Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  Our small party of zoo veterinarians assembled on the boat dock and we were issued identification badges. Along with the employees, we shuffled aboard for the boat ride and disembarked through the island security gate, making our ways to appointed work areas. The morning of our first day was devoted to lectures on foreign animal disease, showing grim images of disease disasters from around the globe that all of these efforts were meant to protect against. After lunch, we were to see live animals that had been infected with hoof and mouth virus and African horse sickness and the dreaded Newcastle poultry virus. Study animals for the research arrived from specially monitored, disease-free supply farms.

  To enter the disease containment area, we were directed to remove all of our clothing and accessories and take showers. Exiting naked to a separate suite, we were provided with sterilized coveralls, footwear, gloves, caps, and masks to wear while in contact with contaminated animals. Everything that left the building, except people, was sterilized or incinerated. All ventilation and liquid waste systems were filtered and treated to assure that the possibilities for extramural contamination were virtually nil. Emergency power generators were in place to assure that a power failure would not compromise the lab’s mission. It was an awesome operational discipline.

  The cattle, pigs, horses, and chickens were segregated in their own subunits of the containment area and had been experimentally infected with livestock disease agents. We went from unit to unit, observing animals with blistered feet and gums, diarrhea, depression from virus fevers, and neurological tremors, physically examining individuals to test our growing knowledge of foreign animal diseases. God, please spare us and our animals from these problems.

  We had a rigorous day observing the dying and the dead, the victims of diseases that most veterinarians would only read about in textbooks, some of the most destructive and costly animal diseases known to mankind. Afterward, before exiting the building, we went through a supervised series of decontamination procedures. Stripped naked again, we dropped our clothes into an autoclave hamper, blew our noses three times, coughed up and discarded phlegm, and took the first of three mandatory germicidal exit showers. Finally, we emerged into our original locker rooms and were reunited with our street clothes and personal belongings. The experience was somewhat extraterrestrial, and, slightly dazzled, we walked out into the late afternoon sunshine, quietly congratulating ourselves on our good fortune to have been entrusted to witness these infamous animal plagues.

  As we stood beside this disease-fighting fortress looking out toward the nearby Long Island Sound, we observed a lone seagull with an obvious limp and a drooping wing struggling along the edge of the parking lot. Picking it up to examine its problem, we passed the fortunate patient around the group—the collective knowledge our elite group of zoo and wildlife veterinarians would surely help this poor bird. Then reality struck us simultaneously: we had committed a terrible crime. Minutes out of the poultry plague lab, we had violated our affidavits that forbade all animal contact and handled the first living creature that we set eyes upon.

  One sheepish volunteer, seagull in hand, marched back to the fort, offered a contrite group confession, and handed over the unlucky bird for a complete necropsy and incineration. We would all hear about our transgressions in the next day’s lecture.

  13. SO, YOU WORK AT THE ZOO?

  Employees, Visitors, and Fence Jumpers

  Zoo tour bus driver/guides have a special place in the experiences of visitors, and their services offer a convenient alternative to hours of walking up-and-down hills in the San Diego Zoo. Drivers are expected to develop their own narrative routines, within the limits of fixed routes, stops, and good taste. Each tour begins with, “Welcome to the World-Famous San Diego Zoo,” and continues with the formal admonition, “Please remain seated and enjoy your tour and keep your hands, arms, legs and small children inside the bus at all times.” After that, the drivers and the passengers are on their own.

  Only a few drivers are career employees. Most are college students filling in summers or weekends. Certain personalities seem to gravitate toward these jobs, as it requires a knack for rattling off statistics about animals, paying attention to stray human limbs poking out of the bus, and going through the same boring punch lines to the same jokes, day after day. Their closest competitors were probably the tour guides on the Jungle Safari River Cruise at Disneyland, minus the blank pistols that they used to scare away the mechanical hippos.

  Since repetition breeds boredom, the bus drivers were always coping by being convivial party animals. Without doubt, they were the most socially motivated subculture within the zoo. Although plenty of tour-guide material was passed down over the years from driver to driver, each one tried to bring something fresh to the challenge. For some, it became a place for them to try their standup comedy routine talents on entirely captive audiences. Most of their statements ended with lilting tones and exclamation points. Accuracy often took a back seat to truth in search of the audible sighs that came from passengers when apprised of such stunning facts as “The cost of replacing the plant life in the zoo alone would exceed the value of the animal collection by thirty times!” (no reason was given, however, for such a radical proposal) and “It takes over two hundred thousand bananas, fifty tons of raw horsemeat, two million crickets, and five billion grains of rice to feed the animals at the zoo every year!” At least the visitors now understood why the admission price was so high.

  Certain health fables were perpetrated to justify the interaction of the drivers with selected performing animals in the zoo. Even though the public was not supposed to feed the animals, the bus drivers regularly did so to amuse the riders and generate laughs. One myth was about the bear biscuits that they fed to get “Yogi” and “Boo Boo” to rub their bellies and pat their heads, or to salute “our loyal armed forces personnel on the bus.” The monologue would then continue, “These biscuits were formulated specifically for our bears by our zoo veterinarians. We feed them to be sure that they get all of the vitamins and minerals they need to keep them healthy.” So their stories went. I stood on the sidewalk numerous times during my health rounds and exchanged eye contact with the drivers. They knew that this was a total fraud, but resumed their narrative in front of me anyway: “Feeding animals is not allowed in the zoo, but the biscuits that I am giving them are strictly for nutritional purposes.” (Veterinarian grits teeth and rolls his eyes.) We usually broke off all eye contact at that point, and the bus moved on up the hill to the next bear exhibit, and a fresh handful of biscuits. One driver seemed particularly unnerved by my presence one day and fixated on me in his side mirror as he rolled forward to the next bear exhibit. His attention was abruptly jolted when several agitated riders yelled out to him, “Keep on moving!” He had failed to notice, while focusing on me, that the lone male spectacled bear that the bus was passing was engaged in a contortionist act of self-stimulation.

  If a performing animal was asleep upon the arrival of a bus, a sharp blast from the air brakes or a well-placed biscuit to the skull brought it straight to its feet. Just as motorcycle-riding chimpanzees have disappeared from zoos and have been replaced by more high-minded activities, the feeding of the San Diego’s bears and elephants from the buses gradually lost its defensible place in the consciences of the zoo trustees, and the tradition was allowed to die. This only placed an even greater burden on drivers to attempt verbal antics in order the win the loyalty of their passengers.

  Most of the corny jokes were cute and benign: “These peccaries to your left are very piglike, but they are not really pigs. They are also called javelinas—that’s hava lee’ nahs. The name of the big handsome one on the left is Gregory Peccary (laughter) and the smaller, prettier one, on the right is Olivia De Javelina (more, less spontaneous, laughter). Gregory is the one who has the stinky odor. . . . ” “That cute little carnivore hiding behind the log on your right is a wild cat called a lynx—his name is Smokey. . . . ”

  On Hoof and H
orn Mesa (where the zoo’s deer and antelope play) it continued: “Hey, do any of you kids know the biggest medical problem of a giraffe? (momentary silence). A sore throat!” The kids laughed, adults groaned, and, as for the giraffes, they never got sore throats. To this same question, the best answer I ever heard a kid yell out was “nosebleeds!” The driver smirked with upstaged resentment and ignored him (he probably planned to use this on his next tour). The only things missing from these bus monologues were the pratfalls and rim shots.

  Admittedly, the guides had a tough audience, since they tried to capture the attention of linguistically challenged foreign guests, distracted parents, sticky little children, and servicemen from the Navy and Marine bases. Another “humor spot” on the bus tour was along the zoo perimeter, where the buses stopped and the driver would challenge the passengers to name the species of wild animal behind the tall chain link fence. After a brief silence, and watching the audience strain to figure it out, the driver would chortle, “Those are the dangerous Homo sapiens, the wild all-American teenagers at Roosevelt Junior High School!” No matter how lame the joke, it always seemed to get a laugh (or a groan) from someone on the bus. The foreigners who didn’t get it often laughed out of politeness.

  If nothing else, the success of bus-driver humor is a vivid testament to the profound effects of vacationing in a warm climate on human intelligence. Almost anything works when people are relaxed and off their normal cynical guard. A spell descends over many people when they enter many zoos, and it dissipates only after they part with their last souvenir dollar in the gift shop and exit the turnstiles. The same phenomenon occurred when special visitors toured the San Diego Zoo hospital behind the scenes on VIP tours. I secretly thought that, surely, some of these prominent personalities and celebrities would take pity on our humble medical establishment and whisper some encouragement in the right administrative ears to fund a new zoo hospital.

  At first, our facilities were most unimpressive, underequipped and understaffed. Yet, mesmerized by their proximity to a tiger or a koala, almost everyone, brain surgeon and board chairman alike, fell into a trance of baffled awe and thought that our hospital was state-of the-art marvelous. I imagine that for them it was like getting off a plane in Haiti or Cuba and being oblivious to the less progressive aspects of those countries while the tropical fragrance of plumaria and jasmine addle the brain. Some time later, when we built the new modern zoo hospital, physicians and dignitaries gazed around, now in more familiar surroundings, often complaining that their own human hospitals were not as nice or as clean.

  Other driver jokes quickly got axed from the bus routines when visitors took offense to the material. Apparently some things do have the capacity of cutting through the spell of the zoo experience and crossing the reality line. After reciting numerous stunning animal facts during his tour, one standup comedian driver reached a little deeper for a “one-two” as he eased the bus to a stop in front of the giraffes. “What do you get if you lay all of the arteries, veins, and capillaries of a giraffe end to end around the earth’s equator?” Everyone hushed while awaiting the answer, and the driver answered—“a long narrow mess.”

  One joke earned a driver several days’ suspension without pay: “Over on your right, those handsome hoofed animals are the Somali wild asses. They are very rare in nature and live on the arid plains of northeast Africa. These animals cost the zoo over $10,000 each. . . . Now that’s a lot of money to pay for a piece of donkey!” A few belly laughs blurted from the servicemen on board, accompanied by some stares of disbelief and indignation from parents accompanying children. The driver had the misfortune of hosting half a busload of church members on an outing with their families and would hear about it from his supervisor when he returned to the bus station.

  The employees in the San Diego Zoo Security Department had an especially interesting subculture. Upon my arrival to the zoo, their mood was highly military, and many of the uniformed staff were former servicemen, police officers, and even a retired prison guard. Unlike some zoos that dressed their security personnel in whimsical pith helmets and shorts, the haircuts here were short, the uniforms crisp straight-arrow police style, and some of these guys looked as if they had taken a heavy toll on the enemy in their soldiering careers.

  The zoo’s perimeter fence had been wired with electronic surveillance sensors to detect intrusions. Various radio code words were used to communicate public misconduct or noteworthy circumstances, such as, Breach of Perimeter Fence Security, Inebriated Visitor, Injured Visitor, Pervert, Animal Escape, or Zoo Director on the Grounds—the director never had a radio and so he was isolated from much of this intrigue. Interlopers attempting to scale the fence for free admission were hunted down like escapees from a maximum-security prison. It was a friendly sport, but many of us puzzled at the overdedication of some of these officers in pursuing petty offenders. We were also perplexed that they were all so well-armed. Most of the nighttime trespassers were intoxicated Navy or Marine recruits who came over the fence on a bet.

  Veterinarians had a special, peculiar bond with security officers as a group, and I could sense it when we had our animal capture guns on the zoo grounds. One day it dawned on me that this kinship was based on the fact that we were the only other zoo personnel who were armed. Altogether, the zoo security problems were pretty minimal for an annual visitor population of over three million people. Much of the credit was probably due to the total change of atmosphere, which seemed to attenuate many negative public behaviors. The lack of beer and liquor sales in the zoo then probably raised the average IQ a few points as well. Visitor screening started at the front gate. Here the tipsy, barefoot, shirtless, rowdy, and derelict elements were sized up and ushered out. The security force usually gave scantily clad women a pass, however, and I suspect they had a radio code for them as well. On peak days, the crowds created such an elbow-to-elbow experience that human behavior adopted a herd mentality, voluntarily surrendering to issues of interpersonal space and comfort.

  We called one perpetually unsmiling security officer “Killer John” (not to his face, of course). Rumor had it that the only time he ever smiled was when he injured his foot one day. The night security guard, however, took the peculiarity prize for the whole force. I hardly ever saw him in the light of day, and I doubt that he was ever suntanned in his entire life. The zoo is a mysterious, sometimes haunting, place to be at night. Purposely lighted in a subdued fashion to permit animals to rest, the darkness is peaceful, except for the occasional roar of a lion or animals shuffling, snorting, or barking. Knowing the beasts that reside in the neighborhood can make walking alone in the dark a little intimidating to the psyche.

  Officer Snyder was a stocky, balding man who dressed in dark clothes and wore a black stocking cap. He could see in the dark like a cat, and he lurked around the zoo like a nocturnal predator. His nighttime habit was to creep up behind uninitiated employees in his crepe-soled shoes, turn his eight-cell metal flashlight on the back of their head—at point blank range—while simultaneously shouting, “Who is it?” After one initiation like that, and a change of underwear, you were sure to call him on the radio to advise him of your presence when you next tended to a nighttime illness.

  One evening Snyder offered me a midnight ride back from the nursery to the zoo hospital in his patrol car. We careened off of the front entry plaza in the dark like a speeding rock down a steep canyon road with all of the vehicle lights off. I felt as if we had dropped down a mineshaft and were certain to end up in the hippo pool at the bottom of the hill. Safely back at the hospital, I asked Snyder why he drove like hell in the dark like that. He said, “Doc, if you’re going to catch someone in the zoo at night, you gotta take ’em by surprise.” I asked, “Snyder, who are you trying to catch tonight?” A man of few words, he replied, “All of them, Doc!” And off he raced into the blackness to rejoin the other creatures of the night.

  14. ANIMAL CASES AND CHASES

  And Some Things Better Kept to
Myself

  When one is doctoring a large collection of wild animals, every day brings new problems and twists. After fifteen years at the San Diego Zoo, I often wonder what it would be like to regularly tend to animals in a smaller zoo where less changes from day to day. When I have visited smaller zoological gardens over the years, I have found a certain serenity in being in someone else’s zoo for a change. Many of these smaller zoos actually have some open, grassy glades and quiet shaded benches to rest on while leisurely observing the animals. There is no perpetual crush of a crowd, no minefields of fumbled food obstacles, no intermittent screeching of tour bus brakes. In stark contrast, few days seldom went by at the San Diego Zoo without some event that stirred the staff’s adrenal glands.

  Shortly after I arrived in San Diego, we received an urgent radio summons from zoo security that one of the orangutans had escaped from the exhibit on Primate Mesa. Meanwhile, several hundred people milled around at the zoo entrance, readying themselves to start their visits to the animals. My boss, Dr. Chuck Sedgwick, and I frantically tossed capture equipment into two vehicles to head for the zoo grounds. This was going to be the big one! This was no Alexander Haig moment: the veterinarians were definitely in charge.

  Each armed with a capture pistol or rifle, we hastily loaded a few tranquilizer darts while attempting to get confirmation about who had escaped, in order to determine the drug dose for the capture. But no one could tell us who had gotten out. The males are over twice the size of the females, so we loaded a dose that we hoped had enough safety margin to work for either. With emergency flashers going, I sped down the hill from the hospital in one vehicle and up the steep slope to the back service entrance of the ape grotto. Meanwhile, Chuck headed toward the front to defend the main zoo entrance. As I pulled up to the ape kitchen’s loading dock no keeper was in sight, but strewn all over the ground like the aftermath of a tornado was the ape string’s fruit and vegetable order for the day. I raced through the ape kitchen with the gun and a few spare darts, up a flight of stairs and down the hall to the orangutan holding cages. They were empty. Running up yet another flight of steps toward the public area, I found all but one of the orangs outside in the exhibit—a single female was unaccounted for. Just then a message barked from the radio that “Sally” was the escapee, and she was seen heading toward the main zoo entrance several hundred yards away. I bolted up the pedestrian incline walk from the exhibit in that direction, and after only thirty yards I spotted her—seven score pounds of flowing auburn hair walking about free on all fours.