Life at the Zoo

by Phillip T. Robinson

  On her final visit to the zoo she meandered around on her regular rounds. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and she was nearing the end of her walkabout. The mist had cleared from the zoo entry plaza and a clear blue sky was burning through the morning overcast. With the pavement still damp from the morning hosing of the groundskeepers, a small raft of tourists filtered past King Tut’s bench toward the monkey yard. It was when she turned the last corner to take up her post that it finally happened. Laid out upon her favorite bench were a diaper bag and infant accessories—a woman was sitting with her back to the public thoroughfare nursing her baby.

  According to an eyewitness, our mild-mannered senior walked up to her, screaming “This is my f—g bench!” and then whacked the still-nursing mother with her umbrella. It was an awkward scene by all accounts, and a security guard soon arrived to deal with the altercation. Resigned to her fate and without protest, Miss Elisabeth was gently, but officially, escorted from the zoo, rumpled umbrella in hand, never to be seen inside the turnstiles again. The park pigeon population was fed contraceptive bait and its numbers stabilized. We speculated that that Miss Elisabeth managed to find more grateful pigeons elsewhere in town.

  A few people become so obsessed with certain animals that they become an endless annoyance to both keepers and the medical staff. One such woman was the “Tiger Lady.” This dementia came about when we had a major series of Siberian tiger births in the zoo. One after another, the tigresses became pregnant, and the births exceeded the capacities of the mothers to care for them. The windfall for the public was that the Children’s Zoo was awash in cute tiger cubs. They were stuffed in cribs, playpens, and incubators, and the visitors were a crush at the viewing windows to see them nursing from bottles, playing with dangling toys, and tussling with each other on the ground. Along with the tiger boom came lots of neonatal tiger medical problems in the form of infections, diarrhea, and gastrointestinal upset. Many sleepless nights were spent by veterinarians and nursery attendants treating sick, dehydrated, and hypothermic babies.

  The Tiger Lady arrived early every morning, and she knew the names of the babies better than most of the employees. Naming new tigers became a creative chore; she lobbied for her nominations. Because of the public’s strong interest in tigers, the nursery staff managed to do better than they did with the naming of three orphan rhea chicks that wound up with the backstage names Diarrhea, Pyorrhea, and Gonorrhea. The zoo hospital staff received more health reports from the Tiger Lady than from the nursery attendants. She ambushed the veterinarian on daily rounds with a list of who was sneezing, off of their formula, had loose stools, and should be treated—in her ever-humble opinion. Standing in front of the nursery, she informed visitors about the health status of each baby tiger in the window.

  When she didn’t manage to trap a veterinarian in the Children’s Zoo, she called and left detailed messages at the hospital. Standing for hours, she alternately focused on the tigers and the baby pygmy chimpanzees that also occupied the nursery. Since tigers graduate from the Children’s Zoo more rapidly than chimps, she eventually shifted her attention to the chimps, and then to their transition to the main pygmy chimpanzee group in the zoo. It was a relief to be accosted in the main zoo about pygmy chimps instead of tigers for a change. The tigers had made their way to homes in other zoos, but the Tiger Lady had morphed into the “Chimp Lady.” I immediately began to lay a plan of contraception for the lion pride to avoid a rerun of the Year of the Tiger.

  “We had to let the animals go. No one informed them of their rights when they were arrested.”

  16. ETHICAL CAPTIVITY

  Animal Well-Being in Zoos

  “What’s popular isn’t always right, and what’s right isn’t always popular.”

  —Howard Cosell

  Is it humane to keep animals in captivity in zoos? We could ask similar questions about keeping dogs, cats, and horses as pets; some animal rights organizations do, but not mainstream ones. Zoos themselves are sometimes ambivalent about the term “zoo,” and now often designate themselves as wild animal parks, wildlife conservation parks, and wildlife conservation centers. The former New York Zoological Society is now called The Wildlife Conservation Society. These and similar efforts are intended to cut away from the past and its lingering images of zoological confinement. Indeed, public attitudes about the confinement of wildlife in captivity have changed faster than the quality of their enclosures in zoos, placing steady pressures on zoos to change.

  One of the biggest detours in the ongoing debate about the ethics of exhibiting animals or conducting research on them is the confusion between the terms “animal rights” and “animal welfare,” which have been spun and counterspun and politicized in the public-relations wars between organized and well-funded animal interest groups. While the lines are most strongly drawn between animal rightists and biomedical animal researchers, zoos often find themselves confronted on related issues by the same animal-advocacy groups. There are fundamental differences in the “rights” and “welfare” concepts that I will explore later in this chapter. It is likely that this subject will remain confusing for the average person, inasmuch as it is constantly blurred and misconstrued by media superficiality.

  The principal style of these so-called animal-ethics debates, by both sides, has been typified by sweeping allegations about one another’s actions and motivations. This is followed by minimal analysis or dialogue about the veracity of these assertions on either side’s part. They seldom actually appeal to each other in their communications, but instead play strictly to the audience—the general public. The battles between the extremes of the animal-rights movement and the extremes of the biomedical research community are battles of images, with both sides staking claims to our emotions—images of abused research animals on one side and sick children awaiting research breakthroughs on the other. The public often observes these media spectacles with as much true enlightenment as watching a tennis match being played with an invisible ball.

  My simplest answer to the opening question above is: Yes, it is humane to keep animals in captivity in zoos—if they are properly cared for and purposefully exhibited. I can offer lots of reasons that justify the existence of zoos, but amusement for its own sake is one of my least favorite. I prefer to view the keeping of animals in zoos as bolstering a higher cause that includes the cultivation of compassion and understanding about animals and nature. Entertainment, however, is part of the alchemy needed for the survival of zoos. Another measurement I would make of a zoo is the degree to which it encourages average citizens to support efforts to maintain and respect wildlife and wild areas. This should not be limited to faraway lands, but involve the very communities in which zoos reside.

  Perhaps the measure of an “unemployment rate” could be devised for zoo animals as a yardstick of the success of keeping them in captivity. Just as with us humans, a high animal unemployment rate would reflect badly on zoo leaders. In the wild, as I have said, most animals are preoccupied with foraging for their food, interacting socially, and avoiding predators. What will substitute for these age-old daily behavior patterns when they become irrelevant or marginalized in the zoo? How can the success of animal enrichment programs be assessed to gauge the relative success among zoos? One method being evaluated involves the field of behavioral endocrinology, utilizing assays of stress hormones (corticoids) in feces and urine to quantify physiologic dysfunction.

  How do you really judge which zoos are the best: by their self-proclaimed successes, by their reputations in the media, or by more quantifiable review processes which do not yet exist? Despite our competitive American tradition, the notion that zoos can be ranked like football and baseball teams is pretty unrealistic anyways, since the subjective playing fields vary so enormously from zoo to zoo. People often tend to determine what they like by objecting to what they don’t like, and zoogoers are no exception.

  The San Diego Zoo had its opponents at its outset in the early 1920s, when critica
l letters to the editor were published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, titled, for example, “The Zoo is a Disgrace and a Crime” and “The Zoo Should Be Disbanded for the Good of the City.” Given the reports of the questionable housing facilities at San Diego’s pre-zoo exposition menagerie, from which some of the zoo’s animals originated, it isn’t a total surprise that some individuals wanted to thwart the building of a permanent facility of that standard.

  Some of the early criticisms of the San Diego Zoo had to do with the public feeding of snakes, such as “Diablo” the python, which was such a spectacle that it was announced in the Union-Tribune: “San Diego Zoo will give ‘Diablo’ first meal in five months; 23-foot python will be forcibly fed at Seal Lagoon this afternoon.”

  At a culmination of the early public debate on the humaneness of the zoo in 1925, matters were taken to the San Diego Humane Society and the Union-Tribune by several citizens. A Mr. Richard Wolfe and a Miss Kay Dillenbeck complained about the conditions for the elephants, including their chaining. Miss Dillenbeck led by stating, “I never go to the zoo because I don’t like it. Dr. Wegeforth [the Zoological Society President] is just trying to shut us up by having our president [of the Humane Society] on his board of directors [of the Zoo].” She continued, “You will print only defenses of the zoo. A veterinarian should be in charge of the zoo, not a vivisectionist like Dr. Wegeforth. Untold cruelty is going on up there all the time. The forcible feeding of the anaconda is terrible.” Miss Dillenbeck was interrupted at this point and told that it was a kindness to force-feed the big snake in order to save its life. “That may be true,” she said, “but it need not be done in public. It is humiliating for the anaconda to be fed that way. After all, a serpent is a serpent. You will see that one of these days there will be strict laws that will prevent keeping any animals in captivity. There will not even be goldfish in bowls. And the worst is yet to come. The zoo says it is going to put up a hospital for animals. The tigers died from neglect and so have other animals. That hospital will not be for sick animals. It will be for vivisection, for experiments on our dogs and cats. And we will soon be hearing the heart-rending howls of anguish from that hospital when we go to the park. Oh, I know all about that place!”

  Diablo the python being fed with a sausage stuffer in the San Diego Zoo, 1925

  Only a few months later, zoo troubles continued in the same paper, which headlined a report: “Tormented chimpanzees spit water at lawless zoo visitors; special police protection is asked for animals; rule breakers face arrest.”

  And shortly afterward, perhaps acknowledging Miss Dillenbeck’s admonition to involve a veterinarian, a story led with: “Zoo’s veterinarian alleviates deer’s pain by extracting ulcerated tooth.”

  Perceptions and values were a bit different in those days compared to now—in fact, quite different. They were also affected by the economic hardships of the Great Depression. For example, in the early 1930s, in an unsuccessful effort to generate extra income, the San Diego Zoo offered taxidermy mounts of deer heads for sale to the public from the surplus members of the zoo deer herds. In 1934 it was casually acknowledged in the zoo veterinarian’s annual report published in its own ZooNooz magazine that “in order to reduce maintenance costs a number of less valuable, easily replaced exhibits (animals) were destroyed.” Like many other zoos then and afterward, the San Diego Zoo fell on hard times. Charles Schroeder, then the zoo’s veterinarian, made frequent trips to nearby Mexico to buy low-cost horses that were then shipped to the zoo as animal food.

  An allocation to the zoo from the city’s property tax revenue that began in 1929 was reduced in 1934, causing the zoo leaders to call foul. A castigating article in ZOONOOZ magazine in June 1934 took issue with the San Diego city manager who implemented the cuts. He informed zoo and society staff that “if the zoo workers didn’t have the time to water the trees, the zoo had too many trees,” and added that the zoo should consider replacing zoo workers with welfare workers to save money. (Years later, when the zoo experienced a union labor contract dispute, director Dr. Charles Schroeder made a similar threat to hire vagrants from downtown when the threat of a strike drew near.) That same year, again in the ZOONOOZ magazine, troubled times stimulated desperate appeals to the public for zoo support and management lamented to subscribers: “To those who inquire ‘What have you done with the things in the Zoo, the baby walrus, the elephant seal, the great pythons?’ shall we say to them ‘Oh, we just sat by and allowed politicians to kill them’. . . . Now is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their zoo.”

  A popular, but misguided, promotion at the San Diego Zoo in that era was the Annual Snake Contest, which began April first and ended September first. The grand prize for delivering the largest number of live, “undamaged” snakes was $20, second prize was $10, and $5 went to the person bringing in the largest number of other reptiles (lizards and turtles). The announced intentions of the contest were, ironically, to have “a wonderful exhibit of our local specimens and a renewed interest in the reptiles of our own county.” The contest advisory suggested that children should not try to catch rattlesnakes, and therefore placed no premium on them above other species.

  Meanwhile, back at the financially distressed John Ball Park Zoo, in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, most of the animal collection was being given away to other zoos, and the deer and buffaloes were being butchered to feed the poor, leaving only a few aging specimens on the zoo grounds. In 1935, at the depth of the Depression, many municipal zoos took advantage of federal efforts to reduce unemployment, which resulted in the creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and funding for zoo construction projects throughout the country. Local governments were required to supply the project materials while the federal government paid the workers.

  Every living person is a walking contradiction in his or her personal actions toward living things. Do you swat flies, squash spiders, or clean the bugs off of your car windshield that you have annihilated by the dozens? Have you ever set a snap trap or placed a little brown and yellow box of D-Con poison bait in your garage for mice? Do you consume milk, meat, fish, or eggs? Have you worn leather shoes, belts, or watchbands? Do you suppose that you have consumed many products that have ingredients of animal origin in them? (Would you necessarily know if you had?) Have you ever had a pet in your life? Do you hunt or fish? Is there anyone in the world who has not done one of these things?

  The point of this list of animal uses is to demonstrate that the use people make of animal life is measured in degrees, not absolutes. Based on our culture and experiences, we find some uses and actions to be acceptable, and we reject others. Horse-racing fans, by and large, find bullfighting repugnant, but we all know what happens to many failed equine contenders. Qualifications and distinctions are drawn to justify individual ethical positions, such as whether an animal is regarded as a “sentient” being or not—in other words, whether it is capable of emotion, thought, and suffering. This automatically accords status to more taxonomically privileged creatures, and denies, or qualifies it, with regard to so-called lesser species. Even animal-rights icon Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation, believes that such distinctions could be drawn “somewhere between a lobster and an oyster,” and in general that “all animals capable of experiencing pleasure and pain should be given moral consideration.”

  The “mirror self-recognition test” used by some researchers takes this approach to the next level. It involves placing a mirror in front of an animal and evaluating its response to its own image. In the case of primates, a red dot is placed on an individual’s ear, and the animal’s reaction to it is observed. An animal that reaches for its own ear, as opposed to the image in the mirror, is deemed to have a capacity for self-consciousness. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas have all qualified in this form of test, and, like humans, respond directly to their own reflections. Overall, few animals seem to recognize their reflected image as their own (cats and dogs most often take it for anoth
er animal or show lack of interest altogether). One investigator has reportedly done the same test on one Indian elephant (with a very large mirror) and claims a response similar to that of apes.

  As a consequence of the mirror test and claims that chimpanzees share over 98 percent of their DNA with humans, a new standard is being proposed—particularly by animal-rights lawyers—that would afford apes the constitutional protections accorded to children, the mentally retarded, and the infirm in human society. While the 98 percent argument sounds compelling, mice have been reported to have 97 percent of the same genetic material as humans, and mammals in general over 90 percent.

  One of the more articulate spokespersons on this subject is animal rights attorney Steven Wise, who recently wrote the book Rattling the Cage. His objective is to open the door for organizations and individuals to file lawsuits on the behalf of animals—especially the great apes—in order to remove them from the custody of zoos, research labs, and circuses. Vocabulary-recognition and image-association studies demonstrating that young apes have the potential to develop their intellectual capacities to that of four-year old humans have been used to support the arguments calling for changes in the legal status of chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas.

  At least one organization, Zoo Check, based in the United Kingdom, has dedicated itself exclusively to the total eradication of zoos, and it appears to make no exceptions. Its mission and philosophy are stated in its organizational literature: “Zoo Check is dedicated to investigating the plight of captive animals, exposing and alleviating their suffering and campaigning to phase out all traditional zoos.” (“Traditional zoos” appear to be defined as zoos that have animals.) Zoo Check further proclaims: “Wildlife belongs in the wild” and “Most zoos remain little more than collections of animals held captive in unnatural conditions for public entertainment.”