Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  Okapi

  Lisette was an attentive mother, and the birth of her baby went well for several days until she began to overgroom his rear end with her tongue to the point of making it sore. Unless this behavior was stopped, the okapi baby would be taken to the Children’s Zoo. By all means, we preferred him to be mother-reared on exhibit and tried to alter her behavior by applying bitter-tasting solutions to the baby’s rear, but Lisette was undeterred. Next, we limited her contact with her baby to intermittent nursing sessions, but she was still obsessed about licking her baby’s bottom. Finally, staff veterinarian Jim Oosterhuis devised a little custom vinyl jacket with Velcro closures that the keeper placed on the baby each time he was with his mom to nurse. Both Lisette and the baby tolerated the new apparel, the sore bottom healed, and mother and baby succeeded in remaining together.

  Everyone eventually graduates from somewhere or something, and zoo animals are no exception. Though they may not receive paper diplomas like us humans, they move from one stage of life to another, often with as much drama and fanfare as accompanies human benchmarks in their social and educational development. With many species, the decision to hand-raise a baby is a painful one in a zoo, but this is particularly so with the great apes and monkeys. These highly intelligent beings acquire critical socialization skills by being among their own from birth, and they lack skills if denied the necessary role models. Like humans, their development from infancy to adulthood is cultivated and colored by their experiences, as well as their innate capacities to develop into unique individuals. They, too, can become misfits or neglectful parents if they are deprived of the psychological enrichment of life’s critical passages.

  To avoid these problems, some innovative efforts have been made in zoos to educate and reeducate such orphans and to teach abusive and neglectful mothers to care for their babies. There is nothing more troubling than watching an inexperienced ape mother scrubbing the floor with her newborn infant as it squeals in terror. Remedial education holds promise for some of these creatures.

  When I first arrived at the San Diego Zoo, several orangutan and pygmy chimpanzee babies were being hand-reared, either because their mothers failed to hand-rear them or because they had acquired respiratory infections that made it necessary to care for them in the Children’s Zoo nursery. A baby Bornean orangutan named Ken-Allen became the most boisterous of them all. Ken was eventually evicted from the infant nursery when he became too active, but he was still too small to return to the main zoo. Mischievous and demanding, he was transferred to a miniature ape exhibit nearby, where he could climb and tumble without knocking around the other babies.

  Ken was going through a particularly spoiled and independent part of his development and would play with and evade the attendants like a frisky little kid. After he started to bite a few people to get his way, the day finally came for his repatriation to the big zoo. By then, Ken had become an overconfident little brat. This would all to change when he was in the care of the “real” ape keeper and away from the overindulgence of the nursery attendants

  Ken went from being a big shot in the Children’s Zoo to a punk kid in the big zoo. The other orangutans decided to teach him some life lessons. After a few days, Ken’s only earthly possession, his security blanket, was in tatters. He struggled in tug-of-war matches with members of his new clan who wanted to share the blanket, and he ended up with only a small hanky-sized remnant that he would balance on his head or hold in his mouth lest he lose it. Fortunately for him, one of the female orangutans befriended him, and thereafter he sought her protection when others decided to give him head-to-toe physical inspections by pulling at him like a wishbone. Eventually, as Ken grew bolder and more confident, he found his new environment stimulating and the interactions with the other orangs a game. He gave the adult male, Big Bob, a wide distance, wary of the power and prestige that this huge individual enjoyed within the group.

  Within a few months Ken was beginning to feel secure and accepted. Like some children, he was lulled into a false sense of independence as he grew, which eventually led to an overbearing confidence that caused him to discount the experience and capabilities of his elders. Big Bob, the group patriarch, mostly tolerated and ignored Ken at first, but as Ken became more annoying, he made the mistake of taking Bob’s forbearance as a sign of weakness or capitulation.

  As most adult male adult orangutans typically do, Bob spent much of his daily efforts in apparent meditation. His massive body and commanding presence were not designed for playful antics any more, or for juvenile trivia. Failing to engage him in play, Ken decided instead to make a fool of Bob. Capitalizing on his own youthful agility and energy. Ken taunted and tormented him. When Bob was deep in thought, resting on the large telephone-pole climbing structure, Ken would shinny up from behind and pull Bob’s flowing dreadlocks. At first Bob tolerated this adolescent play and simply ignored Ken. When his efforts at stirring Bob from his repose failed, Ken would climb underneath and pull on Bob’s toes. Still being ignored, Ken escalated the interaction by running along the horizontal beam on the climbing structure, slapping Bob on the leg or head as he dashed past. Becoming more agitated with each growing insult, Bob whirled around and flashed his lips at this little pest. It was clear that Bob was no match for Ken’s speed and dexterity, and Ken knew it.

  Ken became pleased with his newfound status as aggressor, while the other orangutans watched in apparent awe at his suicidal behavior. He had become a juvenile delinquent. The tables turned abruptly, however, when Bob finally decided to teach his diminutive tormenter a lesson. On a day following one of Ken’s outbursts of insubordination, he made the mistake of walking past Bob, who apparently feigned slumber. Without warning and with lightning speed, Bob seized Ken by the ankle and gripped him tight. Surprised, and not knowing if terminal vengeance was coming, Ken screamed as if he had been caught in a steel trap. He beseeched the other orangutans to intervene on his behalf, but no one budged. For an entire day Ken went everywhere that Bob went, shackled like a prisoner in an apelike version of Woody Allen’s chain-gang movie Take the Money and Run. Up and down the climbing structure, over to the water drinkers, and down against the glass windows, Ken was dragged along like Bob’s terrified little doll. Big Bob didn’t release his vicelike grip on Ken’s ankle until it was time for the group to return to their sleeping bedrooms for their evening meal. The next day, and for many days to come, there was no more hair pulling, no more slapping, and no more taunting. Ken wouldn’t get within twenty feet of Big Bob.

  In time, as Bob’s health failed, Ken replaced him as the group patriarch. Dental disease and an ensuing chronic sinus infection eventually were Bob’s undoing. It all started one day when the keeper called to report that he was falling over every time he tried to stand up. The immediate culprit was an inner ear inflammation caused by a sinus infection, which had arisen from an abscessed tooth. After a vigorous course of antibiotics and root canal surgery at the zoo hospital, he bounced back rapidly, but a chronic sinus problem dogged him for months. Despite all of our medical and surgical efforts to cure Bob of his problem, he eventually succumbed. Unbeknownst to us all, he also had chronic heart disease, and he died in my arms despite resuscitation efforts.

  Several of us stood teary-eyed as I phoned the zoo director and curator to break the sad news. Ken went on to become the next leader of the orangutans. When a new naturalistic exhibit was constructed, Ken continued to demonstrate his adventuresome skills. He was the only one in the group who managed to find the essential finger- and toeholds on the exhibit walls and escaped to temporary freedom three times before the zoo designers found and eliminated the architectural oversights.

  One of the notable successes in retraining a mother took place with Dolly the gorilla. She was captured as a nine-month-old infant in Africa and brought to the San Diego Zoo, and then moved to the zoo’s sister facility, the San Diego Wild Animal Park. She had missed the experiences of growing up among gorillas in her early childhood and re
lated more to people than her own kind. When Dolly was ten years old she gave birth to her first baby, but, when the newborn tried to cling to her, she rejected his advances. After six hours of hopeful observation, the baby was removed to the park nursery for his own protection.

  Steven Joines, a local graduate student in primate behavior and part-time keeper, collaborated with other keepers and organized innovative efforts for Dolly’s reeducation for the next birth. It would be accurate to call this a course in Gorilla Behavior 101. Starting with confidence-building contact behind the scenes, he devoted considerable time to developing personal rapport with Dolly, and then began to introduce her gradually to novel stimuli, including a small pillow. He then transformed the pillow into a sturdy, cream-colored, denim object filled with foam and drew a face on one side. Dolly accepted these baby prototypes readily, and she was encouraged to treat her new object gently. She was taught to hold her pillow as if it were a baby, and she responded to requests that she rotate her pillow baby so that its face was properly oriented toward her own body. Because of her retraining, however, when she was encouraged to “be nice to the baby,” she cooperated, and went on to rear it successfully, breaking the cycle of maternal ignorance and neglect.

  Bern, Switzerland’s old bear pit, c. 1900

  6. EXHIBIT MAKING

  Creating Zoo Ecosystems

  On a gray, overcast morning I stood by the out-of-the-way exhibit at the appointed time. A notice posted on the entry marquee announced the schedule for the world’s shortest animal exhibition, and I was sure not to be late. It was a fairly simple-looking affair as exhibits go in Australian fauna parks—a gravel-bottomed glass aquarium measuring, perhaps, five feet wide, fifteen feet long, and six feet high, sitting under a shady wood canopy. If you were to spend the entire day watching for the grand entrance of the platypus you would be lucky to have it in view for a full twenty minutes, if at all. It might not be active that day and might instead remain secluded in its den. Fortunately, they are usually ravenous little creatures, consuming enormous quantities of worms, crayfish, shrimp, and other aquafauna.

  Then, like clockwork, the keeper appeared with a cupful of earthworms and slid open a panel. He plopped them into the water in a wriggling mass that steadily sank bottomward, trailing a slimy cloud of debris. Suddenly, an impish, dark creature with a face like a duck, webbed feet, and a narrow tail swooshed into the water from its hiding chamber. Systematically, it attacked and gobbled down the entire clod of worms. And, just as quickly, after a brief exploration of its tank, the platypus was gone. The exhibition was finished.

  Few zoos have exhibited the platypus. For years it seemed nearly impossible to keep them alive in captivity. This creature is a bona fide zoological oddity, and, along with its Australian echidna relatives, is the world’s only egg-laying mammal—a mammal being defined as a warm-blooded, haired animal species whose female gives milk. The platypus has a toothless duck beak, with which it forages for invertebrates in its native stream habitat. The eggs have a surprisingly short incubation period of less than two weeks.

  The Bronx Zoo’s first attempts with platypuses failed to keep them alive for even two months in captivity. The early specimens cost the zoo $25,000 apiece in today’s dollars. With their ability to consume half their body weight daily in worms, grubs, and shrimp, the platypus, pound per pound, was one of the most expensive species to keep in the zoo. In captivity, platypuses often died promptly from malnutrition or pneumonia until an Australian naturalist, David Fleay, came along. Fleay was the first to accurately chronicle the behavior of this species, and in 1943 he also was the first to breed and hatch it in captivity—a feat which has seldom been repeated since. Fleay was engaged by the New York Zoological Park to assist in its next attempt. It managed to keep platypus alive for some years, but still without reproductive success.

  Platypuses are supposed to be completely protected in Australia, but they have a penchant for becoming entangled in man’s plastic litter, nets, traps, fishhooks, and discarded fishing lines. Their capture and export to zoos has been banned for years. The keys to platypus husbandry include the prevention of hypothermia, stress, malnutrition, and infections. This is no small feat, however, but it is critically aided by proper housing arrangements. Fleay constructed their captive nesting areas in such a way that required the platypuses to climb through a narrow wooden chute that was lined with rubber squeegee blades. As they pressed along the snug passageway to return from water to the den, the moisture was effectively scraped from their hair coat, allowing them to dry off readily in the comfort of their nesting compartments. Captive platypus spend over 90 percent of their time in the seclusion of their dens. The wild platypus figured this squeegee thing out long ago, and they favor tight streamside burrows for their hideaways.

  Barred exhibits at the New York Zoological Park, c. 1900

  The earliest animal collections were private royal menageries that excluded the general public. Public animal displays in cities offered the confined viewing of captive wild animals in makeshift cages or walled pits, where they were difficult to care for, sometimes dangerous, and often victims of the curious eyes and taunts of the general public. The early perceptions of wild animals often placed them in the context of dangerous wild beasts. Their medical care was practically nonexistent, and it is no wonder that some of the earliest concerns for animal welfare in Europe focused on the plight of these pathetic creatures. Even earlier, in Europe’s darker days, animals were put on trial occasionally for injuries they caused to humans! The first public zoos tended merely to the basics, providing visitors with the rudimentary opportunity, however unnatural, to see live wildlife curiosities for the first time. Only the most affluent adventurer could view animals in their wilderness habitats. They were displayed as caged specimens, taxonomically arranged, focusing on comparative anatomy and evolution. Little information about their ecology and behavior was provided to visitors; indeed, much of this was poorly known at the time.

  Zoological incarceration-style bear exhibit

  In the zoo world, “cage” is a dirty word. Zoo animals are no longer allowed to live in cages, as it projects a feeling of sterile, cold, insensitive living conditions. It is also a reminder of what zoos are no longer supposed to be. Instead, terms like “captive environment,” “zoo habitat,” and other more politically cozy designations are being substituted for the “C” word. When all is said and done, however, a “cage” or a “habitat” represents the physical world that limits an animal’s resources. A poorly designed or managed “captive ecosystem” is no better than a lousy cage. Zoo animals are entirely reliant upon their keepers for comfort, ambient temperature control, sanitation, food resources, social prospects, and, ultimately, their longevity. In nearly every respect, exhibiting animals in captivity is analogous to a journey on a spaceship, where the quality and dependability of the life support systems determine the well-being of the passengers.

  Zoo exhibits have changed dramatically since their beginnings, and, like impressionist paintings, their public purpose in today’s zoo is to create an illusion for the viewer. They are human versions and perspectives of the natural world and thereby have an innate bias toward the human orientation. From an animal’s standpoint, however, exhibits take on much more pragmatic meanings. An exhibit determines the artificial limits of an animal’s territory, and it should be judged by both the quality and quantity of space it provides, including the usable vertical and horizontal dimensions.

  The next big revolution in zoos attempted to eliminate the viewing of the animals from pit railings and through unsightly bars and wires. The privately owned Hagenbeck Tierpark in Hamburg, Germany, constructed in the early twentieth century, became best known for the use of open, moat-enclosed exhibits, for which Carl Hagenbeck was even granted a patent in 1896. Of course, moats are no strangers to European castles and fortresses, though their intentions were usually to exclude intruders rather than confine the inhabitants. By their nature, moats err on the s
ide of security rather than safety. The exhibit moats are usually dry rather than water-filled, although numerous “monkey islands” and other exhibits have been built in zoos with water barriers, sometimes to the peril of the animals. Some American zoo directors were put off by Hagenbeck’s pseudo-geologic exhibit rockwork and his penchant for mixing animals together, which was contrary to the traditional zoo paradigm. The best examples of natural geologic exhibit backdrops in America were executed by projects at the Denver and St. Louis zoos in the early 1900s, when actual plaster castings of natural cliff faces were used to form the concrete zoo structures.

  Moats and fences are constructed to confine animals in proportion to their capabilities for escape. Hedges, plantings, and rocks were used to conceal the moats and support facilities from the visitors. Though more complicated in seasonal climates, some of the larger zoos began to make a gradual shift to open, diorama-style animal displays that had been popularized in natural history museums. Uncluttered by traditional fortress-like visual obstructions, at least during good weather, bears, tigers, lions, and hoofed animals were observed from walkways that meandered past their airy compounds. This provided the exhilarating illusion that virtually nothing was separating the public from the beasts, and it often offered sightlines and overlapping vistas that encompassed scenes of both predators and prey. A few zoos, such as the San Diego Zoo, beneficiaries of a subtropical climate, developed an early distinct flavor of their own because seasonal shifts to gymnasium-like indoor quarters were not a winter necessity.