Without question, the most interesting animal exhibits display family groups, whether it is primates or meerkats, those small, weasel-like creatures from Africa (Timon is the meerkat featured in Disney’s Lion King). They stand on their hind legs like little Grinches. The activity and social repertoires of intact social groups of animals provide the enrichment that animates an exhibit in the most intricate ways. Zoos need more meerkat and naked mole rat types of exhibits. The public always seems to connect the most, intellectually and emotionally, with the primates. The evolutionary relationship of monkeys and the great apes to people provides a sense of kinship that humans find irresistible.
Designing meaningful exhibits in zoos is phenomenally complex and difficult. Using a metaphor, one might regard this visually by picturing a large tree. The leaves and branches of the tree represent the more visible portion of an exhibit, whereas the roots underground are the invisible, but critical, infrastructure that supports and nourishes everything above. These rooted elements of the project are critical to the flow of personnel, food, and services to the exhibit.
The two major aspects of the design of successful animal exhibits are aesthetics and functionality. Special care is required to assure that neither is unduly compromised. Rather than claim that one is more important than the other, it is most constructive when both aesthetics and functionality are wedded. Building a new animal habitat is an expensive and complex undertaking, one bound to be executed with a sense of trepidation. After all, no one wants to be affiliated with a $5 million flop—whether it is a movie or a zoo exhibit. Unlike a dud movie that can straggle on in video stores generating some residual revenues, an exhibit bomb stands as a monument to the failed vision of its creators.
To lessen these risks somewhat, a significant portion of each project needs to be devoted to the “programming” and “design” phases in order to prevent elephants from tipping into moats and apes from scaling the walls. The animals themselves are the silent stakeholders who must rely upon people to provide suitable environments. Their agendas must be articulated by humans, who, for better or worse, add their own interpretations to their needs. The key players in this process are:
1. The animals. One of the proposed inhabitants should be appointed to the design group and be referred to deferentially by the other team members throughout the whole process. Team members can take turns being a spokesperson and advocate for this silent member.
2. Keepers, who generally report to the curators and are charged with caring for the animals in the exhibit that is being designed.
3. Curators, who manage the animal collection and have primary responsibilities for breeding and exhibit programs.
4. Veterinarians, whose job is to prevent and control disease, as well as to treat illness and support the management of animals for curators, keepers and applied research.
5. Physical services departments, which supply the plumbers, maintenance workers and groundskeepers to keep the exhibit physically fit and running.
6. The zoo director, who represents the board of trustees or city government, fiscal managers, marketing, and public relations staff.
A key element that binds this team together is a capable and experienced architect.
Their individual points of interaction with the exhibited animals influence the priorities of each of these groups. Because nearly everything eventually affects animal health, the veterinarian has an especially important role in bridging the gaps between these interests. The zoo director wants an exhibit that is appealing to the public and that will bolster the public’s patronage of the zoo. Gate revenues, and the things that drive them, set exhibit priorities in most zoos. Exhibits have to draw the public into the zoo, and, it is hoped, create opportunities for secondary income thorough the sales of food, merchandise, memberships, and donations. Whereas colleges often secure the patronage of alumni by building their basketball and football teams (sometimes to the point of prostituting themselves), zoos attract benefactors and visitors by creating new and appealing exhibits and programs.
Zoo curators are also driven by multiple masters in the exercise of designing exhibits. A new exhibit must improve substantially upon the outmoded facilities being replaced. Curatorial priorities include a long list of past facility shortcomings to avoid, coupled with a vision for new visitor experiences. Many people now go to zoos seeking meaningful outings, not merely to gawk at the animals. Since curators are in charge of animal exhibition, it is critical for them to avoid any catastrophic aesthetic disappointments. Team-oriented design methods have blunted their risk. Curators’ priorities must also take into account the practical duties of the keeper staff, as well as the logistics of providing an environment conducive to safety, breeding, pregnancy, and the raising of young. Research capabilities would also be a plus in any new animal exhibit; this most often takes the form of behavioral observations, but may also require the collection of urine for endocrine studies to manage captive reproduction and ready apprehension for related procedures.
Keepers must be fully integrated into this team of designers, since it is they who will expend, daily, the time and energy to mitigate any shortcomings. The operation and maintenance costs of an exhibit over its lifespan can be astronomical if it is carelessly designed or constructed. Once brick and mortar are set, it will be years before a replacement facility will be seen. Drains clogged with food and animal feces and uncleanable surfaces will be their recurring nightmares if these details are botched. More than one exhibit has been built where two-inch diameter floor drains ended up having to attempt to accommodate four-inch animal droppings, food, and bedding debris.
Exhibit design is a pernicious concern of the veterinarians. Conditioned by past animal illnesses ranging from fight injuries and diarrhea to maternal neglect of infants, veterinarians usually have opinions on most aspects of new exhibits. Since much of a veterinarian’s daily activity is based on what is going wrong, rather than what is going right, veterinarians may sometimes be viewed as nitpickers on project teams. Lighting, heating, cooling, shade, sanitation, toxic plants, safety, catching, handling, crating, observing, isolating, and zoonoses (diseases that people can catch from animals) all ramble through their veterinary thoughts in endless permutations. How can all of these variables be kept in play and still avoid having a new exhibit that ends up looking like San Quentin Prison?
Plain and simple attention to detail resolves the majority of the veterinary issues about new exhibits. After a proper analysis of a project’s direction, good design is always in the details. Poor basic choices for layout, cage mechanics, floor and wall surfaces, lighting fixture placement, and plumbing specifications are all avoidable design traps into which, unfortunately, too many projects have stepped. The sad part is that an animal exhibit need not necessarily cost more to function correctly the first time. Any truly innovative project, however, will involve risk-taking, and with that will come some failures. Two of the priciest mistakes in the development of exhibits are oversights and subsequent changes, which require expensive changes by the project engineers, architects, and contractors. Also significant in the costs of early failures in the plan, however, are the time burdens placed upon the client team members, who are called upon, often at short notice, to devote additional efforts to overcoming programming and design oversights.
If I ran a zoo, I might be tempted to find the very best exhibits in the world and duplicate or improve them rather than starting from scratch—especially if the exhibits were a long distance away from my zoo. An entire zoo could be built by modeling the best of what works in other zoos around the world, so long as climatic and thematic considerations prevailed in these judgments. However, exhibits and whole zoos should take on their unique character because of the necessity to fit them into the local physical, climatic, and cultural topography.
Construction cost overruns can start immediately after the “conceptual” phase of a new exhibit, and again when oversights are made in the “programming” phase. The
task of programming is to develop the working plan (program) of what the exhibit must accomplish, the interrelationships of its subparts, and the whos and hows of accomplishing them. Only when all elements of the plan have been determined in tabular fashion can any first attempt be made to rough out the physical aspects of the project. There is a perpetual temptation to narrow the focus of exhibit or facility design by prematurely creating a visual image. This happens because visual images are needed to inspire donors and other supporters to raise needed money. Above all else, an exhibit must fulfill the mission of its residents, the animals, and this is then married to the aesthetic aspect of the overall project. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Programming is a dynamic process of meeting with all key parties in the exhibit project and rooting out their expectations, priorities, and knowledge. The best methods of accomplishing this involves determining the main goals of each group, understanding their underlying needs and concerns, and preserving the details of their visions in the end product. Another vital step is to place each group’s information into the project as a whole when negotiating (often bartering) construction compromises or deleting things from the plan. Some mistakes occur when changes are made by one party to the design without the input of the others, who might easily foresee the negative ramifications.
As with all major construction projects, there can be “mission creep” resulting from including an excess number of secondary features at the expense of the primary project objectives and budget. Slipping in unbudgeted expenditures, such as souvenir and snack stands, escalators, and the like, can subtract from the fundamental product unless the budget is supplemented. In the long run, a poorly planned project will cost far more to operate and maintain.
Another common mistake is for the project team to disassemble once the working drawing phases are finished, leaving things to fate, luck, and the skill and goodwill of the contractor to bring the project to life. Even Dr. Frankenstein tended to his monster after the initial electrification event, yet zoo projects often are inadequately shepherded by their creators, as the following list of shortcomings illustrates.
1. The door mechanisms throughout a new chimp exhibit were so weak that there were three breakouts in first three days of inhabitation. The animals ransacked the service area, broke plumbing fixtures, set off fire alarms, and caused a flood.
2. An orangutan found enough handholds on an artificial cliff face that he climbed out hand-over-hand. He was found sitting with a visitor on the public viewing platform. He repeated the feat several times in a row before modified rockwork finally thwarted his new climbing career.
3. An exhibit of subtropical animals was sited on a north-facing slope with poor sun exposure, making the outdoor exhibit cold and uninhabitable until the sun was directly overhead.
4. The orangutans in a newly opened exhibit unearthed concrete waste that had not been removed by landscapers prior to placing grass sod. Using the concrete chunks like hammers, they destroyed thousands of dollars worth of bulletproof viewing glass during the first week of inhabiting the new enclosure.
5. As an economy measure, several large sand and gravel filters were eliminated from a new hippo pool with underwater viewing, resulting in a maximum visibility of about twelve inches. Hippos, like babies in swimming pools, almost always do their business in the water.
Underwater hippo viewing is not a brand new idea, though it is relatively recent in zoos—the Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas probably had the first. Toledo, San Diego, and several other zoos now have them as well. But in Kenya, East Africa, at Mzima Springs (Mzima means “well” or “good” in Swahili), tourists have been able to see underwater hippos in crystal-clear visibility conditions for decades. These springs, arising from lava flows in the Chyulu Hills region, are the headwater source for the coastal city of Mombassa, Kenya, miles away. The springs create an enormous water flow that keeps the water clarity extraordinarily transparent. This is the location where the world’s best underwater hippo and crocodile photos have been taken. In nearly any ordinary hippo habitat the normal muddy, silted water would eliminate underwater views altogether, but at Mzima hippos perform underwater ballets that can be seen through a glass window in a submerged tank that is entered down a set of narrow steps. More recently, this hippo haven has been featured in several National Geographic television specials.
It is not uncommon for new exhibit residents to demolish many of the new plantings, and it requires some ingenuity to protect vegetation to some degree. When a new primate exhibit opened in the Atlanta Zoo and the animals began to destroy valuable trees, zoo director Dr. Terry Maple’s response to the horticultural staff was “plant cheaper trees.”
Experience has shown that animals respect certain physical boundaries and that this can be exploited in exhibit design. The giraffe is a peculiar animal that is unafraid of heights, but fears just the opposite—small depressions in the ground. Unlike other hoofed animals, which climb and jump across uneven terrain, top-heavy giraffes are reluctant to walk or step down into depressions. Giraffe exhibits can be built with minimal surrounding moat barriers, as shallow as three to four feet deep. They are so concerned about misplacing their feet on irregular terrain that one female giraffe at the San Diego Zoo refused to exit the back holding area to enter the exhibit at times of day when a pole cast a suspicious shadow across the path. It acted, for all purposes, like a solid fence. Some of the less creative animal enclosures have employed electricity, dangerous obstacles, or sharp implements to encourage animals to stay within the boundaries of their exhibits. Such prickly surfaces, such as those to confine elephants, risk puncturing their feet and are reminiscent of the old spiked railings used around urban buildings to deter public loitering.
Animal exhibits often need unique assets to function well. For example, special areas may be required to introduce new animals successfully to one another, or to separate or recombine groups in the event of breeding seasons, pregnancies, illnesses, and infant rearing. When you consider how much must be contemplated in creating new, complex animal environments in the zoo, it’s a wonder that they get built at all. No matter how much care is taken, ways will always be found later to improve on the final product.
As more animal behaviorists consult and work in zoos, their talents lend critical skills to exhibit design teams. Predicting how animals will live in a new environment is an educated guess, and behaviorists strive to reduce the guess factor. The behavior of each species is taken into account in each successful animal exhibit. Although conditioning in captivity can modify the needs of individual animals, spatial behaviors are genetic characteristics of a species. For example, animals tend to separate themselves apart from members of their own species, as demonstrated by how close birds sit near one another while perching on branches or telephone wires. We all have experienced a human who has invaded our own “personal space” and can relate to the discomfort that it can bring. Animals have certain minimum distances that they prefer to keep between themselves, companions, and intruders before they react negatively or flee. These types of distances will determine the success or failure of an animal exhibit, since too close proximity to the public or cagemates will be distressing. The lack of adequate interpersonal space between animals may induce aggression and stress, and is a principal cause of fighting and injury in zoo animals. Veterinarians experience these spatial constraints when they approach an animal to observe its condition, and they learn to respect these behaviors in order to obtain information on the animal’s condition without undue intrusion.
The general public is unaware of how important species behavioral patterns affect animals’ prospects in exhibits. Some species are highly social, while others are loners. In the wild, some animals of the same species seldom interact except when females come into seasonal estrus and mating takes place. Such is the case with giant pandas in captivity, where males and females often ignore or even attack one another because forced proximity is not the norm in nature. Just as some species are quite soli
tary and have reproductive strategies that overcome this separateness in the wild, others are highly gregarious and thrive best when they are able to live in colonies. A variety of aquatic bird species, such as penguins and flamingos, are good examples of this. Exhibit design, along with consideration of the social groupings of animals, has critical impacts on both compatibility and reproduction.
A common dynamic of herd animals, such as the antelope species, is the development of bachelor male groups. In the struggle to maintain social order and hierarchical relationships, many young males depart (not always gracefully) from family clans when they begin to transcend into sexual maturity. In confined settings the lack of space for this social segregation often leads to injuries from aggression if contesting parties are left to their own devices. These bachelor males hang together in separate groups as they are ejected from the main herd by the dominant male. Over time they may attempt to reenter the herd and to take on a place of leadership if they are able to dominate the ruling male. In a zoo exhibit where this social dynamic is in play, it is important to have sufficient room for these graduating males to find adequate room to escape the aggressive actions of the alpha male. Failing to ensure this space is available can cause fighting and injuries. In many cases it is necessary to remove these surplus males from the exhibit to prevent aggression and stress in the entire group.
The classic animal signs of inadequate exhibit environments in zoos are behavior aberrations. Historically, the more common ones seen in zoos are stereotypic locomotion such as pacing, weaving, overgrooming, and walking in repetitive patterns. Solitary animals in mixed exhibits may even become sexually fixated on animals of the wrong species—like the squirrel-raccoon odd couple I once saw in an East Coast zoo. Primates often do somersaults or bound endlessly from one object to another in their enclosures. Bears may walk to and fro with exaggerated head-swinging movements, or they may practice an embarrassing level of self-gratification. Just as a well-orchestrated animal exhibit of the lowliest creature can work miracles in understanding animal conservation issues, so can a poor exhibit undo the magic of the world’s most charismatic species.
Life at the Zoo Page 11