civic leaders and socialites. The membership of the Zoological Society has always been regarded primarily as a fundraising base rather than as a democratic, intellectual association. Indeed, for most of the society’s history, it has been traditional to pass board positions to close friends, relatives, and other patriotic members of the San Diego establishment, with minimal public fanfare and without extramural solicitations of candidates.
The animal collection in the zoo numbered in the thousands when I first arrived on the scene in 1972. The days of postage stamp–style zoo animal collections were still alive, but numbered. The zoo’s sizeable budget and the inclinations of its management had brought together an incredible variety of birds, mammals, and reptiles. The early years of the zoo’s operation had been hand to mouth, but with the help of the warm, subtropical San Diego climate, the zoo smothered its arkload of animals with lush plantings of exotic trees and flowers, overwhelming the arid native landscape and concrete animal abodes with an illusion of verdant fertility. Many of the heavy brick-and-mortar overhead expenses of the typical temperate-climate zoo were avoided in this comparatively idyllic setting. Contrary to the more ordinary zoo experience of smelly lion grottos and barred, steam-heated monkey houses, the San Diego Zoo provided a refreshing contrast for visitors. Even winter in San Diego was as nice as it ever got at home for most of the out-of-towners.
Many of the animal exhibits were styled in the form of open, dry-moated enclosures, a concept borrowed from the private Hagenbeck Tierpark, which opened near Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1900s. Efforts to produce truly naturalistic exhibits would not come to San Diego until the 1970s, however. Carl Hagenbeck was an animal dealer whose new style of zoo began to do away with the rigid separations between people and animals. San Diego’s expanded use of spacious, unfenced outdoor exhibits took away the detracting smells and many of the visual barriers. The use of trees and plantings softened hard exhibit structures and concealed the service areas. Some of the initial visitors to San Diego’s first open-moated lion exhibit, built in the 1920s, were so alarmed by their unbarred proximity to the animals that they complained to zoo management of its “danger” to the public. Zoos were very different even in those relatively recent times—certain animals that we now expect to see in most moderate to large zoos were relatively uncommon. The first giraffe born in captivity in the United States, for example, lived for only six days at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1889, and even by 1925 there were only five zoo giraffes in the entire country, although they were present in traveling circuses. It was also widely believed then that keeping a gorilla alive in captivity was virtually impossible.
The San Diego Zoo of the 1960s and ’70s was as much an emerging international theme park as a zoological garden. Joan Embery, one of the zoo’s nursery attendants, with her entourage of zoo baby oddities, had become a favorite guest on TV personality Johnny Carson’s Los Angeles–based Tonight Show, and she eventually logged more than seventy appearances, only a few short of Rodney Dangerfield. The crowds of visitors at the zoo were regular and impressive in size.
As soon as they entered the main gate, visitors would fix their attention on an aqua lagoon filled with pink flamingos surrounded by emerald greenery. The zoo has always prided itself on the crispness and cleanliness of its grounds. Swarms of paper pickers and sidewalk sweepers constantly combed and ironed the zoo to assure that restrooms and walkways were spotless and wrinkle-free, and that fallen ice cream cones, spent peanut shells, and the dregs of soft pretzels were promptly swept away. Early in the morning, before the arrival of the daily masses, hoses, brooms, and pressure sprayers groomed the entry and exhibit mesas; the glass windows in the reptile house were squeegeed free of noseprints and fingerprints; and the chrome entry turnstiles were cleaned and buffed.
For unspoken but financially lucrative reasons, drinking fountains were far scarcer than snack stands and vending machines. There was no mistaking that this was also a thriving business enterprise, with abundant entrepreneurial opportunities inside the gates for food vendors, popcorn wagons, souvenir shops, and tour bus rides.
Visitors shifted in a politely impatient, gradually congealing queue at the entrance, where they awaited the skyward retraction of the gate that marked the starting line for another day in paradise. The zoo is like a living creature, demanding to be fed, bathed, and nurtured in a daily ritual of reincarnation. Even the animals seem to join in this orchestrated transformation, awaiting the attentions of their keepers, who bring them their daily concoctions of fruits, meats, biscuits, seeds, and alfalfa.
Annual attendance and per capita visitor expenditures were the San Diego Zoo’s daily management mantras in the 1970s, just as they are today. The administrative climate of the zoo exuded commerce and competition, and zoo officials intensely followed the statistics of tourist visitations to regional competitors, such as Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Sea World, and Universal Studios. There was no need to track the performance of other zoos, inasmuch as they were regarded as noncontenders. Some of this commercial and animal collecting frenzy, however, was beginning to give more ground to ideas of wildlife conservation activities outside of the zoo’s gates.
The zoo grounds and exhibits were laid out up and down heavily landscaped hills between islandlike mesas. At first, it was a disorienting, almost dizzying, experience to wander the grounds. I wondered which of these animals would be my first patients. Dr. Charles J. Sedgwick, the chief veterinarian, was my zoo medicine mentor. “CJ” possessed a singularly strategic sense of what zoo animal medicine should be about, a feat requiring more than an average capacity for both humor and enlightenment. Years later, as we reminisced about our veterinary careers, he observed, “Like you, I seem to have a knack for eventually annoying my boss no matter where I go.” Of course, I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by the “Like you”—I would prefer to believe that the two of us might just be two of those restless souls referred to earlier in the memorial to Dr. Richard C. Cabot. But, let’s face it, at one time or another, most of us have found ourselves talking when we should have been listening.
CJ’s first initiation in a zoo job had been in Los Angeles in the 1960s, where he moved the entire Los Angeles Zoo animal collection, physically and chemically, to a new facility in Griffith Park. His diversified experiences included surgically descenting skunks for a Disney movie—at home, but in his garage (on the orders of his wife Shirley). Before this he had been a dog and cat doctor and a NASA veterinarian, preparing monkeys for the early rocket flights that preceded America’s great manned space missions.
Philosophically, Sedgwick was much more interested in understanding and preventing problems than in simply treating them. (This trait is not universal among veterinarians, or most people.) He always looked for the underlying, cryptic implications of animal diseases, using every available resource to solve a clinical problem, experimenting with new medical equipment, and recruiting skills from local specialists in anesthesia, surgery, and neonatal medicine. When it became clear that he regularly asked his interns for their opinions and perceptions, I knew that he would come to be regarded as one of the most insightful veterinarians with whom these trainees would ever work.
Supplementing the clinical experiences were the resources of the Pathology Department, headed by Dr. Lynn Griner, the initial supervisor of the zoo’s veterinary internship program. Less affable than Sedgwick, Griner was a capable and dedicated zoo pathologist and teacher nonetheless. Never having actually experienced the humility (and occasional humiliation) that comes from practicing clinical medicine, his empathy for yeoman veterinary clinicians was tentative.
The intern whom I replaced, a Canadian, overlapped with me for several months in the beginning. He tiptoed lightly around the pathology office, and he could never fathom whether it was his Canadian accent, personal demeanor, or preoccupation with photographing bird eggs that routinely irked his pathologist
boss. On my inaugural car ride to an animal health meeting with the Canadian and the pathologist, who rode in the back seat, the egg photographer received a scathing lecture about cleaning the car after treating animals in the zoo—unfortunately, Griner had sat down on a used hypodermic needle that the intern had left out during the morning’s medical rounds.
Perhaps nowhere else could more be witnessed on the diseases of a greater variety of animals. A stygian sign hung in the autopsy room declaring, “All Ye Who Enter Here, Abandon Hope”—a whimsical statement that a clinical veterinarian would be loath to endorse, although not entirely without some historical validity in zoos. Actually, the term “autopsy” is not correct in veterinary medicine; the preferred veterinary term for the postmortem examination of an animal is “necropsy,” and that is the one that I will use henceforth.
A lingering stigma of the questionable clinical prowess of veterinarians in zoos, along with the ever-present willingness of many veterinarians to give zoo work a try, may have accounted, in part, for the short average tenure (two to three years) for most clinical veterinarians who had worked at the San Diego Zoo from its inception in the 1920s. Dr. Charles R. Schroeder, one of the zoo’s first veterinarians and later its director, was expected to devote time to nonveterinary duties that included developing photos that were made into postcards by night for sale on the zoo grounds the next day. I had missed the more whimsical salad days when the hospital staff occasionally barbecued a postmortem hindquarter of a zebra or antelope.
Life at the Zoo Page 2