Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  Our mild-mannered alpaca stood less than four feet tall at the shoulder. Living without a mate of the same species, she managed to stay healthy and out of conflict with several llamas and vicunas in a mini-South American exhibit on the Hoof and Horn Mesa. Until shearing her, no one quite realized how small an animal resided beneath this huge mop of wool.

  The shearer shaved to his heart’s delight. The more he shaved, the smaller she shrank and the bigger the black heap of fleece grew on the ground next to her. However, no one was more shocked at her small size than she. We had transformed a statuesque animal into a Grinch-like waif. She looked around at herself in apparent disbelief at the alien she had become. No longer worried about heatstroke, we shifted our concerns to the alpaca’s mental well-being. She behaved as if we had stripped her naked and tossed her into the public square. For days, she refused to venture into the exhibit area and hid in the seclusion of the back holding pen. From time to time she would peek out in front, as if to see if anyone was staring. It would be weeks before

  she would be anywhere near normal and several days before we could coax her to eat. Ordinarily, we don’t imagine animals as being victims of vanity, but she shunned all human contact and seemed unable to stand to look at her own legs and body.

  The wool, however, was eventually fashioned into a beautiful sweater.

  Zoo animals do not always carry out their amorous acts in private, any more than your dog tries to be discreet about licking certain of his body parts or relieving himself on the lawn. As with our domestic pets, the reactions of people to these intimate situations in the zoo are especially different when in the company of small children, who demand an explanation for everything that’s going on. Unlike many animals that have seasonal estrus periods, the primates, like humans, are in a relatively perpetual state of availability. The Monkey Yard and surrounding primate exhibits were in close proximity to the zoo entrance, and easily accessible to parents with children and teachers with young students. The baboons, in particular, are role models of promiscuity. They have harem-like social structures that attempt to assure that all eligible females are pregnant or nursing at all times. Teachers and parents automatically gravitate to the monkey areas because of their universal appeal. Only experienced and resourceful visitors have learned to navigate skillfully around the compromising situations offered up by the baboons.

  If a mating scene spontaneously unfolds in the presence of children, some parents simply grab their kid’s hand and drag them unceremoniously to the next exhibit without comment. Or they make a profound transitional pronouncement such as, “Hey kids! Let’s go get some ice cream right now!” The most creative parent I ever witnessed in this predicament decided to stand her ground with her five-year-old and simply lie. Asked what the two monkeys were doing, she said, “Well sweetie, the little monkey on the bottom hurt her leg, and the big monkey on the top, well . . . he’s trying to help her up on the tree so that she can rest.” Promoting the appealing sentiment that animals are caring souls, the lie succeeded, and they moved onward to the next set of monkey cages, most likely with a parental prayer that they would encounter no more orthopedically challenged inhabitants.

  The price of successfully breeding animals includes the responsibilities of rearing them and finding suitable homes for the surplus offspring. Wild sheep, deer, and goats are very prolific, and the job of rounding up these surplus animals for shipment to other zoos ultimately falls to the keepers and veterinarians, and this may not always be an easy task given the agility and herd behavior of these animals. Some can be trapped and funneled into crates, but others require trickery and chemical restraint for their capture. Just as the Pied Piper of Hamlin led the children away from their families, the zoos’ “Judas goats,” of various species, help to attract and march off their surplus herdmates. The biblical reference implied here refers to the infamous Judas, who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, in a similar manner in which animals also forsake their own species and sometimes lead them to slaughter. Human trappers in Asia have used tame elephants to deprive wild elephants of their freedom. Similar techniques have been used for hunting wild animals and waterfowl, where live animals act as actual decoys or confidence builders, to attract animals to within a hunter’s range.

  A Judas goat in a zoo is a hand-raised animal that has lost much of its normal aversion to humans because of the taming, and often imprinting, that takes place when they have been bottle-fed since birth. Absent from their herd during critical socialization periods, they have greater affinities to people than to individuals of their own species. A Judas goat acts as if all is normal when humans are around, even when loading chutes, traps, and people await them in catch pens behind the exhibit. The Judas goat calmly eats its food and relaxes, deceiving his herdmates that nothing is awry. Then, when it’s too late, the selected émigrés find themselves trapped where they cannot escape their fate. The modest reward for a Judas goat’s behavior is its continued residence at the same zoo.

  Things were not so easy with George, one of the San Diego Zoo’s last remaining common chimpanzees, following a decision to specialize exclusively on pygmy chimpanzees and put the others up for adoption. Biding his time pending the move, George spent his days in a large two-story outdoor cage behind the Ape Grotto, overlooking a forested hillside. This off-exhibit enclosure was covered with heavy-gauge chain link fencing and could be approached at ground level. Intelligent, curious, and increasingly suspicious, George seemed to wonder what had become of his female companions, who had diminished one by one as they were sent off to other zoos. With the disappearance of his wives, his behavior suggested that he was beginning to question the sincerity of his caretakers, and so he moved to the opposite side of his cage at the slightest suspicion. Perplexed by his shrinking family, his wariness only grew.

  When news came from the curators that a new zoo home had finally been located for George, Dr. Chuck Sedgwick and I contemplated how we would get him out of his spacious accommodations. Despite our earlier efforts, he had rejected all of our attempts to slip tranquilizing drugs into his foods to make him manageable for crating. Because the chimpanzee is among the strongest of the primates, pound for pound, this would require an intellectual and chemical, rather than a physical, exercise. We decided to start by paying social calls on George to size up his attitude and to find a way to exploit his vulnerabilities. It turned out that George’s main weakness was for food—speckled bananas in particular. As we reduced his daily fruit ration of bananas, grapes, and apples, George grew noticeably concerned. The coup de grace, however, was for us to visit George while Sedgwick ate an apple and I methodically peeled a banana for myself. As we nonchalantly savored every morsel, George watched intently and lusted after the small brown paper bag from which we would ceremoniously pull out the fruit, leaving only a few token pieces if he approached us before we departed. When shipment day approached, we finally made our move. George was optimistic to see us with our customary bag of fruit, which by this time was becoming an obsession with him. He salivated as we extracted the fruit and ate it piece by piece, excluding him from the fun. No matter how much we hoped to catch him, this deceptive drama was tinged with a little veterinary self-loathing for our insincerity, as we had already determined the manner of George’s undoing.

  I removed a banana and slowly handed the bag back to Chuck. As I began to peel it, curious George approached us. Without a second’s hesitation, Chuck nonchalantly reached into the bag, withdrew a capture pistol, and shot George in the leg with a dart. George was stunned and outraged at the deception, glaring at us in disbelief as he screamed in anger and yanked the dart from his leg. He wildly flung it at us, barely missing Chuck’s head, jumping, stomping, and scolding in such a fit that made the hair prickle on the back of my neck. His eyes began to glaze over. We tossed him a small apple as a peace offering, but he threw it back at us like a baseball. His consolation for this insult was joining the company of other chimps over a thousand miles away. T
here he continued to father little Georges, who were probably equally fond of speckled bananas.

  Veterinary rounds to the quarters of the great apes was always a special experience, shared on numerous occasions with their favorite keeper, Harold. The living accommodations were pretty simple, made up of barred cubicles with heated floors, laid out behind the public exhibit areas along a series of hallways, divided into separate zones for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. I preferred to visit in the early morning before the housekeeping chores were complete so I could see the evidence of the feeding and digestive activities of the past night. On some days the hallways were a gauntlet, depending on the family moods of each group. Everyone had names, which highly personalized the degree of feedback between keepers and veterinarians about the individual animals in contrast with larger groups of animals in the zoo. At close range, it was common for strangers to be sprayed with water from an orangutan’s well-placed thumb over a running water tap. Other favorite missiles, flying through the bars in the service hallways, included scraps of leftover fruit and gorilla-sized handfuls of loose dung. One of the best ways to prevent such occasional assaults was to avoid direct eye contact. Staring, especially by strangers, is impolite and aggressive among the great apes. By emulating their habits, we were merely adopting the logical protocols that we expect of our fellow humans, such as hand-shaking, smiling, and other howdy-do pleasantries.

  Only after making a matter-of-fact, humble entrance can you get to the business of looking more closely for reported medical issues of the day. As in many human cultures, you cannot do business with these intelligent animals before you socialize. This often involved direct contact with more approachable individuals to scratch their backs, rub their tummies or even hold their hands. Linda, the pygmy chimp, was a hand-holder and loved to have her belly rubbed. She was as trustworthy as any great ape could ever be; if she were truly ill, I wouldn’t have hesitated to open the door to examine her. The mother of the entire colony, Linda, along with husband Kakowet and the rest of the pygmies, were an endless source of entertainment and companionship for the animal staff that cared for them. Several years after Linda was finally transferred to a primate breeding facility in Georgia, I had the occasion to travel to her outdoor compound by detouring from a trip to the Atlanta Zoo. As I parked my car and approached her enclosure, I could see her sit up and take notice of me from a distance. The closer I came to her, the more animated she became, until I was near enough to touch the hand that she extended to me through the heavy wire mesh. We were both glad to see one another. Two years had not diminished her affection for contact with an old friend.

  Developing rapport with individuals helps greatly, but safety always remains a concern with these powerful primates. No neckties are allowed in proximity to the apes, as more than one behind-the-scenes visitor to zoos has been grabbed and thoroughly thrashed with such a convenient handle. Among the chimps and orangutans, my favorite befriending treat was sugarless cinnamon gum. Some of them never caught on to the idea of gum-chewing and would simply gulp it down. A few relished the taste and texture, though, and, on several occasions, when the time came to go up on public exhibit, they would sit contentedly and chew for several hours while they checked out the visitors across the moat. It became difficult to discern who was more intent on watching whom. The people saw black and red apes with shaggy hair gazing across the moat toward them. The apes saw tattooed bikers and their babes, serious punkers, obese goths, liposucked gangbangers, and botoxic rockheads staring at them. On balance, the apes were often more competent than their human observers.

  Perhaps the greatest ape offender residing in San Diego was a newly acquired gorilla named “Abe,” who arrived complete with extensive dental infections. Abe could spit like a champion tobacco chewer. His journey to San Diego from the Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain Zoo was a little unconventional, as he was the excuse for a well-lubricated gratitude party for volunteer boosters of the San Diego Chargers football team on the team’s private Boeing 707 jetliner. The beer and champagne flowed freely for everyone aboard except the flight crew and our gorilla transfer team. While we left San Diego in warm sunshine, we could see wisps of snow in the overcast drizzle as we touched down on the wet tarmac at the airport in Colorado Springs. Several rows of seats had been removed to accommodate Abe’s crate, which was shifted off of a forklift and into the side door of the aircraft near the food galley. Along with a sharp blast of cold air, the partying passengers got their first whiff of a genuine gorilla; every football locker room they would smell in the future would be tame by comparison. Abe was flying first class on this trip and sat calmly in his crate as the other animals partied their way back to San Diego. Back at the zoo, he became a spitter, targeting nearly everyone who approached him. As you walked down the ape bedroom-service aisle, the best strategy was to move fast, turn your head, and avoid eye contact. I can still recall the warm, slippery sensation of being hit on the back of the neck by Abe. Treating his dental problems slightly improved his breath, but it did not alter his behavior. Most people always gave him plenty of extra room.

  Abe had been brought to the zoo to bolster the gorilla population since our long-beloved male, Albert, had developed health problems that eventually took his life. One of the most handsome gorillas ever born, he had a regal air about him that universally appealed to the staff and the public. Unlike Abe, who came across as sort of a vagrant, Albert had bona fide class. When Albert began to suffer from kidney and heart disease, it finally became necessary to sedate him and better define the causes. He was twenty-seven years old and had seldom been sick, and most of his veterinary experiences had been positive ones. When he caught sight of the blowgun, he cringed, but bent over and put his hands in front of his face, providing the easiest possible shot at the great muscles in his rear end. His surrender made me embarrassed to shoot the dart into him. As soon as he felt the prick of the needle, he patiently pulled it out of his rump and politely handed it back through the bars without malice, fully convincing me that he knew this intrusion was an attempt to help him.

  After Albert died, a staff taxidermist from the Denver Museum of Natural History came to the hospital to make a plaster death mask and prepare Albert’s remains for relocation. There was Albert, propped up in a sitting position on the necropsy table, with that handsome face covered in wet white plaster of Paris. I walked in to see how Albert and the museum man were doing as the technician slopped on another layer of plaster. He asked me if I had known Albert. Feeling some regret that my treatments had failed, I said, “Yes, I was his last veterinarian.” The final time I saw Albert was several years later on a business trip to Denver. He had not yet been fashioned into a museum facsimile of himself, but his skeletal remains rested in several neatly labeled cardboard boxes on a shelf. I moved a box onto a table and took a peek inside to find plastic bags full of his carefully cleaned bones. Alone for a few minutes, I said my goodbyes and resolved to return in another year to see the results of their efforts to reassemble him to his former glory at the zoo—but I’ve never been back.

  In our efforts to help animals, veterinary zeal has led to more than one animal’s demise. This happened on an eight-hundred-acre island in New York, the unlikely location of the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Animal Disease Center. Plum Island is located a mile and a quarter off the northeast shore of Long Island. The USDA complex is somewhat reminiscent of San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island in terms of security. It was named for the wild beach plums that were seen on its shores by early explorers. A real estate bargain like Manhattan, it was sold by local Indians to a European man for “a coat, a barrel of biscuits, and 100 muxes (fishhooks).” While some may find animal research with infectious diseases disheartening, there is no question about the importance of protecting our agricultural economy from the devastating effects of these disease agents.

  Zoo veterinarians are in strategic positions in the detection of foreign animal diseases in exotic animals that may have
escaped interdiction during their original importation. A small group of zoo veterinarians was invited to Plum Island for a unique opportunity to see, firsthand, live cases of the world’s most frightful animal diseases. These included foot-and-mouth disease, African swine fever, rinderpest, African horse sickness, avian Newcastle disease, and other scourges of the livestock planet that had previously been eradicated or largely avoided in the United States. One entire department of the research facility was dedicated to biological security, and the rules and regulations resembled a Marine boot camp in their inflexibility.

  The morning routine involved a ferry ride to the island from the mainland. Visible name badges, closely monitored personnel checks, and an aura reminiscent of the Manhattan Project surrounded this transition from civilian life to the risky world of biological containment. Given the destructiveness of these pathogens to livestock, the mere thought that these dangerous viruses might accidentally infect America’s herds and flocks due to the negligence of research workers was pervasively disconcerting. Permission to participate in this direct exposure to infected animals required formal preconditions, including signed affidavits and memoranda of understanding promising no contact with livestock or fowl for a minimum of two weeks after departure. All Plum Island employees are banned from keeping livestock or from visiting farms, fairs, or other venues in proximity to live animals.