Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  Nothing impresses medical knowledge upon students’ minds more than observing disease firsthand in the necropsy room. Daily lessons were available on cases of malnutrition, infectious disease, parasitism, cancer, and trauma. The causes of zoo animal deaths are as endless as a medical encyclopedia and parallel many human diseases. Eventually, nearly everything that died in the zoo, including feral creatures, was necropsied, from hummingbirds and giraffes to koalas and Komodo dragons. Deceased animals were sliced, stained, and magnified under microscopes to determine the causes of death. The outcomes of all of our clinical efforts were transparent—the pathologist always knew if the veterinarians had screwed up, missed a diagnosis, or made errors in treatment. Pathologists are known in all medical circles as having the last word. The historical staffing priorities at the zoo appeared to place marginal hope in clinical salvation, valuing, instead, the study of death after life more than life before death.

  Shortly after settling into my office in the old hospital building and starting a daily clinical routine, I was dumbstruck by the scope of the huge job ahead. Keepers brought sick animals to me faster than I could adequately treat them, and often sooner than I could learn enough about them. The existing medical records amounted to a faint paper trail of fading index cards that were filed in haphazard fashion, accompanied by a few sketchy logbooks of animal treatments. After starting the day with the boxes and crates of sick creatures that awaited me at the hospital each morning, there were house calls to be made in the zoo for animals needing evaluation and treatment. The days often ended with night emergencies at the Children’s Zoo Nursery when one of the baby tigers, orangutans, or gazelles had diarrhea, indigestion, or an infection.

  The old San Diego Zoo Hospital was a stately but outdated facility consisting of two floors of antiquated laboratory space. Its lofty ceilings and large, double hung windows pre-dated mechanized air conditioning. In the beginning of my internship, there was no veterinary nurse or secretary to support the clinical veterinary staff, and little legacy of enduring clinical medical programs. The old hospital was being used mostly for pathology labs and a few visiting researchers; this latter function was in a state of limbo after several failed attempts at constituting a research center in the 1960s.

  In the years to come, however, the long-delayed research vision of the zoo’s founder, Dr. Harry Wegeforth, would finally be realized with the successful development of the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES) under another talented physician, Dr. Kurt Benirschke. The CRES unit is now a leading research center in the zoo world, with an emphasis on reproduction, genetics, and animal behavior. Its “frozen zoo” evokes futuristic images of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with a bank of liquid nitrogen reservoirs that house thousands of live tissue specimens—suspended at -196° C—from hundreds of species of animals, including the sperm and ova of many highly endangered creatures. Peeking into one of the heavily insulated vaults through a thick door on the top, a cold fog billows from the stainless steel racks containing rare and endangered DNA. While the technology to utilize this living library fully is still in its infancy, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and cloning technology are being experimented with, already producing panda pregnancies and wild cattle births using surrogate domestic cattle as mothers.

  Some years before, the clinical veterinary activities at the zoo were shifted from the old hospital into a series of rooms that had been converted from animal barns. Out the back door and down a few steps, an outdoor compound stretched back some 150 feet in a quadrangle. To prevent animal escapes it was completely covered, top and sides, with chain link fabric, and zoo vehicles entered it through tall sliding metal doors. Surrounding this space were various barred outdoor cages suitable for housing big cats, bears, and other carnivores, and freshwater pools for seals, sea lions, otters, and aquatic birds. Housing for the hoofed animals was out back in outdoor pens, and several indoor rooms were appended to the back of this compound, where birds, monkeys, and all manner of zoo miscellanies were held for treatment or quarantine. Larger animals—rhinos, elephants, hippos, giraffes, and the like—were treated in their more substantial living quarters on the zoo grounds.

  The equipment in the old zoo hospital was spartan by any standard and included retired and donated medical tools that had come to rest there over the years. We never did figure out what surgical procedures on humans had employed some of these obscure implements. Our surgical area was located in a room with a wall-mounted gas heater, which had to be turned off to avoid fire hazards when anesthetic oxygen was in use. In the summertime, it was cooled by screened jalousie windows that lined the wall toward the central compound.

  We heated the developing solutions for processing X-rays in a tiny dark closet where an ungrounded aquarium heater gave users intermittent electrical shocks. In the heat of summer we placed ice-filled jugs in the tanks to cool the fluids to a workable temperature. In the years to come this would all be corrected with the construction of the Jennings Center for Zoological Medicine, which provided state-of-the-art treatment, radiology, and surgery facilities. But, for now, this was a fire-engine style of medical practice by anyone’s estimate—and there was smoke in the air.

  Trimming lion’s claws at London Zoo, c. 1880

  2. TOO EARLY FOR THE AUTOPSY

  Fitting in at the Zoo

  Zoo veterinarians have undergone a vigorous evolution in the past century through the process of successive approximation. More simply put, they have become more competent by learning from their mistakes. Initially, they brought relatively little to the table clinically because of the lack of a knowledge base on diseases, animal husbandry, and restraint techniques for exotic animals. Though woefully unarmed with useful sedatives, medications, vaccines, antibiotics, equipment, and facilities, they steadily improved their clinical capabilities over time. To begin with, veterinarians acquired a lot more experiences than understanding. Like the stepsisters’ struggles to fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper, the early efforts to incorporate veterinarians into zoos were often awkward.

  Veterinary medicine as a professional discipline dates back to Egyptian times, but formal training did not begin until 1761 when the first veterinary school was founded in Lyon, France. Zoos as we know them today originated in the 1800s after a flurry of scientific exploration and discovery. Following the lead of natural history museums, botanical and zoological gardens came into being as living public collections for the display of newly described species. Advances in plant and animal classification, including the use of binomial nomenclature (systematic scientific Latin names), devised by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in the 1700s, brought order to the descriptions of the earth’s biota. His Systema Naturae, published in 1735, classified living organisms into the now-familiar system of genus and species. The public came in droves to view these far-flung animal and plant curiosities.

  Perhaps the Schonbrunn Zoo in Vienna, founded in 1752, was the first significant urban zoo in modern times, followed by the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1793. The London Zoological Garden, founded in 1828 at Regent’s Park, but not opened to the public until 1847, is the oldest public zoo in English-speaking countries. Its parklike atmosphere popularized the zoological garden and sparked the beginning of a wave of new zoos in Dublin (1830), Bristol (1835), Manchester (1836), Amsterdam (1838), Antwerp (1843), Berlin (1844), Rotterdam (1857), and Frankfurt (1858).

  The distinctions between menageries and zoos were often somewhat blurred in the beginning, and a number of zoos were derived from these less formal assemblies of animals. Traveling menageries sometimes dead-ended in cities, and through local initiatives they became stationary attractions that evolved into zoological gardens. The traveling circuses that developed in the 1800s frequently added animal menageries as sideshows. Indeed, because of their cramped, commercial nature, “menagerie” became a pejorative expression that implied exploitive and banal values. Zoos, however, out of economic pressures, hav
e always courted the public to one degree or another by staging assorted activities that could hardly be considered zoological in character, such as balloon ascents, concerts, roller coaster rides, pyrotechnic displays, and overt circus-animal acts.

  In 1829 London’s Regent’s Park zoo hired a Mr. Charles Spooner as its first “medical attendant” (veterinarian). His assignment was to “attend three times in each week, and oftener when necessary, to prescribe for and examine all the animals and to keep a record of his observations and practice” for the sum of sixty pounds sterling annually. Spooner’s journal entries show an emphasis on postmortem evaluations and almost no surgical interventions, although cases of malnutrition appeared to be common and were treated with various mineral salts. He tended to kangaroos with abscesses, bison with internal parasites, a cape hunting dog with pneumonia, and jackals with bites to the legs, for which he prescribed that “Tincture of myrrh compress to be applied to the parts affected every morning.” One of his early observations in avian medicine is this: “Several of them [the parrots] are continually nibbling and cutting off their feathers as they grow. They seem to be troubled with intolerable itching of the skin and keep themselves disgracefully bare.” For the feather-pickers he prescribed the following: “RX Dissolve grains of corrosive Sublimate in half an ounce of spirits of wine—add a half pint of water and with a bit of sponge. Apply a little of the lotion all over the bird.”

  In 1833, complaining that the workload had increased substantially due to the increase in animal numbers, Spooner requested a salary raise. After an inquiry into the care of the animals at the zoo his request was denied, and Spooner’s services were dispensed with. Thus, Spooner had the distinction of being the first zoo veterinarian to be hired, denied a raise, and fired. Subsequently, a Mr. W. Youatt was employed for a higher annual salary of one hundred pounds.

  In the United States the first public zoos developed in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Depending on your history source, each of these cities lays claim to hosting the first American zoo, although a zoo history buff pointed out to me that if we consider America in the broadest sense, Montezuma’s zoo in Mexico might be the hands-down winner. The Lincoln Park Zoo, for example, considers the donation of a pair of swans in 1868 to mark its founding date, although a zoo director was not hired until 1888. The Central Park Zoo was originally a menagerie that gradually morphed into a zoo; where it crossed the line is a matter of conjecture. The Philadelphia Zoo records its founding date as 1859, when it was first chartered, although it did not open to the public until 1874. Given its initial size and persistence in pressing the point, Philadelphia’s claim may seem to pull the most weight, although this hair-splitting has probably served only to diminish this historical distinction. Not claiming first bragging rights in this contest, the Cleveland Zoo unapologetically states that it is the seventh-oldest zoo in the United States. The Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, claims to be the third-oldest. According to the dates that zoos were actually opened to the public (as operations of reasonable substance, whatever that means), America’s flock of pre-1900 zoos fledged in the following years:

  1873

  1874

  1875

  1876

  1882

  1883

  1887

  1889

  1890

  1891

  1892

  1893

  1894

  1896

  1897

  1898

  1899 Lincoln Park Zoo (Chicago), Central Park Zoo (New York)

  Philadelphia Zoo (Pennsylvania), Buffalo Zoo (New York)

  Cincinnati Zoo (Ohio), Ross Park Zoo (Binghamton, New York)

  Baltimore Zoo (Maryland)

  Cleveland Zoo (Ohio)

  Roger Williams Park Zoo (Providence, Rhode Island)

  Portland Zoo (Oregon)

  Atlanta Zoo (Georgia), St. Louis Zoo (Missouri)

  Dickerson Park Zoo (Springfield, Missouri)

  John Ball Zoo (Grand Rapids, Michigan)

  Milwaukee Zoo (Wisconsin)

  Seneca Park Zoo (Rochester, New York)

  Denver Zoo (Colorado)

  Como Park Zoo (St. Paul, Minnesota)

  Alameda Park Zoo (Alamogordo, New Mexico)

  Henry Doorly Zoo (Omaha, Nebraska), National Zoo

  (Washington, DC), Pittsburgh Zoo (Pennsylvania)

  New York Zoological Park (New York), Toledo Zoo (Ohio)

  The early zoo veterinarians were usually large-animal practitioners, inasmuch as veterinary medicine began with its principal emphasis on agricultural species and beasts of burden. These veterinarians provided part-time services to zoos and were often called in when animals were already sick. It must have been an awful dilemma for them—unable to treat many animals until they were so ill that they unable to stand. Modern-day veterinarians who have traveled, unequipped, to some remote vacation spot, and have been unexpectedly presented with a sick animal to tend, know the helplessness of having no anesthetics, instruments, X-rays, or capable assistants, which was the norm for these pioneers of the profession. Even worse, these founders had a huge knowledge gap that would take a long time even to begin to overcome. Most basic scientific information about immunology, infectious disease, metabolism, reproduction, and genetics was yet to be revealed. These first zoo veterinarians often arrived too late for any helpful treatment, but too early for the necropsy.

  In America, the first full-time clinical zoo veterinarian to be employed was Dr. Frank Miller, who joined the New York Bronx Zoo in 1901. In the same year, Harlow Brooks, M.D., became the zoo’s pathologist, simultaneously working on the staffs of several human hospitals in the city. Joining Dr. Miller in 1902 was Dr. W. Reid Blair, who served as veterinarian from 1902 to 1926. The first operation that Dr. Blair performed was to lance several abscesses on an alligator.

  Reptile House at the London Zoo, c. 1900.

  Miller and Blair encountered some initial resistance from the zoo’s director, Dr. William Hornaday, who was reported to distrust veterinarians. When it was proposed that newly arrived primates be isolated for a quarantine and acclimatization period after their arrival, Hornaday vetoed the idea, stating that monkeys could be replaced when needed and did not justify the labor and expense of the proposal. The budgetary needs of the medical staff took a back seat to Hornaday’s interests in constructing animal buildings, and the veterinarians struggled along in the beginning with scant facilities, reference materials, laboratory equipment, and even necropsy instruments. Lacking their own microscope, Brooks, the pathologist, paid for the first one out of his annual honorarium. After only two years, Miller departed the zoo to return to a more lucrative private clinical practice in the city, while Blair stayed on as staff veterinarian.

  Thus began the first zoo animal–health program at the Bronx Zoo, and the zoo hospital was finally built in 1916. Given the established practice of donating deceased animals to several of New York’s natural history museums, there were struggles about priorities when museum curators complained that postmortem examinations were spoiling their specimens. Hornaday settled the argument, informing the curators in no uncertain terms that postmortem exams had first priority over museum accessions. Early work in the medical department focused on ongoing nutritional problems in the zoo’s primate collection, most likely the result of inadequate dietary vitamin D and imbalances of calcium and phosphorus. When Hornaday finally retired in 1926, Blair became the zoo director and served for fourteen years in that capacity. Surprisingly, up until his time as director, the visiting public had been banned from taking photographs (a common restriction in European zoos then) in the zoo in order to protect zoo sales of postcards and guidebooks—a Hornaday mandate. Blair soon did away with this practice after he became head of the zoo.

  Dr. W. Reid Blair (right) treats a rhinoceros calf at the Bronx Zoo, c. 1909

  Writing in an article in the New York Zoological Society Bulletin in 1913, Elwin R. Sanborn recounted some of the diffi
culties of handling animals for treatment in the Bronx Zoo:

  On several occasions in her younger days the African rhinoceros Victoria required medical attention for an abscess that had developed on the left jaw. She was astonishingly mild tempered, but displayed energy and activity out of all proportion to the estimate of her strength. In the early stages of development of the growth, she yielded readily to the surgeon’s knife and subsequent dressings. Several operations at infrequent intervals reduced the swelling, but did not arrest completely its progress, although a perfect cure seemed to be effected each time.

  A further recurrence of the trouble convinced the doctor that a more thorough operation was necessary. Elaborate preparations for the operation were made and a force of men was assembled to aid the surgeons and their assistants. It was the first attempt that had been made to secure the animal, and we have never ceased to rejoice in the fact that it was and has been the only one. Seven veterinary surgeons, a professional anesthetizer, a dozen keepers, ropes, patent hopples, mattresses, pails, cotton, a varied assortment of surgical instruments and appliances and two and one half pounds of chloroform and ether were arrayed on one side, and nine hundred pounds of rhino on the other. Victoria fought a noble fight that morning, with malice toward none, and emerged from the anesthesia groggy, but triumphant. Had it been possible, without the slightest doubt she would have returned thanks that the operation was a complete success.

  In today’s zoo, using contemporary knowledge of chemical restraint, all this might be readily accomplished with several keepers, the veterinarian, and a veterinary assistant.