Zoo in the head

Have you met Miss Jones?



In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones retraces Joanna Yeates' last steps and ponders her death's deeper meanings:

Leaving Jo’s flat, I return to my car. My satnav takes me to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The theory is the killer took the long route from the flat to where he dumped the body to avoid the CCTV cameras. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the 50p toll.

I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work.

There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

Finally, a man in a taxi jumps out, and runs to me brandishing a 50p piece.

‘Not all men are monsters,’ he says, grinning. Maybe not. But one monster is all it takes.

Poignant, sensitive, heart-breaking. Or, to take some of the milder remarks from the comments thread, "Shameful, inept, morbid, irrelevant, patronising", "insensitive, lazy, snobbish" and "unbelievably ill conceived".

Zoo news: dead gorilla

This is Yeboah, the 12-year-old western lowland gorilla brought over to London Zoo in November from La Boissière du Doré zoo in France: he died suddenly last Thursday, 25th March. He'd earlier recorded high blood sugar levels, so diabetes is suspected but not confirmed.

Yeboah is the second male to die at London Zoo's Gorilla Kingdom, which opened in 2007 - Bobby died, reportedly of a heart-attack, in December 2008, aged 25 (in capitivity, life expectancy is 35-45). Yeboah had only been living full-time with the three female gorillas - Effie, Zaire and Mjukuu - since the beginning of the month. David Field, the zoological director, assured the Daily Mail stress wasn't a factor. The relevant thread on zoochat.com has some interesting comments: one suggests it was Epstein-Barr virus (i.e., glandular fever - and another member of the herpes family), but doesn't offer any sources. Commenter Procyonlotor, who seems to be a member of ZSL staff, says that Yeboah had been passing blood in his urine, and that his symptoms were similar to Bobby's. The Mirror reports that zoo staff believe Mjukuu, the youngest female, may be pregnant; Procyonlotor seems to hint at this, but I couldn't find confirmation anywhere: aside from David Field's conversation with the Mail, ZSL (as with elephant deaths at Whipsnade) seems to have tried to pretend nothing has happened - no official announcement on the zoos website, for example.

Silence is preferable to the Mail's relentless anthropomorphising:

The reaction was a very human one. The three females sat apart, making no eye contact, sometimes staring at the ground for minutes on end.

During breaks in the rain, they got up and mooched around forlornly, mourning their lost mate.

They had known Yeboah for only a few weeks. But the sudden death of the western lowland gorilla has clearly had a great impact on his 'wives'.

This follows on from a report, last year, about the females being given photographs of Yeboah prior to his arrival: one of the accompanying pictures was captioned "Ooh la la: Effie seems to like the look of her French beau." I suppose we're lucky this one didn't get headlined "Sacre bleu!" or even "Merde!"

Sorry for a second grim posting in a row. Most zoo news is births or deaths.

Zoo news: brewery director forced to resign over failed piss-up

The director Conservation and Research at Calgary Zoo in Canada, Cathy Gaviller, has resigned after a number of incidents over the last year or so involving the death of animals or danger to animals or the public. A swift run-down:

1) January 2009: an "exotic" two-year-old goat - a Turkmenian markhor - became tangled in ropes attached to an "enrichment device", or toy, and strangled itself in front of visitors. (I think the collision of strangulation and the words "exotic" and "toy" may have gained this incident extra attention; it all sounds oddly like the kind of thing we used to associate with Tory MPs before they went all metrosexual and hip.)

2) June 2009: a gorilla was photographed holding a knife which a keeper had "accidentally" left in the enclosure. “It was a small utility knife," according to the Zoo's communications director; "it wasn’t a huge knife.” The gorilla has been forced to return to traditional razor-blade in toothbrush handle methods

3) October 2009: two men climbed into the zoo at night, and were hurt - one seriously - by a Siberian tiger.

4) December 2009: a capybara was crushed to death by a hydraulic door. Another capybara had died in July after being attacked by one of its fellows.

5) January 2010: four mule deer died in a week, according to Zoocheck Canada; Calgary Zoo said that the four had died over several months, mostly from unremarkable causes, though one did charge into a fence.

6) February 2010: two Malagasy giant hog-nosed snakes (non-poisonous) escaped down a drain left open during cleaning, but were found a day later. A python in the same enclosure was too big to fit down the pipes.

7) Last week: a gorilla climbed a pile of ice and jumped on to a perimeter fence, from where he had access to the public parts of the zoo. This happened before opening time, and he jumped back into his enclosure as soon as a keeper approached.

Further back:

8) In 2008, the zoo called in police after 41 stingrays died; later, it transpired that the water in which they swam had low levels of oxygen.

9) In 2006-7, four gorillas died of varying causes.

And they've lost a couple of baby elephants along the way, but hey, who hasn't done that?

That's both spectacular and depressing; under the circumstances, it's hard to see how Gaviller - who had been in the job for 20 years - had any choice.

I haven't blogged on zoos since well before Christmas: apologies to the hardy few who have maintained an interest.

Lost in Cambodia

In the Observer, Andrew Anthony writes about the curious case of Malcolm Caldwell, a British university lecturer and apologist for the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. He was murdered on a visit there in 1978: it is likely that Pol Pot ordered the killing, but the motive - given Caldwell's entire and sincere enthusiasm for the re Along the way, he offers this bizarre and distressing story:

I visited the archive on the second floor of the building, where some of the 4,000 files the Vietnamese discovered are housed. Here, I was brought the "confession" of John Dewhirst, a 26-year-old teacher from Newcastle who was captured in 1978, while sailing with friends through the Gulf of Thailand. Intercepted by a Khmer Rouge patrol boat, they were placed in S-21 and tortured over the course of a month. As the weeks passed, Dewhirst made a series of ever more bleakly surreal confessions. They start out as straightforward biography – he explains that he had studied at Loughborough university. Then he admits to being a CIA agent, recruited at Loughborough where the CIA, he is made to say, maintains one of its covert training bases. It "was housed in a building disguised as the Loughborough Town Council Highways Department Surveyor's Office". He also reveals that his father is another CIA agent, using the cover of "headmaster of Benton Road secondary school". Dewhirst was murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1978.

via Oliver Kamm

Zoos in the news: dead zebras

At Dublin Zoo on 2 April a zebra was killed by a white rhino in a shared enclosure - the rhino was chasing a couple of other zebras who had bitten her, and hit a zebra bystander by mistake. At Greater Vancouver Zoo four zebras died two months ago, allegedly from stress and muscular exertion after a pair of Cape buffalo were placed in their enclosure.

In recent decades, zoos have taken to mixing up animals to create an African experience or a polar experience, or whatever it may be - at Dublin, it was the new African Savanna habitat. This has advantages for spectators, in that it mimics a little more closely the experience of seeing animals in the wild, and it helps to conveys an idea of an eco-system of interdependent species: or, as Leo Oosterweghel, director of Dublin Zoo, put it, "we can mix animals together in an incredible landscape which will enrich and stimulate their lives and at the same time will captivate and immerse our visitors in a real and breathtaking experience... Why go on an expensive safari holiday when you can enjoy an African experience in Dublin?” Whether it has advantages for the animals is open to question; a mixed-species experience ought to give them a richer life, but it is always going to be a sketchy, two-dimensional version of the wild, and species that mix happily in the open may not rub along so well in a confined space.

The public attitudes of the two zoos make an interesting contrast. Dublin tried to tame the problem: the zebras "nipped" the rhino "playfully", she was "annoyed", zebras can be "mischievous", it was an "accident"; and the two animals were named - Zanta the rhino and Killarney the zebra. It all seems quite cosy, really (though I remember that in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond argued that the reason zebras have rarely been successfully domesticated is that they are too bad tempered and hard to handle). Greater Vancouver Zoo, on the other hand, didn't publicise the death of its zebras at all (which is why cause of death is so far only alleged) and didn't respond to questions from reporters. All the running has been made by the Vancouver Humane Society, who have linked the zebra deaths to past animal health problems there. Both zoos are guilty of playing down the situation, and it may be that both are guilty of mismanagement, but Dublin comes out of it smelling much sweeter.

Incidentally, none of the news reports I read specified what kind of zebra. Dublin's website confirms that it keeps Grant's, the smallest subspecies of the plains zebra; I can't find details for Greater Vancouver, but judging by the photos I can find it has some kind of plains zebra as well (you can tell because they have much wider stripes than the migraine-inducing Grevy's and mountain species).