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.

 

 

New creatures rape your face

A friend who knows of my interest in zoos sent me a link to this disturbing video:

The comments on youtube are variously horrified and gloating. One viewer says "The monkey takes the phrase 'I'M GONNA RAPE YOUR FACE' to a WHOLE new level." That's a phrase? Apparently it is: type it into Google and be amazed by the wealth of face-raping references that come up (including, prominently, the lyrics of the song "Hybrid Moment" by the horror-punk group The Misfits, which is where I found the headline for this post). More sensibly, another commenter says "This is how you get genital warts."

It's not a monkey, of course: a chimpanzee is an ape (and it does seem to be a chimp, not its - our - cousin, the bonobo); I haven't been able to identify the species of frog. The video was shot, according to the caption, at Honololulu Zoo on 11 November 2004, but has only recently gone viral. It raises a number of issues. One is a point that I've made before: zoos are not hermetically sealed; animals get out, other animals get in, scavengers, predators and - presumably the frog's case - passers by; a zoo is a small eco-system. The second issue is our notion that zoos are suitable entertainment for children. Yes, they love to see the giraffes and the elephants and the funny monkeys, but if you hang around a zoo for any length of time you're bound to see a fair amount of shitting and fucking, and even some dying (though that's one bit of business zoos mostly manage to keep offstage). I'm not worried about children watching animals mate - if they're going to know about the birds and the bees, they may as well get the lions and the baboons along the way. But there are other behaviours that aren't so obviously necessary to their education; face-raping frogs sits firmly in this category, and I'm mildly perturbed by the sound of children giggling at the spectacle.

A bigger question is, what do we make of the chimpanzee's behaviour? That's really two questions. First, is this normal behaviour for chimps or a zoo-bred pathology? Some animals, such as lions, tend to fuck neurotically in captivity, and it has been suggested that this may be part of what's going on with the  bonobos, who are famous for supposedly resolving conflict through sensuality rather than, as is the case with chimps, through violence (for an overview of the whole sexy bonobo/vicious chimp myth, see Ian Parker's 2007 New Yorker article "Swingers"). Then again, lots of animals masturbate; my guess is that a young male chimp will try anything with a hole in it. I'll try to find some literature on this some time. Second, why do we humans react the way we do? Many of the youtube commenters see the chimp as perverted or cruel, a rapist, which suggests that they are anthropomorphising too much. I don't say that you should never anthropomorphise. For instance, it's clear that the great apes, at least, are capable of a degree of empathy with suffering, which is the main prerequisite to cruelty; all the same, I doubt that this chimpanzee has any real sense that the frog is suffering. But "perverted", "rapist" - these are human terms, implying some buried assumption that animals should stick to human sexual norms.

You could concentrate on a slightly less worrying aspect of all this: the apparent indifference of young mammals to the usual barriers between species - in particular, their willingness to play with other species. Here's something to take the froggy taste away:

Zoos: Just looking

Photo courtesy of WilliamCalvin.com

From John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" (1977):

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.

From the Daily Telegraph:

A study of orang-utan behaviour suggests that just like many of us they regard "people watching" as a pleasurable way to spend an afternoon.

The discovery was made after experiments with five orang-utans at Australia's Melbourne Zoo. In the tests, the viewing window onto their enclosure was either left completely open or half covered.

This gave the apes the option of hiding behind the concealed part of the window if they wanted to protect their privacy.

But far from avoiding the prying eyes of the public, they preferred to sit in full view looking back at the humans.

Figures compiled by the University of Melbourne showed that they spent four times longer watching people than they did out of sight and looking the other way.

Five orang-utans is hardly conclusive proof of anything. But my own observation contradicts Berger: most animals aren't interested in us (and why should they be?), but some are fascinated. I've had my gaze held by an animal in a zoo a number of times. What that means is another question: maybe, like those orang-utans, they are interested in you as a fellow creature; some sympathetic spark jumps the gap between species. More likely they see you as a potential predator, a potential meal, a potential competitor for a spot in the hierarchy.

In any case, Berger puts too much weight on the gaze, because he's an art critic and because humans are very visual animals. Our gaze doesn't necessarily mean a lot to a bat or a dog or most other animals. Daniel Dennett once speculated that a dog, with its highly developed sense of smell and poorly developed visual system, doesn't "see" things as we understand the word: a bird flying overhead merely leaves it with an impression of "birdishness", in much the same way that the dog's rich smell-picture of the world is reduced by us to the sense that things are a bit whiffy. So an animal doesn't return your gaze; maybe it's wondering why you don't return its ultrasonic chirrups or respond to the friendly overtures it's making by means of secretions from its scent glands.

Zoo news: Yum

 

The menu at the Bin Feng Tang restaurant at Beijing Zoo now includes a number of species housed at the zoo: hippopotamus toes, kangaroo tail, deer penis, crocodile. Despite an assurance by management that the meat comes from farmed animals, not zoo specimens, the restaurant management has been heavily criticised, both inside and outside China. The Guardian quoted Chang Jiwen at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as saying, "It is very inappropriate and immoral of them to sell such products. It is against the aim of the zoo".

It is heartening to see these concerns raised inside China, where mistreatment of zoo animals has been commonplace (bear in mind that that link is more than 10 years old, though). But as a number of commenters on the Guardian report point out, it isn't obvious what is wrong here, given that the animals are farmed: indeed, being farmed for food is one of the best protections a species can have against extinction. The Guardian also had Ge Rui of the International Fund for Animal Welfare arguing that "by selling the meat of caged beasts, this zoo stimulates consumption and increases pressure on the animals in the wild." How does that work? In the Global Times, Qin Xiaona, president of the Capital Animal Welfare Association, put much the same point in more concrete terms: "It may give people the impression that eating wild animals is legal since legal restaurants are serving them." He added: "The zoo is where we teach our children to be nice to animals. How can we do this after eating them?"

Not that there is necessarily an opposition between being nice to an animal and eating it. John Berger, in "Why Look at Animals?", wrote: "A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but." Then again, in the same essay he writes of the marginalisation of animals in our consciousness, and sees zoos as a symbol of this phenomenon: clearly, the zoo visitor snacking on hippo toes isn't in the same relationship to the hippo that the peasant is to his pig. 

Consumption of zoo animals isn't a new phenomenon. In 1859 the anatomist Richard Owen held an "Eland Dinner" at which a variety of exotic fleshes were served up (this was a sort of sequel to his feast inside a statue of an iguanodon at Sydenham Park in 1853). The guests included the surgeon and naturalist Frank Buckland, son of the late William, geologist Dean of Westminster, who had been famous for his pet hyena and his enthusiasm for exotic foods: "mice on toast", ostrich, crocodile stew and (once, by accident) a small piece of the embalmed heart of Louis XIV. Frank was inspired to establish the Acclimatisation Society to explore more systematically the possibilities of introducing exotic animals to temperate climes, and proceeded to eat his way through a large number of species.

In France, Etienne Geoffroy-St. Hilaire established the Jardin Zoologique d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, opened in 1860 by Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie. This turned out to have a really practical application during the Siege of Paris 10 years later, when the chef Choron at Voisin's restaurant cooked a number of the animals for Christmas - stuffed ass's head, elephant consommé, camel roasted in the English style, kangaroo stew, roast bear, haunch of wolf in a deer sauce, terrine of antelope with truffles: the full menu is at the head of this post. Elephant was a particular hit: there were several elephants at the city's three zoos, and by the time the city was relieved Choron had cooked his way through the lot. Babar au rhum?

The anxiety about the menu in Beijing shows up a sentimental streak in our thinking about conservation. On the one hand, we (this is a western, liberal, environmentally concerned we) want animals taken out of the margins of our lives - and zoos can be a tool for doing this, as well as a symbol of that marginalisation: that may be the best argument for keeping them. At the same time, we don't want to have any of the kinds of relationships with wild animals that we've had in the past, because those generally involve exploiting them - by eating them, or using their body parts to make things. We think we ought to care deeply about the natural world while staying the hell out of its way. In this respect, we're a little bit like the old caricature of a feminist, who wants equality, but also wants dinner paid for and the door held open. Maintaining the balance is hard work. Hell, now I'm hungry: pass the binturong.

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.

Penguin at the zoo

Combining this blog's two principal concerns:

 

Illustration by Barry Evans - and nothing special, either: it seems to be trying to convey abundance and variety, without much success or beauty (though I quite like the goldfinch, halfway up on the left. 

Fascinating book, though: this is the first (and so far as I can find out, only) edition, 1970 - 28 May 1970, to be precise, from the reviewer's slip in my copy. This was a period of massive expansion in British zoos - I remember reading that in the mid-1970s Britain had one quarter of all the world's captive animals. The book contains details of 80 zoos in the British Isles (phrasing that allows Schomberg to include Guernsey, Jersey and Dublin), and according to Schomberg "many more are being planned". For comparison, in its 2008 annual report the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, with its wider remit, lists 81 members and six provisional members.

Each entry gives the address, acreage, opening hours, price of admission, whether or not tours and guidebooks are available, eating facilities, transport information and - a real slice of period - whether or not the public are allowed to feed the animals. The zoos are classified according to type: [A] Major representative collection (e.g. London Zoo) [B] Major specialist collection (e.g. Slimbridge) [C] Medium-sized mixed collection (e.g. Colchester Zoo) [D] Small specialist collection (e.g. Farnham) [E] Small mixed collection (e.g. Widdington).

The real attractions are Schomberg's introduction, a very good digest of zoo history and philosophy, and his reviews of each zoo. For the major collections, what he says is nicely expressed but unremarkable; it's when he has to strain for something to say that his quality emerges: one zoo has nice views; the owner of another plays classical guitar; another offers, alongside one of the largest collections of trained eagles in Britain, works by Holbein and Van Dyck and letters from D'Israeli, a frequent visitor to the house. There's some pleasure, too, in reading between the lines. In the introduction Schomberg (himself a stockbroker and ad-man before moving into zoo design) expresses his astonishment at a lack of regulation of zoos - essentially, the only bar to having your own zoo was whether or not you could get planning permission for the buildings - and says that he considers a few of the listed zoos bad, encouraging readers who agree to complain to the authorities. But the entries themselves don't reflect his disquiet, except in the case of Wellingborough ("needs to be completely rebuilt before it can reach acceptable standards") - it's the suddenly neutral tone that gives the game away.

Copies seem to be fairly rare - expect to pay more than a tenner, at any rate. I'm fairly sure I paid a lot less for my pristine review copy, but otherwise the where, when and how much escape me.

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." 

See also:

Zoo news: Fickle fingers of fate

Photo by Alasdair Preston, and almost certainly copyright

This is a field mouse feeling the chill wind of death - in the shape of a peckish ringtailed lemur - ruffle the fur on the back of its neck. But have no fear! A zoo-keeper leapt in and rescued it!

The picture was taken by Alasdair Preston, a casual visitor to the Five Sisters Zoo in West Lothian, and has no real news value. But it does illustrate neatly a truism about zoos: that they are extremely porous institutions - animals get in (usually to snack on the inmates' fodder; occasionally to snack on the inmates), and animals get out, rather more often than the authorities like to let on. At the Hagenbeck Tierpark in Hamburg a couple of years ago I noticed a crowd gathered just next to the Siberian tiger's enclosure but ignoring the tiger completely: as I got closer, I could see that their attention was being held by a perfectly ordinary red squirrel squatting under a bench - its independence making it far more attractive than the rare and magnificent predator prowling a few yards away.

You can read the full story of the mouse's escape in the Telegraph, though you may find yourself vomiting in disgust at the ignorance on display: the lemur is referred to as a "lemur monkey" and plain "monkey". Lemurs are primates but about as closely related to monkeys as we are, and you wouldn't describe a human being as a "person monkey", would you? Well, not unless it's a Telegraph website sub-editor.