Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  Heading straight for the registration desk, we got a better look at this interesting assortment of guests. On closer inspection, the men looked like extremely well-dressed cowboys with expensive, tailored Western suit coats and polished dress boots. I handled the shotgun nonchalantly while the keepers checked us in, nearly dropping it when I juggled my possessions to sign the guest register. Relief began to come when we finally moved away from the festivities toward the elevators and the privacy of our rooms. As we pressed into the small crowd on the elevator and pushed the up button, one of the well-dressed gentlemen aboard looked me square in the eyes and asked, “How’s the huntin’?” Floored by our apparent transparency, I said “Uh, just great! Fine party you’re havin’ here tonight!” “Don’t beat huntin’ though—good luck tomorrow,” he replied. Later the next day, we safely delivered our rare animal cargo to its destination at the zoo in Colorado Springs. I flew back to San Diego while the keepers drove back with the gun.

  Some animals require a different magnitude of equipment than most of our patients, especially the elephants. In order to work with such imposing animals, training and handling are essential to providing the regular care that these animals need. The two elephant species, the Asian and the African, have superficial resemblances, but quite a few differences in their training capacity and reliability. Despite the more trainable nature of the Asian elephant, any elephant can take control of the scene if injured or frightened.

  Elephants have the largest appetites in the zoo, and consume more than a hundred pounds of hay daily, along with perhaps twenty-five pounds of fruits and vegetables. This results in a sizeable amount of labor to clean up the digested remains of this forage, not to mention the liquid by-products of the prodigious amounts of water that they consume. Elephant keeping is hard physical work!

  Lucky and Maya were our two large Asian elephant cows. Almost all elephants in zoos and circuses are females. Male elephants can be held only in specialized facilities after they become mature, due to their unpredictable, aggressive tendencies. Since these two ladies were inseparable companions and of similar size, we noticed earlier than normal, by her profile, that Lucky was losing a significant amount of weight. Our facilities had no scales, and so this weight decline was based on our observations and from photographs over time.

  One of the worrisome diseases of elephants, usually contracted from other animals or people, is tuberculosis. This a slow and persistent bacterial disease. As a veterinary student on a visit to the Detroit Zoo, I remember well how they baked isoniazid medicated bread loaves for their elephants to get them to take their daily doses of antituberculosis drug. Fearing TB, we skin-tested both Lucky and Maya, and to our relief both they and their keepers tested negative. Intestinal parasites, another potential cause of declining condition, are nearly nonexistent in established zoo elephants. As we stepped over melon sized balls of elephant dung on our regular visits to the elephants, I don’t recall who noticed it first, but Lucky’s droppings were noticeable coarser than Maya’s.

  Because of the physical differences in the stools of the two animals, it seemed most likely that Lucky wasn’t digesting her hay properly. I was able to do a cursory dental exam on her because she had been given some fundamental training by the elephant keepers. She was used to standing and picking up her feet for routine care of her soles and toenails, and Lucky did so willingly for rewards of apples and carrots. As she stood focused, munching on her apples, I slipped one hand and forearm inside her mouth and could feel the molar teeth back alongside the cheek on each side. As I ran my fingertips along the enamel ridges, I came upon an oddly shaped tooth about the size of a small bread loaf. Lucky had a major dental problem, and the distorted shape and position of this tooth was the likely cause of her weight loss.

  Elephants have dentition quite unlike all other animals. The teeth that do all of the work of mastication develop throughout their lifetimes and emerge in their huge upper and lower jaws in the rear jaw area. Stacked and cemented together like oversized piles of poker chips lying on edge, the teeth erupt slowly and gradually migrate forward as they disintegrate on the front edge. The forward end of the tooth flakes off in segments, gradually expending its chips as another tooth starts its journey in the same manner. For unknown reasons, one of Lucky’s molars became stuck along the journey and was being rear-ended by its replacement tooth, causing it to twist sideways. This had caused a malocclusion with the opposing tooth in the jaw. Thus, the hay remained poorly chewed and only partially digested, depriving her of nutrition.

  Though little zoo work had been done with elephant dentistry, it was clear that the tooth had to go, and it was up to the zoo veterinarian and his dental consultant to figure out how. Fortunately we had several good drugs for sedating elephants. One in particular, etorphine, is a powerful synthetic narcotic estimated to be ten thousand times as potent as morphine. It would allow us to lie an elephant down completely on its side for dental surgery.

  I drove to the maintenance warehouse and went through all the power tools that they had, looking for the right implements for the job. I finally settled on an electric jackhammer that was used for chipping concrete on repair jobs in the zoo. It came with handy chisels of various widths and sharpness. A few crowbars, hammers, chisels, and hacksaws rounded out the tools that we needed for the job. As we arrived on the day of the big dental procedure, the keepers looked with skepticism at the tools that Dr. Dave Fagan, our dental consultant, and I brought along—an array of medical bags, oxygen tanks, ropes, winches, hammers, crowbars, and demolition tools.

  Whenever a large-scale animal procedure is about to get under way, zoo veterinarians typically go over the game plan with the key participants—a sort of preflight briefing. We walk through the expected sequence of events for the anesthesia and surgery, including emergency and safety precautions. Among the critical aspects of this particular dental procedure was the imperative that Lucky needed to end up lying down on her right side. If she went down on the left side, we would be unable to physically move her to work on her left upper molars, and that would scratch the surgery for the day, making her more wary in the future. Despite our efforts to conceal the preparations from Lucky for her impending sedation and surgery, the fact that she was locked inside and her companions were out in the exhibit yard was ample warning. She refused to lie down on command so that she could be sedated while recumbent, and instead I had to give Lucky her injection of M-99 into a foreleg with a hand syringe.

  With large ropes placed around her neck and her legs and the help of several “come-along” hand winches anchored to the massive barn beams, we were able to give her physical guidance. Shortly after her injection, Lucky made a slowly controlled stretch and came to rest on her chest on the straw-padded floor. Just as we started to pull her right leg forward to position her on her side, she reached out suddenly with her trunk and gave me a whack that sent me hurtling into the wall. I’m not sure that I have ever experienced a blow so solid—it was like being hit with a fire hose that had snapped free of a hydrant.

  To save face while the pain slowly subsided, I pretended it didn’t hurt, and we proceeded with the surgery. After nearly an hour of prying at the molar, the seven-pound tooth was finally delivered—a brown, comma-shaped baguette. The gallery of keepers looking on smiled in approval. Just ten minutes after administering the drug antidote into an ear vein, Lucky rose to her feet, looked around her barn, and accepted an apple. With time and supplementary feeding, her weight loss was stabilized. Without these drugs it would be impossible to handle many of the pachyderm problems seen in zoo practice today.

  15. ZOO REGULARS

  Coworkers Without Titles

  She arrived at the gate just before it opened each day, as precise as an atomic clock. She was a bona fide “Zoo Regular.” The San Diego Zoo is open every day of the year without fail. I am not sure that anyone alive remembers a single day when the shades on the ticket booths did not roll up to meet a brand new queue of visitors. Th
e San Diego Zoo is so widely known that if it closed its doors for good there would still be people who didn’t get the word and would show up twenty years later to visit. As in the television program Cheers, every major zoo, public museum, and library has a central cast of characters that are referred to as “The Regulars.” These are the devoted and sometimes lost souls who make that institution a focus of their daily existences, dutifully going there as if it were their place of work. By foot, bus, taxi, or limousine, they showed up at the zoo every day, some frequenting select geographical niches on the zoo grounds, others roaming widely to offer their daily greetings to specific gorillas, elephants, or giraffes.

  In many zoos, in the vicinity of the great apes or other charismatic species, you often encounter self-appointed docents who know all the animals by name, the details of their family history, their individual idiosyncrasies. At first you might mistake them for employees as they enthusiastically interject answers to questions that arise as newcomers discuss the animals before them. In order to keep official docents in predictable synchrony with zoo policies, many zoos have established formal training programs for them.

  Zoo regulars speak to certain staff members every day, but they may silently pass by others for years. When they gave you a wink, a wave, or a knowing nod, you know that they had accepted you as part of their zoo. Regulars are above and apart from the rest of the common crowd, who are, after all, ignorant of the true inner workings of their private little world. They always have favorites among the animals and the zoo staff, and they often hang out near the keepers at their coffee breaks to learn the latest gossip in the trials and tribulations of the keepers’ and animals’ personal lives, or for an update on the progress in treating medical problems in individual zoo animals. One “zoo nut” always wore a hat and safari vest that sagged under the weight of scores of zoo souvenir pins that he had faithfully collected in his travels to other zoos, wearing them like campaign medals from far-off wars. Some offer impromptu lectures about their beloved animals to the other visitors from favorite vantage points.

  Unlike docents, who usually undergo structured training and follow established guidelines, the regulars are self-appointed freelancers who choose their own turf and make their own rules. In contrast, a “decent docent,” according to La Jolla biologist and poet Dr. Ralph A. Lewin, has limits:

  Doozen don’ts for docents

  There are things a decent docent doesn’t do,

  Such as feeding alligators at the zoo.

  You should leave the meals of monkeys

  To the keepers and their flunkeys,

  And they’ll leave the nuts for visitors, and you.

  There are things a decent docent doesn’t dare,

  Such as cosseting a bison or a bear.

  You should leave the panther-petting

  To the guys behind the netting

  Who are trained for bearding lions in a lair.

  There are things a decent docent doesn’t do,

  For you have to give the animals their due.

  If they butt or bite, or nibble,

  Or, like dromedaries, dribble,

  You may lack the prime prerogative to sue.

  A decent docent doesn’t nag a gnu.

  The ranks of rank transgressors must be few

  Though there’s just a tiny po’cent

  Who debase the name of docent,

  And who sometimes, inconspicuously, do.

  So, although responsibilities accrue

  In the service of a docent at the zoo,

  When they let you go inside,

  Let your conscience be your guide:

  There are things a decent docent doesn’t do.

  One San Diego visitor, who always kept entirely to himself, and whose chosen outer garment was a trench coat, was dubbed “the Tortoise Guy.” He came to the zoo only to observe the mating behavior of the giant Galapagos tortoises—an irregular regular of sorts. Leaning against the concrete block fence every day, he stared for hours as they carried out their propagatory duties. The tortoises milled around and clambered upon one another, making low grunting and hissing sounds as the tortoise man stood patiently and imagined the unimaginable (we imagined). Despite his otherwise harmless behavior, at least in the zoo, his final visit was on the occasion that a security guard noticed he was naked under the trench coat. Years later, while researching this book on the Internet, I stumbled across this sort of fantasy—apparently, the World Wide Web has brought about new networking possibilities for similarly afflicted “zoophiles” and “animists,” offering chat rooms where they openly discuss their emotional and physical attractions to nonhuman species.

  Less complex than the Tortoise Guy, “Harvey” always wore a helmet to the zoo, or at least that was the way someone dressed him to go there. Eventually the helmet acquired a telephone number that was neatly stenciled on the back, but Harvey never realized that he was a marked man. It didn’t exactly shout “How am I driving?”—but that was clearly the intended message. Harvey had his good and bad days, but it was the bad ones and the phone number that caused his retirement from the zoo.

  He often stood at the bottom of the steep hill in front of the old hippo exhibit, where the zoo tour buses regularly stopped for driver commentary. On some days his mission was as self-appointed sidewalk tour guide, and he would educate pedestrian passersby with unintelligible pronouncements. The drivers never stopped near him when he was in the zoo, since his disjointed ramblings and admonitions to passengers occasionally broke into obscene expletives. But Harvey was patient—he stood and waited for his audience. For the most part, the buses stopped short of or past him to avoid his salutations. It was a game of dodge-Harvey, and most of the time, they made sure that Harvey missed the bus. When bus traffic was backed up on busy days, however, Harvey would finally score—there was only so much roadway in which to evade him. Drivers sometimes purposely foiled coworkers in a following bus by stopping in a location that forced a dose of Harvey upon them in a fraternal right of passage for new drivers. Fortunately, his epithets were difficult for most visitors to understand, but his outbursts became more animated. It was surmised that his stenciled phone number must have been his undoing after several offended patrons reported his final transgressions.

  Elderly, neatly dressed, dignified, and carrying a small black umbrella, apparently to avoid the San Diego sun, Miss Elisabeth, a thin, gray-haired matron, made her daily zoo rounds. Like most zoo regulars and the zoo’s animals, she too was a creature of habit. For years she arrived in a taxi, strode through the same chrome turnstile with her senior pass, and was off on a precise route to visit her favorite animals. She rested on particular benches that gave her exacting views of people, animals, and events that she monitored daily. Her favorite bench was next to the Flamingo Lagoon, near the outdoor perch of the zoo’s blind cockatoo, King Tut, a 1925 gift from the legendary animal collector, Frank “Bring ’em Back Alive” Buck. She always said good morning to Tut and then settled down on her bench.

  Clutched in her hands every day, until the final bans came into effect on pigeon feeding in the zoo, was a small sack of bird seed and leftover bread. She was obviously much more of an animal than a people lover, strictly keeping her own company with the birds. Perhaps it was the no-feeding rule that contributed to her relatively rapid demise, but no one knows for sure. The zoo and surrounding Balboa Park, were plagued with pigeons and something had to be done. The presence of feral pigeons defecating parasites amid a priceless bird collection and swarming antelope feeders like locusts was untenable, never mind the costs of cleaning their messes from park facilities.

  At the height of the “pigeon crisis” an employee at Balboa Park’s landmark California Tower, an ornate bell tower attached to the Museum of Man, called me to recruit support for his own anti-pigeon crusade. He led me to the tower’s interior and up the steep, winding iron staircase to witness the carnage. Amid nests on nearly every step of this metal helix in the bowels of the tower were scores
of dead and moribund pigeons. The babies (squabs), unable to fly out of the vertical abyss, lay in random heaps. Something had to be done about the park’s pigeon holocaust!

  The clandestine efforts of the zoo’s pest control technician, a top-secret program of poisoning the pigeons, was ended abruptly after several acutely intoxicated pigeons, apparently with terminal cardiac arrhythmias, crash-landed into a crowd on the zoo’s main entry plaza near the Big Olaf ice cream stand. When the pigeon problem came up in staff meetings, I pointed out that pigeons were rare in neighboring Tijuana, Mexico, and, to no avail, suggested a fact-finding trip there to learn exactly why.

  Then a very promising pigeon trapper, an enterprising Vietnamese refugee, learned of the problem and volunteered to help. He live-trapped the birds and the numbers started to drop; we were all impressed and hopeful. The masses of pigeons gorging themselves on antelope grain thinned noticeably. But, just as tangible gains were being made, the news came from the city health department that our trapper had been busted and would not be returning to the zoo. Inspectors discovered that he was serving up barbecued park pigeons in his family’s local restaurant. Our trapper went out of the pigeon business, and the population rebounded.

  Miss Elisabeth never learned of the behind-the-scenes warfare directed at the burgeoning pigeon population. In hindsight, some people thought that she had seemed more agitated than usual lately. She complained relentlessly about the feeding ban. Her once-loyal pigeons had abandoned her for fatter pickings at the snack stands and hung out instead with the tourists, who carelessly dribbled buttered popcorn wherever they went. I can only surmise that she became bitter about this radical change in feeding policy, and heartbroken that her birds had forsaken her. Still, no one realized that Miss Elisabeth was about to snap.