Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  The first veterinarian to become the director of an American zoo was Dr. William A. Conklin, who directed the Central Park Zoo starting in 1870. Veterinarian Gus Knudson was hired by Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo in 1907 at the age of twenty-six. He was appointed to the newly created position of zoo director in 1922 and struggled for years to convince the Board of Park Commissioners to create a zoo that was free of traditional bar and wire barriers. Frustrated by an unfenced zoo perimeter, ongoing vandalism (“throwing rocks, breaking windows, firing rifles and bee bee guns, using sling shots, poking sticks at monkeys, and even giving them lighted cigarettes and matches”), and a lack of cooperation in local government, Knudson eventually succumbed to the absence of science and the abundance of zoo politics, resigning in disgust in 1947 and making his feelings well known in the Seattle press. Four years later the zoo perimeter was finally fenced. In the 1970s, Woodland Park would start to become many of the things that Knudson had envisioned and would help to set new standards for modern animal exhibits.

  Dr. Gus Knudson of the Woodland Park Zoo

  Dr. Patricia O’Connor Halloran was the first full-time woman zoo veterinarian in the United States. She was employed by the Staten Island Zoo in 1942 and retired from that institution in 1970. It was largely through her initiatives that the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians was formed, and she served as its first president from 1946 to 1957. In 1955, at a time when only scattered bits of literature on the diseases of zoo and wild animals existed, Dr. Halloran compiled A Bibliography of References to Diseases of Wild Mammals and Birds. In that same year there were only six full-time clinical veterinarians working in zoos in the United States.

  With celebrity zoo animals in yesteryear’s zoos, it was sometimes rumored that management’s timing of summonses for medical help were calculated to assure that the veterinarian was on the zoo grounds prior to an animal’s demise—at least by minutes. After all, it was essential to demonstrate that everything humanly, if not humanely, possible had been done before a publicly beloved beast passed away. Under such circumstances, it was no wonder that zoo veterinarians started out lacking reputations for medical agility, however heroic their efforts. The arrival of the veterinarian in those early days was often an ominous sign in the zoo—something important was often going to die! It would not be until much later that effective clinical interventions, coupled with strong programs of disease prevention, became their modus operandi. Disease avoidance has always been the principal focus of effective zoo medicine programs, as the practical options for medical treatment of feral species are much more limited than in domesticated animals.

  Some years ago a revealing obituary was published in Newsweek about a recently deceased senior physician with the United Nations World Health Organization, which targets human disease problems through immunization, nutrition, clean water supplies, and other fundamental approaches. This doctor’s philosophy spoke volumes about the exponential value of preventive medicine and it is equally applicable in zoos. Described as a person who “gave up a very lucrative clinical practice to help run a global health bureaucracy,” his own explanation for his career change was this: “In private clinical practice I could only effect cures on a retail basis, whereas, with the WHO, I have the luxury of practicing medicine on the wholesale level.” And so it is, or should be, with zoo animal practice—prevention always offers the greatest overall dividends. Failing to unearth the root causes and attack the instigating factors for a caseload assures that a veterinarian will see the same problems over and over again in a zoo.

  Surprisingly, nothing is harder to sell in medicine and environmental management than investments in prevention. This may be so, in part, because prevention constantly enters the realm of subjective opinion and speculation—areas that are flat ground and fair game for both doctors and administrators. Even though we are placing new emphasis on education in the United States to prevent social problems related to illiteracy, poverty, and crime, spending for the military and law enforcement vastly exceeds that for education. The annual cost of incarcerating a person today—at least according to the television commentator Andy Rooney—is $60,000. Because energy, water, and atmospheric problems are often politically ignored and minimized, we may wake up to our environmental dilemmas one morning only to realize that the world was destroyed while we were sleeping.

  In a zoo it is difficult to construct clear cost/benefit models to convincingly demonstrate how adding an $8,000 warm-water floor-heating system to the bears’ sleeping areas will pay financial dividends. However, any food service manager worth his or her salt could easily argue the wisdom of buying a $4,000 vending machine, by projecting sales and profits and amortizing the costs over its useful lifespan. Decisions in government, zoos, and our personal lives are often made on whim, bias, and ignorance of the seemingly petty, but critical, details.

  Even though zoos house a wide range of exotic creatures, relatively little illness, overall, comes from obscure diseases. Many people are surprised to learn this. Even so, zoo veterinarians always have to be vigilant for the possibilities of more exotic diseases such as rabies, Marburg virus, simian B virus, foot and mouth disease, rinderpest, African swine fever, avian Newcastle disease, and the like. These diseases are so uncommon or nonexistent in the United States, that most veterinarians—like physicians looking for anthrax infections in people—have never seen a single case in their entire career. For fiscal reasons, the critical animal-management challenge in most zoos is prioritizing which basic improvements should be made in order to leverage the greatest health gains for the investment. Even small, basic Band-Aid enhancements in animal environments or procedures can drastically reduce the numbers of animal health problems.

  Much of the veterinary caseload in zoos is a result of management, husbandry, and logistical failures and the shortcomings of animal facilities. I refer to this large body of problems as “diseases of captivity.” Table 2.1 is a list of examples of actual fatalities that I have seen that illustrate this point.

  Table 2.1 Examples of preventable zoo mortalities

  A helter-skelter zoo clinical practice is the primary symptom of a failed program of preventive medicine, which should place great emphasis on avoiding the typical array of the maladies of confinement. While physical facilities have fundamental bearings on animal health, procedural and personnel factors weigh just as heavily in the balance.

  After joining the hospital staff at the San Diego Zoo, I began to equip the zoo hospital with advanced orthopedic surgery equipment in response to the prominent caseload of broken legs that was occurring in the animal collection—my own personal contribution to the pursuit of technological imperatives. As time went by, however, preventive measures in housing and handling techniques began to pay dividends, and we saw far fewer orthopedic injuries, leaving this surgical equipment sitting idle most of the time. Over the years our cases shifted away from broken legs, malnutrition and hypothermia. As husbandry programs improved, the character of our clinical medical practice, and how we expended our efforts, changed dramatically.

  In the so-called early days, zoo veterinarians and physicians began to study the causes of death in zoo animals; they had ample material to learn from given the generous supply of mortalities. Dr. Max Schmidt, a veterinarian, became director of Germany’s new Frankfurt Zoo in 1858 and served there for twenty-five years before becoming director of the Berlin Zoo. In 1870 he published a handbook, whose German title translates to Comparative Pathology and Pathological Anatomy of Mammals and Birds, the first known work of its type. Appointed by Schmidt in 1859 as scientific director, Dr. David Weinland launched Der Zoologische Garten (The Zoological Garden), the first journal dedicated to zoo animal management and health. Other studies of zoo animal mortalities began in England with the appointment of a pathologist-anatomist at the London Zoo in 1865.

  At the Philadelphia Zoo, founded in 1875, its president, Charles B. Penrose, M.D., led the way in the study of comparative pathology in 1905 wit
h the formation of the Laboratory of Comparative Pathology. Herbert Fox, M.D., became its laboratory director in 1906, opening a long, lonely trail to compiling meaningful data on the diseases of zoo animals. In 1923, Fox published the first English-language book on the study of wild animal pathology, derived from his postmortem studies at the Philadelphia Zoo, entitled Diseases in Wild Animals and Birds. Although the Philadelphia Zoo was among America’s oldest zoological gardens, it did not hire its first full-time veterinary clinician until 1973, more than a hundred years after its founding.

  Pathology studies in zoos have been critical to the development of a knowledge base for clinical zoo practice, and began to define the scope of what could go wrong medically with zoo animals. Initially, the prospects for clinical treatment were so dismal that most zoos simply budgeted generously to replace dying animals as needed. Significant pathology programs gradually developed in institutions such as the San Diego Zoo and the National Zoo. Veterinarians in most zoos do their own postmortem examinations and work in conjunction with pathologists at universities and government animal diagnostic laboratories.

  It was not until the 1960s that the use of new drugs and improved handling procedures finally allowed animals to be safely sedated for extended diagnostic procedures, treatments, and surgery, but there were still relatively few full-time zoo veterinarians in the entire country. The real advances in zoo medicine and research began to accelerate in that decade. Finally, it was feasible to intervene without a significant probability of killing the patient. These successes began to create a demand for the services of veterinarians as full members of zoo staffs, and the profession expanded sharply in the 1970s and ’80s. Safer anesthesia completely changed the rules of engagement, catalyzing rapid progress in zoo clinical medicine and research. In the late 1960s only twenty-five full-time veterinarians were employed in American zoos and aquariums, but by 2004, this number had increased tenfold.

  Zoo animal medicine requires skills in identifying the underlying, often cryptic, causes of diseases. Inexperienced veterinarians get sidetracked by concentrating on the business of treating problems, rather than consistently searching for the inciting factors. This emphasis has been due, in part, to a lack of understanding of how to house and feed many species and monitor their well-being. The fundamental goal is to recognize problems early enough to be able to remedy them. The most successful zoo practitioners have an uncommon degree of common sense.

  Finding the causes of disease sounds simple, but it is in truth a stumbling block that I, and most others, have tripped over in zoo medical practice. The species Homo sapiens is by nature composed mostly of tacticians rather than strategists, with inborn inclinations for picking the low-hanging fruit. Strategists focus on creative concepts and visionary thoughts, while tacticians translate this information into practical applications. These differences in human dynamics affect society’s intuitive approaches to medicine in general. As ample proof in our everyday lives, witness the weighted emphasis on treatment vs. prevention in human medical practice. We expend most of our collective medical resources treating diseases, rather than understanding and preventing them.

  Society needs both strategists and tacticians—and, on balance, many more of the latter. It is our fundamental nature to deal with the proximate and the tangible, rather than root causes and their seemingly abstract consequences. Today’s human healthcare systems provide for expensive high-tech cardiac bypass surgery, but little for prevention, such as supervised exercise wellness and nutrition programs. Strategists tend to go into research, preferring to focus on the “what and why.” The best clinicians have a healthy mix of both capabilities.

  Holistic styles of medicine—human and veterinary—take into account the whole organism and its environment, rather than simplistic prescriptions. It is the only truly effective approach to a zoo or a human medical practice, requiring insights into behavioral, nutritional, and environmental factors that influence disease. Many veterinarians cringe at the notion of being identified as holistic, because they misconstrue the label as having some connection to quackery or as a narrow synonym for unconventional or alternative medicine, which seem to have hijacked a good word. Eight hundred years ago the medieval Jewish physician Moses Maimonides wrote, “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it. Treating problems in isolation from their inciting causes and their hosts amounts to insensitive medicine.” Without a doubt, Maimonides was a holistic practitioner, as were many physicians before the advent of comprehensive diagnostic blood panels and computerized imaging tools. TV’s Marcus Welby, capably played by actor Robert Young, is my romantic notion of what a family doctor should be like. He seemed to be as interested in who someone was as a person as he was in the vitality of his or her gall bladder.

  Table 2.2 Problem analysis of a zoo animal injury

  Diagnosis: Antelope with Broken Leg

  Hit fence jumping out of exhibit

  Chased by startled exhibit mate

  New employee frightened herd

  Employee not adequately trained

  Staff turnover due to inadequate wages or working conditions

  Table 2.2 illustrates an example of problem analysis of a zoo animal injury. Some past zoo administrators have argued that the zoo veterinarian’s problem solving involvement should be limited to steps A through C, though I don’t believe that veterinarians can be very effective in a zoo if they accept that premise.

  This example, similar to chain reaction stories like the Great Chicago Fire, where a cow supposedly kicked over a lantern and started it all, helps to point out the importance of analyzing problems. In the zoo, a diagnosis alone won’t explain how a problem arose, how best to treat it, or in particular, how to avoid it in the future. Interpreting information and events, and prescribing solutions, is the subject of many vigorous discussions in zoos. A real doctor, like Marcus Welby, should be just as keen on finding out what is causing a problem and preventing it as on treating it and collecting a fee. Successful zoo veterinarians have to be part sociologist, epidemiologist, ethologist, and detective in order to treat the whole animal.

  Dr. Charles R. Schroeder with camel, c. 1935

  3. GROWING PAINS

  Educating the Menagerie Makers

  “It’s a pretty good zoo,” said young Gerald McGrew, “and the fellow who runs it seems proud of it, too.” But if Gerald ran the zoo, the New Zoo, McGrew Zoo, he’d see to making a change or two.

  —Dr. Seuss, If I Ran the Zoo

  When they began to arrive on the scene, veterinarians often blended into zoos as readily as oil mixes with water. It was the natural order of things that veterinarians were predestined to impinge upon well-established territories. Veterinarians were needed, revered, and occasionally feared, but seldom were they unconditionally embraced by all of their new employers and coworkers. Some gave up in frustration when it became clear to them that zoo management’s receptivity to new ideas and personalities was limited.

  Feelings about veterinarians in zoos have ranged from “vexation to veneration.” In fact, that was the precise title of a testy little paper that was once presented at a national zoo conference by a frustrated zoo director. He had somehow achieved an overdose of veterinarians, felt that they were a bittersweet addition to the zoo world, and tried to reconcile himself to the reality that they were here to stay. He simply hoped (perhaps prayed) that they would find more gracious ways of fitting into zoo operations, and empathize more with pragmatic institutional and fiscal priorities.

  Veterinarians generally feel that no institutional priority should be greater than animal health. What constitutes that, of course, can be a matter of personal bias or opinion, as well as of clinical judgment. The rub comes when veterinarians relentlessly press not just for more medical supplies or equipment, but also for major changes in the quality of animal facilities and husbandry programs. In many zoos it was expected that veterinarians limit their activities to the traditional practice of
medicine and leave the aesthetic, ethical, ecological, and economic matters to others on the zoo staff.

  Actually, veterinarians were mostly misunderstood. Their priorities focused on creating more objective measurements of animal health and well-being within a traditionally subjective zoo world. In a subculture typified by animal lore and habitual practices, they considered defining reality to be an important part of their job. Veterinarians tend to view the performance of a zoo somewhat like a baseball game where not only the score but also errors are important. If, for example, you were a human anesthesiologist, most people would not be too impressed by the fact that 95 percent of your patients survived your care if the norm exceeded 99 percent. Veterinarians always go after that last one percent. They have an apparently annoying habit of concentrating much of their efforts on the part of the glass that is empty, with a view to promoting changes that avoid repeating mistakes that cause healthy animals to become patients.

  The personnel difficulties arise when there are conflicting management priorities about what to change in a zoo. Unlike most human doctors, who ordinarily are called upon to tend only the sick, veterinarians seemed strangely interested in the healthy as well. Some institutions wanted veterinarians simply to concentrate on ill animals and leave the healthy ones to the curators and keepers. Experience quickly taught them, however, that problems ignored or undetected today invariably ended up in their hands as tomorrow’s medical cases. The problem with zoo veterinarians, as employees, was that, unlike yesteryear’s house-call doctors, they didn’t go away after the treatment was finished. They kept looking around and finding more broken things that needed fixing.

  A veterinary school classmate of mine once had a fine black Labrador retriever named Bart who was insane about duck hunting. Even though he was deaf from years of field shooting, he lived to hunt. My friend was considering retiring Bart because of one persistent habit: he was such a good bird retriever that he not only brought his master’s ducks back to him in the field, but also picked up every crippled bird within a radius of a hundred yards. It was hardly possible to go hunting with him and take the legal limit because Bart regularly brought back ducks downed by other hunters. Just as you thought you were about to reach your car with the legal number of birds, Bart would return from the marsh with yet another duck in his mouth and put you in jeopardy of a poaching citation. I suppose that zoo veterinarians, like Bart, seemed a little overachieving, at least to some zoo directors and curators.