Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  To put these speculations to rest, I fashioned a hair-collection device from a wooden pole by attaching a saw blade from a small carpentry tool to one end. I snagged hairs from our two green polar bears, Frieda and Caspar, while they were confined to a small back holding area. In the hospital lab, there was no question that the hair contained green pigments, but it was difficult to make out exactly what was taking place under a normal light microscope. Sticking with the algae theory, I was fortunate to find one of the world’s experts on algae, Dr. Ralph Lewin, at the nearby Scripps Institution of Oceanography. With his expertise we identified the cause of this puzzling, but harmless, phenomenon.

  The green color was indeed due to algae, which had taken up housekeeping inside the hollow shafts of the larger guard hairs of the animals’ pelage. This hollow hair architecture is designed to provide efficient insulation for the bears in their Arctic homelands. Using the scanning electron microscope, we found crystal clear images of the little round green single-cell algae living contently in these spaces. Cultures from the hairs produced nearly pure colonies of a common freshwater blue-green algae called Aphanocapsa montana.

  After discussing our findings with other zoo veterinarians, I was sent fresh hair from polar bears at another zoo three hundred miles away, as well as from a zoo in Australia. The results were the same—the hollows of the nonpigmented hairs were colonized with algae. This translucency allows light to pass through the hair surface and support the growth of algae through photosynthesis. Normally hollow, zoo polar bears’ guard hairs tend to wear from abrasion on hard exhibit surfaces, opening the chambers to colonization. Unlike the zoo hairs, the ones that we obtained from wild polar bears and museum specimens were intact and algae-free. Only a few other animal species (several types of seals and sloths) have been shown to have algae on their hair coats, but these are surface, rather than internal inhabitants.

  Shortly after our findings were reported in the journal Nature and in Time, I walked by the polar bear exhibit to discover that Frieda and Caspar were now snow white. I had intended to do some controlled tests by adding salt to their water to be able to prescribe how zoos can safely and scientifically turn their polar bears white again. I was curious about what had taken place to preempt the plan. The bear keeper was behind the exhibit in his kitchen, washing up after preparing food for the animals. “Jim!” I called out. “The bears are white—what happened?” “Doc,” he said, as he scooped out a cup of white powder from a can under the sink, “when it gets too green, I just throw about a cup of this stuff in the pool and in two days they look great.” “What is it?” I asked, trying to conceal my disappointment. “Dishwasher powder from the zoo restaurant.” Then I asked, “How long have you been doing this?” He replied, “Oh, for a few years, I guess, but I always forget about it until someone complains.” “What brand of dishwasher soap is it Jim?”

  Zoo animals have been transported by every imaginable means, and some individuals make their living doing just that. When I first started as a zoo veterinarian, I met a few Neanderthal-style animal shippers and I was pretty appalled by their attitudes. Let’s just say that the bad guys are mostly gone from the business, and good riddance to them. Nothing offends a veterinarian more than someone who has little or no regard for the safety and well-being of animals. I evicted one such individual from the zoo hospital compound (not physically, because he was an ex-professional wrestler) when he attempted to assist in loading several lions into his animal trailer with an electric cattle prod. I refused to have any direct dealings with this individual again in my career, and told him so on the spot. As he departed he quipped, “I don’t really give a damn what you think, Doc—I buy and sell vets every day!” I assured him that this would not be the case on my watch.

  Some years later, and still doing business with dozens of American zoos, he finally achieved his moment of infamy on the CBS television program 60 Minutes for his role in the unethical sale of surplus zoo animals at live animal auctions. His most memorable TV video cameo, however, was on the grounds of the San Francisco Zoo, when he spit on a Channel 5 news reporter while she attempted to interview him about his animal transactions with shooting ranches as he departed for parts unknown with a fresh load of surplus Axis deer. Subsequently, he was dropped as a registered animal dealer with the national zoo organization.

  The largest donation of animals to the San Diego Zoo came through the personal agent of Welsh singer Tom Jones. Having gone through an expensive divorce in England, Gordon Mills was liquidating his assets at his plush country estate in Weybridge near London. To our surprise, his private zoo included three full-grown male gorillas, one female, and seven orangutans. In anticipation of the long-distance shipment of the whole lot, we set about building ape crates that would be suitable for such formidable inhabitants. We finally settled on ten-layered marine laminated plywood as the perfect compromise between strength and weight, and lined them with sheet metal to render them impenetrable to nearly anything that would fit into them.

  One of the most frustrating details of the entire trip was assuring that vital equipment and drugs for sedating them could all be properly cleared through security and customs upon arrival in London. Despite dozens of phone calls to American and British authorities, the best that I could do was to have the equipment permitted entry as professional tools and supplies, as is done for manufacturers’ representatives who sell, demonstrate, and service equipment. The interesting condition under which the drugs could enter the country was that the permit holder was responsible for assuring that they all left the country as well. This, of course made no sense at all, since we had every intention of using the drugs on the apes. Nonetheless, that was the best that I could negotiate in the bureaucracies that I ran up against. I rationalized that, in any event, the used drugs would be present within the bodies of our apes that would accompany us, and their mere presence in the crates would have to be ample proof that they were used for that purpose.

  I had expressed some concern about practicing medicine in another country without a veterinary license, but I was assured that a well-known English zoo veterinarian would be in attendance to assist, so not to worry about that detail. Finally, we seemed to have everything right—our permits, our arrival plans in London, our trip to the estate, the local trucking logistics and our Lufthansa reservations for nine apes and our small entourage, which would include four of us from San Diego and two employees from the estate who would accompany us back.

  After a brief stayover in London, we took the train to Weybridge. Greeting us in a battered Volkswagen van upon our arrival was a young, energetic animal keeper who had a thick Cockney accent. It was disorienting enough to be traveling English-style down the opposite side of the street in a van, but Jeremy drove like a certified maniac. We looked back and forth at one another as he tailgated and rammed from intersection to intersection on the left side of the road, talking a mile a minute and cursing everything in his path. Arriving at the estate, we unloaded our gear in the carriage house. Our new silver-painted crates had arrived exactly one week beforehand as planned. Just then another caretaker came to the carriage house to fetch us to have a look at the male gorillas that had been in a scrap and inflicted some minor bites on one another. The tension of the impending move seemed to be building with the animals.

  The estate was a spacious property with several residences for hired staff and big grassy paddocks where zebra, camels, and other hoofed animals had romped before the divorce. Separate buildings, now nearly vacated, had housed the carnivores and the great apes. Nearby, sheltered by winter-bare hedges, an impressive thatched two-story family manor house, where we lodged, stood amidst lawns and formal gardens. The remnants of the staff and family at the estate had a demeanor that fell somewhere between the personalities in The Osbournes and The World According to Garp—friendly but conspicuously eccentric.

  Upon our arrival, Jeremy announced that the movement of the apes from England to San Diego had set off a big stir amon
g the zoo people in the United Kingdom, raising concerns that someone might petition the customs ministry to halt the transaction at any moment. To make matters worse, no one had heard from the English vet who was to be our local facilitator in this project. Rumor had it that he might be a no-show, given the controversy that the ape deal was creating among his zoo clients. I called up a veterinarian friend in England for his input, and he advised us to simply go full speed ahead and outpace the bureaucracy. Here we were with our staff, crates, drugs, and airline tickets, and, English vet or not, we were determined to get on with bringing the animals back to San Diego. Our newly formed team of Englishmen and Americans started off fresh in the morning by laying our plan of attack on the crating up of the apes. All food and water had been withdrawn the evening before, and we had kept ourselves as discreet as possible around their quarters.

  We started with the gorillas and darted them with sedatives one by one, toting them on canvas stretchers in the VW van. (Jeremy drove with uncharacteristic care.) At the garage where the crates were assembled we boxed them up and secured their doors. Male gorilla number one went smoothly, and he slipped into the box nicely. People who are unaccustomed to coming into intimate contact with a sedated gorilla have highly variable reactions. Even those who work with them daily often find it disconcerting to have no barrier between them and such a formidable creature. Gorilla number two, however, gave several of the inexperienced helpers a panic attack. As we slid him out of the van next to his crate, he reached out and touched someone. Not aware that apes under typical sedatives sometimes make aimless motions, several people panicked as we started to stuff him into his box filled with loose excelsior bedding. On the verge of hysteria, the team discipline disintegrated. Some began shoving him every which way. He wouldn’t fit into the box. “Give him more drugs! Give him more drugs! He’s going to run way! This is crazy!” shouted the worst-stricken of the helpers. It was painful to see the fear on their faces. “OK, everyone listen up,” I said. “Stop wetting your pants and get all of that packing material out of his crate. No one’s going to get killed!” With the crate now entirely empty, we easily slid gorilla number two into place in a sitting position and packed the stuffing around him like a Buddha statue. When the guillotine door was dropped closed and the bolts were in place, a noticeable relief came over the excitable members of the group, who now looked at each other in embarrassment for losing their composure.

  With everyone finally secured and all nine crates occupied, our truck and forklift arrived at dusk, as scheduled, and we loaded up for our rendezvous at Heathrow Airport. In the Lufthansa cargo assembly area, our silver boxes were neatly lined up in a row. One of the energetic young orangutans swayed to and fro in his box, causing it to inch forward in a surprisingly straight path across the room. Curious freight handlers lingered as they passed, perplexed by the creeping box and the musky odor of gorillas that permeated the air. With only two hours before loading, we impatiently bided our time, expecting the government to arrive and seize our shipment at any moment. We watched more befuddled freight handlers pass by and dragged the orangutan’s box back to its starting point every fifteen minutes. But, finally, we were loaded and airborne. Because of the pungent aroma of our nervous gorillas, I was concerned that the passengers on our DC-10 “combi” aircraft would be overcome with the smell recirculating from the gorilla passengers. The forward portion of the plane carried passengers, while that rear half was configured for cargo. To our amazement, no odor at all could be detected in the passenger cabin—a compelling statement about the air-handling system in the plane.

  All of our apes arrived in excellent condition and, after several days of acclimatization, Jeremy and his girlfriend departed for their return to the empty zoo at the English estate. Some months later, Jeremy had a serious accident in the VW van. According to his girlfriend, his head injuries caused him to lose all memories of ever working with gorillas or accompanying them to the United States.

  If you have qualms about shipping a pet anywhere by air cargo, trust me, your fears are well founded. Over the years, I have heard of and witnessed a number of incredibly dumb things that resulted in animal transport deaths from pure negligence. First of all, there is the possibility that the aircraft cargo hold may accidentally lose its pressure, which can be fatal to animals, as it was to a full grown Siberian tiger we received from the Soviet Union via a prominent German air carrier. This animal was a valuable first generation captive-born male, dead on arrival in San Diego. A rare Mongolian wild horse stallion inadvertently had his entire shipping crate wrapped with plastic sheeting by a major air carrier in Korea, and it suffocated on its flight from San Diego to China, where he was to play an important role in a breeding program to reestablish wild populations. In yet another fatal shipping mishap, an endangered Arabian oryx antelope, traveling to Jordan in the Middle East for release in the wild in a conservation breeding program, was accidentally liberated from its shipping crate in Tel Aviv, Israel. To prevent it from interfering with active aircraft using the runway, it was shot and killed by an El Al security officer.

  When the San Diego Zoo initiated contacts with Chinese zoos and several animal trades quickly followed, we had a close call on an aircraft on the inaugural shipment involving two southern white rhinoceros in a Boeing 747 cargo plane. Confined in substantial rhino shipping crates, the animals became agitated during the flight and began to jostle about in their containers. The pilot became alarmed that they might break out of their crates and could feel the handling characteristics of the airplane change when the animals began to thrash about. Although accompanied by zoo staff, no veterinary personnel were along to provide any chemical alternatives to the problem. Matters became grave when the pilot finally warned that if the two animals did not settle down he was considering decompressing the cargo hold at their 35,000-foot altitude, if that was what it took to protect the safety of the aircraft. Fortunately, the animals and the pilot both settled down, and they eventually arrived fully intact at the Canton Zoo, where I caught up with them several days later.

  Shipping problems also arise from using improper crates. We once received two hyenas at the zoo hospital that had just arrived by air cargo from Africa. After a first glance at the crates my concerns grew, since the ventilation holes looked inadequate for grown animals of this type. As I strained with a flashlight to look at the crates’ inhabitants, a strong odor of ammonia burned my nose and eyes and the animals were uncharacteristically quiet. Quickly, we opened the crates and unloaded their semiconscious cargo, which was probably close to succumbing to the noxious fumes created by fermenting urine in the waste pans in the crate floors.

  For flighty animals such as small antelope, narrow, snug crates with nonslip footing serve best to avoid injuries. Larger animals need space to change positions and avoid problems from being too cramped. An animal dealer from Africa once told me that because of the small commercial aircraft available, it was difficult to ship larger animals out of his country. He devised a creative, though risky, solution to his problem. In the case of several juvenile forest buffalos that were hand-reared, he trained them to live in their shipping crates at night by giving them food rewards. As they grew larger, they gradually learned to crawl into the crates on their stomachs. And, finally, the day came to ship the animals by air—a date determined by their maximum size that allowed them to fit in the crates in a lying-down posture. When the new owners arrived at their airport to retrieve the animals and saw the small size of the crates, they were annoyed and attempted to call him to complain—after all, they had been promised that the animals were going to be at least half grown. When they opened the crate doors to release them, however, they were stunned by the size of the animals that exited the crates and stood up to their full height.

  It is common practice to condition many animals in advance of their travel crates in order to reduce the degree of alarm that they might experience when shipping time comes. We did this with several shipments that I personall
y accompanied involving okapi. Okapis have been known to the Western world only since 1901 and are costly to acquire. This particular male was going to a zoo breeding program in Colorado, and we carefully mapped our route for the two-day trip, arranging to overnight the animal and truck at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  As part of this carefully laid out plan, we carried big plastic jugs of San Diego water and all of the familiar foods that our okapi would need for at least ten days. Two animal keepers accompanied me and the animal, including Ernest, the zoo’s senior okapi keeper. We loaded our truck with the crated okapi and our supplies and began our journey via Arizona and New Mexico. To monitor his well-being at all times, Ernest rode nearly the entire distance in the back of the truck with the side door open to alert us up front if there was a problem. Given the remote areas through which we were traveling, the extreme value of the animal and the narcotic tranquilizer drugs that we possessed, the last item to be loaded into the truck was a double-barreled .12-gauge shotgun—“just in case.”

  Everything went smoothly the first day, and we arrived at our destination tired, hot and hungry. Our contact at the zoo met us with one of their experienced hoofed stock keepers to maintain a watchful eye on our animal all night long. We gathered our personal belongings and medical bags for our ride to the hotel, and I wrapped up the shotgun discreetly in a blanket to carry it along.

  To our surprise, our Albuquerque hosts had booked us into the upscale Hilton Hotel, where there was a formal party in progress. An elite social event was underway when we arrived, and dozens of people dressed in evening attire were assembling in the hotel lobby. I began to feel a little out of place in rumpled blue jeans and T-shirt, not to mention the shotgun-in-a-blanket. I refolded the blanket around the gun so that the barrels wouldn’t peek out as we entered the hotel. The fleeting thought occurred to me that someone could mistake this for a robbery, but we proceeded anyway.