Zoo in the head

Zoos: Feeling the love

 

Guy the Gorilla, photographed by Wolf Suschitzky. Almost certainly in breach of copyright.

BELOVED GIRAFFE AT ZOO ON THE MEND reads the headline on the Boston Globe website. (The subheading is only slightly less heartwarming: "Overcomes urinary obstruction, but risky surgery still possible". My invariable advice to young journalists is, Avoid urine in headlines.)

Leaving aside the details of his condition, let's think about Beau the giraffe's status: beloved. Zoo animals are quite often beloved — Knut the polar bear, Guy the gorilla, any number of pandas, and so on all the way back to Jumbo the elephant and Obaysch the hippo in Victoria's reign. What does that mean? That their names appear in the media, that children clamour to see them, or at any rate parents assume they're who the children want to see, that their photograph is taken often, and any health problem becomes a minor public drama. It is a shallow sort of love, devoid of intimacy, knowledge, real consideration. When Jumbo was sold to P. T. Barnum in 1882, the public was incensed (letters to the press, angry leading articles, a popular song) that he was being removed from his "little wife", Alice, though the pair had never even shared quarters.

Some zoo animals are regarded with benevolent indifference; they are never hated. Most entertainments have their villain: even among clowns at the circus there'll be one who is less likeable, or more dislikeable. But zoos are all about positive feeling. Nobody boos the tigers or the gibbons; at worst you'll experience a shudder at something invertebrate. The closest thing to a villain is us — or rather, not us, we're nice people, but them, those other people who are not so kind to animals: the people the signs are aimed at, who wake the animals in the nocturnal house, howl at the monkeys and chuck litter in the hippos' pool; and the people who do all that logging and poaching that endangers species. Last time I was at the Bronx Zoo, a display about the evils of tiger-poaching included a Land Rover bearing the logo "Evil Incorporated".

I've encountered similar attitudes outside zoos: the park ranger at Haggerston who, haranguing me after my dog killed a squirrel, said "I love everything in nature." (I didn't have the nerve to ask her if that included slugs, rats, and plague bacilli, but let's assume for the sake of argument that I did and she looked pretty foolish.) I'm not recommending that we hate animals; but that sort of worldview — where every species pleases, and only man is vile — is too simplistic to be healthy; it stops you knowing anything. Owning a dog has extinguished in me whatever there was of the dog-lover: I'm too aware now of dogs as individuals, some pleasant, some not.

It's not as if being beloved does animals any good. Knut, as I've mentioned before, was reportedly warped by adulation into a narcissistic psychopath with severe sexual dysfunction; he drowned in his pool, aged four, while suffering encephalitis. Jumbo suffered fits of insanity, which is why they sold him to Barnum. Loving something, or someone, is fine. It's not a substitute for thinking about them.

 

 

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: the elephant in the room

Elephants are difficult animals to keep: they need a lot of space and - in spite of long traditions of rides on the elephant, bun-feeding and circus tricks - aren't easily tamed. London Zoo sent all its elephants off to Whipsnade in 2001 after one of them, Dilberta, trampled her keeper, Jim Robson, to death (and as the article linked to there observes, such killings are not uncommon). Earlier this week, a man got into the elephant enclosure at Byculla Zoo in Mumbai and was killed by a 70-year-old female elephant, Laxmi; the Times of India identified him as an "unknown drug addict", though there was no mention of drugs in other reports.

Elephants are also prone to disease: the photograph above is of Mac, an Asian elephant at Houston Zoo, who in 2008 died of elephant herpes, aged 2. The symptoms are not pleasant - it's the internal bleeding that gets you. Two Asian elephants, Donaldson and Leelee, died of the same disease at Whipsnade in May last year - to Whipsnade's discredit, reporting of their deaths seems to have been restricted to the local press and the websites of animal rights groups such as Born Free (the Telegraph reported Donaldson's death, but only in the context of Born Free's call for an investigation). In the US, the group In Defense of Animals (IDA) has complained to the Department of Agriculture about elephant breeding programmes at a number of zoos, including Seattle and St. Louis. A six-year-old calf, Hansa, died of herpes at Seattle in 2007; two elephants at St. Louis which are known to carry the virus are pregnant. 

Meanwhile, at Paignton Zoo in Devon, a 40-year-old Asian elephant called Gay has been put down after developing severe abscesses in her feet. In the context, it's disturbing that Noah's Ark Zoo in Somerset has announced plans to keep elephants - Noah's Ark is, as the name suggests, run by creationists. Irrationally, perhaps, I don't see people who deny science as ideally equipped for a job as complicated as looking after elephants.

But what are you going to do? Even though an attempt to restart the ivory trade failed last week, elephants in the wild have a hard time - they encroach like buggery on agricultural land; and megafauna don't come any more charismatic: they're what you call an "ambassador species", making the case for wildlife conservation just by being around. Zoos need them; in the not too distant future, they may well need zoos.

On a more cheerful note, at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, an elephant that was believed to have died in the womb popped out healthy and cheerful three weeks ago. He has now been given the name Pathi Harn, a Thai name that means "Miracle"; though I preferred the original - "Mr. Shuffles".

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.

Doh! A deer!

Much fuss in the press over the case of a deer who wandered into the lion enclosure at the National Zoo in Washington DC, and elicited a predictable reaction from the lions. Strangely, several sources focused on the apparently happy outcome of the video above: the Daily Mail ran pictures under the headline "The moment baby deer leaps into lion enclosure at zoo ... and manages to survive"; the Sun had "Deer escapes lion's clutches". The Mail headline was later amended to reflect the more melancholy truth of what happened after the camera stopped rolling: "Tragic end for the zoo deer who leapt into a lion enclosure" - it was so badly hurt it had to be put down.

Zoo staff shooed the lions indoors and dispersed the crowds rooting for the deer: as Jack Landers says, a pointless reaction. Zoos are all about "enrichment" these days, making the animals' lives more interesting, very often by making them work for their food; and the crowds want to see nature red in tooth and claw, don't they? But when a genuinely enriching experience happens along, everybody gets embarrassed.

It's another demonstration that zoos are porous - nature gets out, nature gets in; as Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way." 

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