Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  If the hospital keepers had any disputes with the keepers and curators in the main zoo, it was probably most aggravated by the use of the hospital for housing surplus animals. Our keepers had to run an animal hospital and hotel where the guests seldom made reservations and completely ignored the checkout time. Because of breeding successes, incompatibility issues between individual animals, or occasional managerial largess in finding homes for surplus animals with other zoos, the hospital was a place that animals could be warehoused until other disposition options were found. As a result, these long-term boarders, often big predators, had to be moved around from time to time as different cages were needed for new hospital cases.

  A male lion named Sanetti turned out to be one of the easiest to move out of hospital storage. He was part of a population boom that happened in our zoo lion pride, thanks to the reliable virility of the dominant male, Chopper. Because of the limited housing available for big cats in the zoo, Sanetti lived in a hospital cage as a surplus animal, while the curators unsuccessfully sought a home for him. To cope with this overabundance of lions, I had begun by spaying a three-hundred-pound female lion, which involves surgically removing the ovaries and uterus. Thereafter, I immediately vowed never to repeat that laborious piece of surgery if I could avoid it. As I found myself up to my elbows in the lioness’s abdomen, sorting out the abdominal fat from the ovaries and uterus, I came upon a better idea—sterilizing the male lions by perfecting a surgical vasectomy technique.

  The San Diego Zoo animal hospital is located on the edge of the grounds adjacent to the Old Globe Shakespeare Theater. An elaborate but hastily built outdoor stage had been constructed to keep the theater operating after a fire that had totally destroyed the main theater area. Unbeknownst to the stage director, a male lion, who had a sixteen-pound bowling ball as a toy, lived only forty yards away. With their new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in full swing on opening night, Sanetti roared and thrashed his ball against the steel cage bars for several hours. Miraculously, unlike all other surplus boarders, after just one phone call from the general manager of the Old Globe, the curators instantly found a new home for the lion. He was gone in record time, expedited, we learned later, by pressure from a Shakespeare-loving zoo trustee.

  It is only human nature to take certain liberties with our access to animals during lapses of good judgment, though with certain zoo animals this can be unforgiving. I recall one such moment of my own involving a young Chinese leopard that was newly arrived from a Canadian zoo for routine hospital quarantine. This gorgeous creature had been hand-raised until fairly recently, and upon arrival from the airport he was very homesick. A perfect specimen with a thick, glossy, spotted coat, he was a marvelous animal, weighing in at ninety pounds. He pleaded for attention and companionship through the cage bars. It was hard to keep your hands off him, and I warned several staff members to be aware that he was a full-grown predator.

  Alone late one afternoon, a week after his arrival, I walked past his cage in the main hospital compound. He stood up against the bars and licked my hand, purred, and begged to be petted. I couldn’t resist. On impulse I unlocked the cage door, stepped inside, closed it behind me, and sat down on his resting bench. Obviously surprised, but delighted to see me, he sprang into my lap. As soon as I felt the impact of his weight, I realized that this was a huge mistake; he was definitely not a lap cat. I put my arms around him and gently attempted to slide him off of me while he purred and licked my face with his sandpaper tongue. His glistening canine teeth, now rubbing against my cheek, had evolved through the ages to dissect antelope and deer instantly. He wanted to play, but I was overwhelmed by the instinct to run.

  The more focused I became on pushing him off my lap, the more determined he became to hold onto me. The leopard and I were not playing by the same rules—he was the cat, and I was his mouse. As I stood up, he slid down my front, wrapping both of his front paws about my ankles and panting up at me with his mouth open wide. His pupils dilated, and a look of primeval, predatory enthusiasm filled his eyes. Feeling like a trussed duck, I waddled over to the barred sliding door, dragging my leopard anchor. I cannot recall a single other instance in my life when concealing my true emotions was so vital. Before he could contemplate his next move, I scraped him off on the sliding door as I pulled myself through the opening and snapped the lock on behind me. The warm smell and feel of leopard saliva covered my cheek. I doubt that he actually knew what he was going to do next. Suddenly I felt some strange connection to that San Diego zookeeper whose lifeblood drained from him in the leopard exhibit, alone, in one careless, private moment. All of my future walks past the leopard enclosures kindled a dark and kindred feeling inside of me.

  “Buzzi” Buzikowski, the assistant head bird keeper, was one of the most endearing of the career animal people I met at the San Diego Zoo. Standing slightly over five feet tall, he always had a devilish smile under his trim little moustache and a twinkle in his eye. Buzzi spent many of his working days worrying about his boss, Kenton “K.C.” Lint, the curator of birds, who often placed any failings of the management of the bird collection on his doorstep. An old-school curator, the talented but eccentric K.C. relished reminding you, as he gestured with his smelly pipe, that he had “over forty years of experience with birds.” He saw fairly little purpose for veterinarians in the zoo, with the possible exception of the pathologist—after all, at least he left his living birds alone. Resisting most veterinary encroachments, K.C. was annoyed to find out that even a near-comatose parrot had been taken to the zoo hospital without his consent.

  Buzzi, on the other hand, was warm and affable, always upbeat. But his face flushed and he became agitated with a case of nerves whenever K.C. had him called on the zoo radio. He knew that he was due to be singled out for another scolding, and then the color would drain from his cheery face. Occasionally he would come to me, in confidence, and whisper in a conspiratorial tone, “Doc, I’m not supposed to tell you this—but there’s a sick bird being hidden from the vets in the back of the Jungle Trail cages. Would you have a look at him? But don’t tell K.C. that I told you!” In appreciation for his civic spirit, these cases were handled discreetly to keep him from K.C.’s wrath. Regardless of the personal risk, he had a conscience that required suicidal honesty.

  Later on, at the zoo director’s request, I traveled on an extended trip to Australia and New Guinea with the feared K.C. Lint to obtain koalas for the zoo. We became good friends while touring wildlife reserves and zoos across Australia and New Guinea, and together we negotiated arrangements for the donation of koalas for the San Diego Zoo as a bicentennial gift from Australia to the United States. K.C. finally concluded that vets, or perhaps at least this one, weren’t all bad after all. Afterward, he trusted me to treat most, but not all, of his precious birds.

  Buzzi, however, still remained the bird department’s resident scapegoat. His zoo career was the personification of Murphy’s Law, filled with innocent serial mishaps that got him into hot water, no matter how far he was removed from fault. When the annual Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday school crowd from Tijuana terrorized K.C.’s nesting swans and their eggs came up missing, Buzzi was reprimanded for not having the foresight to erect a barrier in front of their nest. When Buzzi was attacked by a male ostrich that jumped across a wheelbarrow in an attempt to maim him, K.C. chastised Buzzi for scaring the ostrich. On several unfortunate occasions Buzzi was the last person seen holding one of the collection’s treasured parrots before it suddenly dropped dead, when in reality he had picked the poor birds up off the ground when they were too weak to hold onto their perches.

  It was fairly common for people to call the zoo to donate pet parrots that they could no longer keep, and it was usually Buzzi who met the donor to receive the bird and bring it to the hospital for quarantine prior to exhibition in the zoo. Since it was impossible to accept every donation, Buzzi had been admonished by K.C. to screen the donations carefully. One day, following its hospital quara
ntine, a recently donated green and yellow Amazon parrot went on public display in a cage along a busy sidewalk near the Bird Yard. Shortly thereafter, Buzzi received a terse radio summons from K.C. to get over to the cage and take the new bird off exhibit immediately. Dropping what he was doing, he went straight to the bird yard, boxed up the parrot, and brought him to the hospital. I saw him arriving with the Amazon in the back of his little zoo scooter and said, “I thought you just put that bird on exhibit. Why are you bringing it back?” Buzzi flushed, “I don’t know, but the old man was really ticked off about something the bird said to a lady visitor and wanted it off of the grounds pronto.” Just then, the bird stirred in his carrying cage and shrieked, “Screw you! Screw you!” Buzzi’s face contorted into an “Ooh, noo!” as he shook his head and reluctantly refrained from wringing the bird’s neck.

  The morning after a zoo employees’ party we received the sad news that Buzzi had died unexpectedly in his sleep of a heart attack. It was a dismal occasion on the day of his funeral, and I stood with several friends and his pallbearers outside of the church after the funeral mass, preparing to leave for the cemetery burial. We were fondly reminiscing and smiling about the trials and tribulations of Buzzi’s life and times at the zoo, when, as only Buzzi could have it, the hearse’s battery failed and it couldn’t be started. Sensing that something had gone wrong, more of his old friends gathered in a crowd around the hearse. The funeral procession was delayed while we awaited a tow truck to provide a jumpstart. Adding some morbid humor to Buzzi’s final earthly foul-up, someone suggested that we have them try to jumpstart Buzzi as well. We all laughed with Buzzi for the last time, and even K.C. smiled, barely concealing a tear in his eye.

  5. ZOO BABIES

  Promoting Motherhood

  The keepers are the core of the zoo’s conscience, and animals must rely on them to be physically and mentally healthy. In addition to ministering to animals’ essential needs and idiosyncrasies, keepers are also the ombudsmen and advocates of their daily existences from cradle to grave. This nurturing process may begin in some cases with baby animals that may be born to animal couples with poor parenting skills (such as starving, beating, eating, ignoring, or mopping the floor with their offspring). In addition to monitoring animals for maternal neglect, the most common problems for zoo babies, which can be mitigated by watchful keepers, include hypothermia, hypoglycemia, and trauma.

  Many newborns who fail to nurse from their mothers, especially hoofed species, are deprived of antibodies that pass to the baby in the first milk, which is called “colostrum.” In the absence of these protective molecules, babies are much more vulnerable to infections with common bacteria and viruses in their environments. Other animals, such as carnivores, rely largely upon the transmission of protective maternal antibodies through the placenta, as well as in the mother’s first milk. In humans, and other primates, these immune globulins are passed almost exclusively in utero, allowing them to start out life with some fundamental resistances to infections.

  Zookeepers are accustomed to providing special accommodations for zoo babies, based on the maternal style of a particular species. One prickly porcupine baby in the San Diego Zoo became content to nurse from a bottle suspended on the wall of its incubator with minimum maternal contact. Baby primates, however, enjoy being doted upon and toted everywhere in a little papoose sack by an attendant.

  Young ostriches, emus, and rheas, all flightless birds, may be good research models for attention deficit disorder, because their intellectual capabilities, based on their attention spans, are limited. A cynic might even cite their flightless state as further proof of my thesis. I say this with no malice, but these birds are pretty dim, even by avian standards. It has been said, by a few keepers, that ratites (the collective term for the large flightless birds) act as if every day is their first; and that if they encounter the same person thirty days in a row, they believe that have met thirty different people. When their babies are newly hatched, they imitate the parent birds in nearly everything that they do, which can only compound their problems in captivity. To make matters worse, in the absence of parents they imitate each other. Shortly after hatching, ratites quickly begin to trundle about, swallowing and pecking at nearly every strange object they encounter, including one another. This also may encompass fatal objects such as sticks, rocks, nails, and lost coins. One entire hand-reared group of rhea hatchlings in San Diego fell victim to gastrointestinal impactions from consuming artificial plastic grass, pecking and swallowing the green plastic strands until they developed fatal obstructions. No matter how cute these little guys are, one can’t help but question their limited intellects.

  Many animals are housed in variously modified cribs and incubators, and baby marsupials, such as kangaroos and wallabies, which require hand-rearing, are further cloistered in cozy little cloth pouches. Since marsupials are practically embryonic at birth (koalas are about the size of a kidney bean when born), pouch babies have to be well on the way in development before they can be successfully nursed by hand. Because they are constantly with their mothers and can nurse at liberty, their milk is comparatively dilute and low in fat. Other animals that leave their babies in dens and return at intervals to nurse them, such as wild dogs and cats, have more concentrated milk that is higher in fat content. Those who spend time in cold and wet environments, such as the walruses, seals, and whales, have even higher octane fatty milk for sustaining their babies.

  Decisions about a suitable formula and feeding frequency are based on both experience and a growing body of literature on the composition of the milk of wild animals. While all milks contain the same principal constituents (water, protein, fat, sugar, and ash), they can vary enormously in the relative proportions of each, and in their enzymes. Some species, such as zebras, rhinos, and elephants, have milk that is higher in complex carbohydrates and lower in fat. Generally, the higher the fat content the lower the carbohydrate content, and vice versa. Those with the highest fat content are some of the marine species. Hand-rearing formulas for seals and walruses use whipping cream as the base ingredient. These wide variations of milk composition are the result of many factors, including suckling frequency, amount per feeding, and the energy demands of the environment they must cope with in nature.

  Zoo personnel manage this nutritional diversity by dividing animals into groups according to milk types: equids (zebras, wild horses, and rhinos), primates (great apes and monkeys), cloven-hoofed animals (antelope, deer, giraffe, camels, wild cattle), carnivores (tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, hyenas, wolves), and marine mammals (seals, sea lions, walruses). The largest and most remarkable infant ever reared in captivity was a California gray whale named JJ, who was found floundering in the surf near Marina del Rey, California, and cared for at San Diego’s Sea World. He was fed a special formula through a feeding hose that required hundreds of gallons of dairy cream weekly, blended into a slurry with various marine-life proteins. Before his return to the wild he was trained to forage on the pool bottom to simulate more natural feeding behavior, and was consuming 900 pounds of fish, squid and krill daily. During his stay in captivity, JJ grew to more than seventeen thousand pounds and reached a length of thirty-three feet. His radio transmitter fell silent two days after JJ was released into the ocean, and he has not been spotted since.

  Whenever possible, physical field checks of newborns are done in zoo exhibit areas. Keepers are often trained to obtain baseline information such as weight, sex, body temperature, and vital signs during this most critical period. Because of their propensity for cannibalizing their new offspring or abandoning them, leopards and polar bears are ordinarily left undisturbed and monitored by microphones or video cameras. Other common keeper procedures include the disinfection of the umbilical cord and the identification of newborn animals by tagging, ear notching, and tattooing. Microchips are used in some zoos to provide certain, though not visible, identification.

  “Stealing” a baby hippo at the London Zoo
/>   Carrying out these procedures is not always feasible or without risk—not if a mother antelope or rhino catches you playing around with her baby. Nearly every zoo veterinarian and keeper has had to flee from an angry mother when she realized that her newborn was being fondled by a stranger. In the event that maternal care is not going well, foster-care decisions have to be made by the keepers, curators, and veterinarians about removing the baby from its mother and hand-rearing it. Every effort is usually made to encourage the success of mother rearing, given the adverse social and nutritional consequences of separation. Anticipating pregnancies and births allows for preparations to be made in advance.

  In some cases, it is possible for keepers to supplement the feeding of a baby or take other measures to assure that it can remain with its mother. Our female okapi, Lisette, was a good mother, but she had one vice that was compromising her offspring. A relative of the giraffe, the okapi is a large, rare hoofed species that lives in the secluded forests of the Congo, where okapis hide their newborn babies in the forest and return at intervals to nurse them. Striking to behold, with dark brown body coloration and white, zebralike racing stripes on their hindquarters and legs, okapis are browsers, using their long blue-gray tongues to grasp and manipulate their leafy forage. Their tongues are so long that they can lick their own eyebrows and ears.