Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  I have tried to empathize with and imagine how the veterinary mentality makes some zoo directors and curators uneasy at times, and how this would play out if the same dynamic developed between me and my physician. For example, suppose that your family doctor literally hung around your house with you and admonished you: “Put down that doughnut, it’s saturated with fat and cholesterol! Knock off that third cup of coffee, the caffeine will destroy your heart! Fix those broken steps, someone’s going to trip and kill themselves! You should get a little more exercise and drop a few pounds!” The established notion that doctors were supposed to be primarily for the sick set veterinarians off on the wrong foot in some zoos. That’s just not what zoo veterinarians do. They believe that they were hired to prevent disease, as much as to treat it. Opinions often differ, however, about what the zoo veterinarian’s job should and shouldn’t be.

  Some zoos have employed veterinarians as zoo directors. This has been one way of assuring that veterinary care was always available, and it has relieved city administrators of many of their lurking fears about safety and animal welfare fiascos. The only way that some zoos could afford both a capable veterinarian and a zoo director was to put them both into one package. I have always been a little ambivalent about this director/veterinarian arrangement because a veterinarian’s unequivocal first loyalty should be to the animals, rather than to city hall or the park department, which puts the veterinarian in the position of wrestling with conflicting identities. My concerns have apparently been misplaced, however, since some of the great zoo directors have been veterinarians. Veterinarian zoo directors have served in zoos in Asheville, Brownsville, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Fresno, Los Angeles, Louisville, Memphis, New York, Oklahoma City, Oakland, Omaha, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis, Toronto, and Washington, as well as in European zoos in Amsterdam, Basel, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Paris, Whipsnade, and Zurich. When a fiscal crunch arises, I’d like to believe that a veterinarian zoo director would have a cost-cutting approach differing from others who came from management or finance backgrounds. I would expect them to juggle the books secretly so that animals would not feel the budgetary pinches that bean counters impose on zoos. The arrival of veterinarians in zoos challenged both them and their institutions. But, more important, it started to leverage changes in institutional priorities and the lives of zoo animals.

  One of the natural conflicts that arose in this new marriage of animal doctors with zoos was the occasional antipathy that characterized the relationships between the animal curators and veterinarians. I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way, any more than dogs and cats necessarily have to be adversaries. Whenever I see a dog and cat living together as friends, I think that veterinarians and curators should pay close attention to how they pull it off.

  Curators are the key staff members who manage the animal collections and are in charge of buying and trading animals, supervising their daily care, and planning their exhibits. After the keepers, curators have the jobs most of us would want in a zoo. In reality, curators have about as much chance as the president of the United States does to understand and control fully the destiny of their constituents. The ideal management system in zoos is one where directors, veterinarians, and curators have seamless, collaborative relationships. In many zoos the veterinarian was always at the top of the personnel ladder as the most educated person on the zoo staff, including their zoo director boss, although this has changed considerably. Most of the zoo directors in the history of American zoos have not been biologists, and many now come from marketing, management, or administrative backgrounds. Zoo curatorial positions were not typically academically oriented ones either, but often were filled by savvy, trained-on-the-job animal aficionados of highly varying credentials and backgrounds. Zoo professionals have always had to work within the constraints of the economics and knowledge that typify most zoo operations. Perhaps it was preordained that these newly arrived zoo veterinarians would encroach upon resident territorial domains, since many of the solutions to animal health problems lay within the theoretical realm of curatorial influence to correct. Most of the disagreement has come from housing, feeding, and management issues that affect animal health.

  Perceiving the complex managerial needs of the zoo profession, several academic institutions now have courses in zoo biology and management. Michigan State University offers a curriculum in zoo and aquarium science. Canasius College, in Buffalo, New York, has initiated a zoo biology program that covers topics on the genetics, physiology, and nutrition of captive wildlife. Numerous zoos now host veterinary internships or residency training programs for graduate veterinarians. The American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA), the principal industry professional organization, has offered short courses in zoo administration for many years.

  It has been a fitful process to blend veterinarians into the sacred ground of exhibition and daily animal management. Veterinarians correctly perceived these two areas as the wellspring of most of the medical problems that they deal with every day, and, like Dr. Seuss’s young Gerald McGrew, they also set about trying to make a change or two.

  Today, the management in most progressive zoos has succeeded in integrating the capabilities of the key players on their professional zoo staffs, and transcended a lot of the rough spots along the old road. The best organizational models create compatible team environments in which sharp divisions of job territory have been done away with, or at least blunted. Among the many jobs of the zoo director is the task of balancing the priorities of veterinarians and curators, in addition to those of trustees, donors, and civic officials.

  Everyone wants to be a curator, from the trustees, director, and veterinarian down to the zoo docents. This seemingly endless list of aspirants must be a constant source of irritation to real curators. When encroached upon by their superiors, curators sometimes have to hold their breath and humor certain sacred pet projects until a proposal suffocates under its own weight. Such was the case with a proposed exhibit at the San Diego Zoo made in the late 1960s by the zoo’s director, Dr. Charles Schroeder. Because of its anachronistic qualities, this legendary story was still fresh in circulation when I arrived as an intern in 1972. In keeping with the heavy emphasis of the zoo collection on African animals, Dr. Schroeder’s brainstorm was to build on this strength by adding an anthropological tilt—a human exhibit in the form of an African village. As the centerpiece of this politically incorrect idea, “real” African people would be brought over from the “Dark Continent” and live in a village in the zoo, “just like they do in the bush.” (In all fairness, Schroeder did have a contract arrangement in mind for the villagers, rather than a capture expedition.) His proposal continued, “Think of how interesting it would be to watch natives in their natural habitat, weaving baskets, tending chickens, nursing children and all of the other fascinating things that ‘natives’ do.”

  In 1906, the New York Zoological Park, where Dr. Schroeder served as veterinarian for several years in the 1930s, had “exhibited” a human African pygmy in the primate house, although Schroeder seemed not to have absorbed the lessons learned by his mentors there. This whole affair became a public relations disaster for the zoo, and it was criticized by human rights groups in the New York press. It can be read about in some detail in William Bridges’s excellent 1974 book Gathering of Animals. Ota Benga, a male Congolese pygmy, and a pet chimpanzee had accompanied a businessman to America from Africa. When the zoo was approached to house the chimpanzee, Ota Benga stayed on and was “employed” as a helper in the primate house, where he was seen regularly by the public playing with the chimps in their cage. A sign describing Ota Benga’s natural history, as well as well that of the chimps, was added to the exhibit. Ota Benga eventually became disenchanted with his zoo life and ultimately made a spectacle of himself, flourishing a carving knife and threatening visitors. One day he came into conflict with a vendor in the zoo when denied a bottle of soda during his break from hi
s exhibit. Benga began to strip naked in front of zoo visitors until restrained by several zoo employees. As a consequence of these debacles, the sign was removed from his exhibit and Ota Benga was immediately retired. He wound up in the Colored Orphan Asylum, the Virginia Theological Seminary and College, and left there to become a day laborer before finally committing suicide in 1916.

  In the 1970s, a live human exhibit did come to the zoo world. A creative performing artist offered his services to zoos as a live traveling human exhibit called “Urban Man.” For the several zoos that hired his short-lived act, it drew lively media and visitor attention. The Urban Man lived in a small movie-style set, doing what much of urban civilization did best—cooking, cleaning, eating, watching TV, and reading the newspaper. A far cry from an African village, however, Urban Man never had the requisite charisma to be hired at Charles Schroeder’s San Diego Zoo.

  Gradually, one by one, all major zoos, and most medium-sized ones, employed their own full-time staff veterinarians. Zoo medicine internships and residencies started up in larger zoos and at several universities beginning in the 1970s. The San Diego Zoo had the initial zoo veterinary training program. The first major textbook in this field, aptly titled Zoo and Wild Animal Medicine, edited by Dr. Murray Fowler of the University of California at Davis, was compiled in 1978, and its fifth edition was published in 2003. Needed, fast-improving expertise was finally on the way, and the zoo veterinary profession experienced a growth spurt, as did its principal professional organization in the United States, the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians (AAZV), founded in 1946. In Europe, starting in 1958, an annual International Symposium on the Diseases of Zoo Animals has been hosted in various European cities, and in 1961 a group of veterinarians formed the British Veterinary Zoological Society, holding its inaugural meeting at the London Zoo with thirty-six veterinarians in attendance. In 1982 the journal Zoo Biology began publication, and its scope includes current findings in zoo and wildlife research, medicine, and husbandry.

  Among the shortcomings of zoos, even well into the later 1900s, was the lack of systematic record keeping to enable the accurate collection of animal data on origin, genealogy, longevity, medical history, and pathology. One of the great contributions to correct this problem was the development of the International Species Information System (ISIS) in 1973 through the initiative of zoo researcher Dr. Ulysses S. Seal and Nate Flesness. This database now involves more than five hundred member institutions around the world, and it has facilitated the work of special interest groups such as the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG) and their programs to coordinate conservation breeding in captive wildlife. Its MedARKS medical record system is used by the medical staffs in hundreds of zoos.

  Shepherded for years by executive director Dr. Wilbur Amand, the AAZV’s membership now exceeds 1,200 professionals, and it publishes The Journal of Zoo & Wild Animal Medicine, promotes investigative research grants, and has a large annual scientific convention. Its meetings are attended by veterinarians, curators, biologists, and students from zoos, universities, wildlife departments, and research institutes around the globe. What used to be a predominantly male occupation, with several notable female exceptions, now reflects the composition of the veterinary profession in general, and more than half its members are women.

  In 1983 a new veterinary organization was founded to certify specialists in the new discipline that had become known as “zoological medicine.” Eight zoo veterinarians, including me, were selected by the American Veterinary Medical Association to constitute the founding board of the American College of Zoological Medicine (ACZM), which has grown to more than eighty veterinarians who are board-certified as specialists in zoo animal medicine. In addition, specialty groups have formed in wildlife, avian, reptile, and amphibian medicine. Within only thirty years, zoological veterinarians have become inseparable parts of zoos and the veterinary profession. Much of this had to be accomplished by trial, error, compromise, and intermittent doses of analgesics.

  As for the curators today, they, too, are evolving. Their ranks are filling with college graduates and PhDs. The gaps are closing between them and the veterinarians, and some veterinarians are now becoming curators—perhaps what they really wanted to be all along.

  San Diego Zoo reptile keeper with Galapagos tortoises

  4. THE KEEPERS

  Nurturing the Health of Animals

  The eyes and ears most closely tuned to the animals in the zoo are those of the keepers, for it is they who have the most intimate knowledge of the animals’ daily feeding, toilet, social, and sexual habits. The generation of keepers that I first met at the San Diego Zoo was a lively mixture of transformed ranch hands, circus veterans, retired military personnel, short order cooks, janitors, and former zoo tour guides. Occasionally a keeper from another zoo would break into the system, but San Diego had a clear preference for molding new keepers out of raw, local clay.

  Perhaps no frontline job at the San Diego Zoo is harder to come by than that of a zookeeper. Someone once joked that in the event of a zookeeper’s death, the prime suspects would be wannabe zookeepers. Just as Hollywood is inundated with aspiring movie actors, the zoo personnel office is always swamped with applications for keeper jobs. Instead of parking cars and waiting tables at local nightclubs, if you were a would-be keeper you would be best advised to start anywhere that would afford you even a little toe in the zoo’s door. From there, you would have to rely on hard work, networking, and charm to claim a vacancy that might take years to come.

  After you entered the zoo employment system as a hamburger technician or paper picker, you were finally on the inside track to building your credentials and to obtaining the essential contacts needed to edge your way into one of these coveted positions. Working in the gift shop or as a parking lot attendant was second string in this arena of competition—it was imperative that you became a face on the zoo grounds, where you could rub elbows with the animal movers and shakers. After selling perhaps 200,000 corn dogs, you might finally be getting closer. A recommendation from your immediate supervisor, mentor, or lover could make or break your prospects when that opening finally came. You hoped and prayed that your boss had enough leverage to help, and that you had enough personal charisma to prevail.

  As time passed at the San Diego Zoo, so did many of the older animal keepers. A few of those who had been biding their time betting on corn dog futures moved up, and the numbers of keepers able to lasso a wildebeest dwindled to extinction. Seasoned farmhands were replaced with zoo-trained urbanites, a few bearing scars of faltered aspirations to become curators or veterinarians. Some of the keepers became a bit cynical when they realized that their expectations fell short of the actual experience—where financial constraints, limited authority, and occasional public indifference diminished their expected impact upon the system.

  The integration of this more educated, youthful element of the keeper force, and the experienced older employees, was always interesting to observe. The more senior keepers did not gladly surrender their favorite tasks to these idealistic newcomers—after all, they too had to earn their stripes. Like fraternity pledges, the new kids were often delegated the more mundane tasks, such as hosing, raking, cleaning, and chopping veggies, in the manner of a progressive apprenticeship. One common ground that both generations seemed to share was the mythology associated with their respective capabilities with animals. The youngsters attributed their skills to their higher purpose, their academic search for key biological facts, and their astute observations. The oldsters usually credited their insights to their long, seasoned, hard-earned experiences.

  The gradual disappearance of the old keepers’ faces caused a loss of the country bred intuition that some of these former livestock wranglers had brought to their jobs. Among those I missed was cowboy Clyde, the old antelope keeper with a horseshoe-shaped depression in the middle of his face—the price of a youthful encounter with a bronco’s hoof on a Texas ranch. Clyde’s lip ti
lted into a drool on one side of his lopsided jaw, and he had a no-small-talk kind of rural demeanor. He got right to the bottom line if something was going wrong with one of his antelope charges. The newer crop of keepers read and studied more about animals, accumulated more technical knowledge, and had more of their own self-learned technical notions about animal health and behavior problems. They belong to the American Association of Zoo Keepers, and many now have college degrees. The older keepers always called me “Doctor,” whereas the newer ones wanted to call me “Phil.”

  The assignment of keepers to various animal groups in zoos varies highly from one zoo to another. Aptitude, experience, seniority, affability, obedience, and loyalty all play a hand in the hierarchy of the keeper rank and file. We would all like to think that this is a perfect process of matching the most appropriate individuals with the most appropriate animals, but—let’s face it—the animals don’t pick their keepers. Some keeper assignments are, unquestionably, more desirable than others. Raking goat droppings off of a steep hillside or cleaning carnivore stools out of a drainpipe just might not be your cup of tea—more a “reward” for political transgressions. Some zoos with strong labor unions go meticulously by the seniority system, which creates some interesting personnel and animal management dynamics. If you want to be the gorilla keeper, you may simply have to wait your turn.