Zoo in the head

Zoo news: Woofs on the loose

The first in a long while, I know. Telegraph TV has the scoop:

So much to enjoy here: "three or four woofs", "I'm gonna say the word 'mature'", and "Wild animals that you see on TV" for starters.

youtube users have left some valuable comments. AMANDATHEAWESOMEone says "OH MY GOD, I STILL CAN'T GET OVER IT. ALL OF THOSE EXOTIC ANIMALS BEING SHOT. THEY DIDN'T CHOOSE TO BE THERE! THEY DON'T DESERVE THAT!!!"

leprokahn138 counters: "I live off of Mt. Perry Road.. 7 miles away from where this happened, Look, this is America, and RIGHT HERE, is hickville USA, ALL OF THOSE animals WILL BE KILLED, that is a FACT, Americans think of nothing else other than FEAR when it comes to things like these ... Dont wrap your emotions into something that wont turn out the way you want it to, Go on with your life, worry about yourself, it sucks, but its true... I WILL SHOOT TO KILL!!!!"

I believe you, leprokahn, I really do.

UPDATE: The story is far more grim than I realized - it is reported that Terry Thompson, owner of the Muskingum County Animal Farm, set his animals loose then killed himself. Forty-eight animals were shot dead, including 18 Bengal tigers (perspective: the Bengal is the most numerous of the six surviving subspecies of tiger; but the most optimistic estimate of the total wild tiger population is 6,000). The other animals shot were: 17 lions, six black bears, two grizzlies, a baboon, a wolf and three mountain lions. Six animals were captured alive: a grizzly bear, three leopards, and two monkeys. Another monkey was eaten by one of the big cats.

Mistakes were made

One of the first things they tell you about when you start in journalism is the importance of avoiding passive constructions: never "This was said by X" but "X said this."

Rupert Murdoch has never been one for the conventional pieties, though: you could deduce that from his apology, published in British newspapers this morning, for the appalling newsgathering methods employed by journalists at the News of the World. "We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred," he says, and "We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected": whereas what he means is "We are sorry we did wrong" and "We are deeply sorry that we hurt people." Otherwise, it might look as though he thought someone else was doing the wrong, someone else was causing the pain. And he couldn't possibly think that, could he?

Oh.

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: 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.

Where we're at

David Cameron (right) and Nick Clegg hold their first joint press conference

My, that was an election, wasn't it? Not precisely exciting, as the media kept insisting it was - for that, we'd all have to have felt some deep emotional investment in the outcome; and for that to happen, we'd have had to feel that at least one of the parties was offering something new and different; and for that to happen, we'd have to have felt like they weren't treating us like idiots with their bland prescriptions for "change", their almost affected aversion to any concrete discussion of economic reality, and the party leaders' continual insistence on their affection for Britain. The vacuous irrelevance of that claim was brought home by Sky News's Adam Boulton, who capped a witless on-air spat with Alistair Campbell by whining "I actually care about this country." Quick, a quiz: "Patriotism is the last refuge of ..." — what? Is it a) "an idealistic and strictly impartial broadcaster"; b) "a wronged man, struggling to reclaim his reputation" or c) "a slimy prick"? (The answer is c), although I'm quoting from memory and can't guarantee that Dr. Johnson used those exact words.)

But it was, if not exciting, unpredictable. I was one of those who expected Labour to face electoral annihilation; and while my boyhood allegiance to the party has been loosened, I was relieved that it did as well as it did. By contrast, Andrew Sullivan - who had a terrible election, substituting wishful thinking about the Conservative Party's talents and chances for hardnosed analysis - wrote 10 days before the election: "There is nothing I'd rather see than the demise of the Labour party, the architect of the socialist state and the culture of class-hatred that I grew up in and that Thatcher alone helped partially dismantle." It's true! Before the Labour party sprang into existence, cultivating class-hatred in order to invent an electoral base that otherwise could never have existed, Britain was a harmonious nation whose major public health issue was that vast number of proles with heads scarred and depilated by over-enthusiastic forelock-tugging as the grateful lower-orders strove to express their appreciation of the paternal kindness constantly lavished on them by their betters. (By the way, I infer from that sentence that Sullivan thinks class-hatred is something felt exclusively by lower classes towards their betters - "the politics of envy" is the usual dismissive phrase. If he really does believe that, he ought to spend some time discussing education with middle-class parents in London.)

The oddest thing is how well things have turned out all round. The morning after the election, the consensus was that everybody had lost - the Tories didn't have an overall majority, the Liberal Democrats hadn't capitalised on their leader's supposedly marvellous (in reality, bland and trivial) performance in the leadership debates, Labour had seen its share of votes and seats slashed. A week on, Cameron is prime minister of a government with at least a paper majority; the Liberal Democrats have got a place at the table on surprisingly favourable terms; and Labour - having flirted dangerously with the idea of a minority coalition government of dubious legitimacy - has ended up shot of an unelectable leader and retiring into opposition with clean hands. All we need now is for Labour to shed some of its enthusiasm for markets and regain a little love for civil liberties and we're set.

Also, it would be good if the weather could stop being so unseasonably bloody cold.

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: Bear special

On Saturday afternoon in Bern, a 25-year-old man climbed into the new Bear Park - an extension of the old bear pit - and was attacked by one of the two resident European brown bears, Finn. Police shot Finn in the chest, driving him back into his enclosure. The man was bitten about the head, but is not in danger.

Several commenters on news stories I looked at ask why a tranquilliser dart was not used: I think the answer is that bullets work much faster than tranquillisers. In any case, it seems that Finn was not seriously hurt; he was shot with a fragmentation round, which did not penetrate any organs. The fragments are embedded in his flesh, though, and he is on antibiotics to prevent infection. Others wonder how the intruder managed to get in in the first place: according to some reports, he spent 10 minutes standing on a wall overlooking the park before jumping down, which is why police had time to fetch the rifle. (Incidentally, the Daily Mail report I link to there has a very complete set of photographs of the attack - not pleasant viewing.)

The intruder has been described, with frustrating vagueness, as "mentally handicapped". This is a familiar story. In September, Kenneth Herron, 21, who has a history of mental illness, climbed into the bear "grotto" at San Francisco Zoo; a bear sniffed his foot, but keepers fired a warning round and the bears scarpered. Herron was acquitted earlier this month of trespassing and disturbing a dangerous animal. He said that he had been told to enter the enclosure by the voice of Tyson Beckford in his head: Beckford is a male model and TV presenter, but as far as I am concerned his only claim to fame is that he was Derek Zoolander's second in his walk-off against Hansel.

I mentioned a few other cases back in June: former keeper with mental health problems found partly eaten in tiger enclosure at Naestved Zoo in Denmark; depressed woman bitten by polar bear after jumping into enclosure at Berlin Zoo. Bears predominate, perhaps because people expect them to be like Paddington or Mary Plain, or their beloved childhood teddies.

Fun fact: Finn's companion at Bern is called Björk.

Fun and possibly important fact: it's been reported that grizzlies moving north are now running into polar bears, competing for food and in at least one case interbreeding. The hybrid is known as a "grolar", which is at least better than a "pizzly". Almost every comment on the Times report is scorning the notion that climate change might be a factor.

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.

Highly evolved

Something very nasty - and very, very stupid - is going on in musty corners of the American psyche. Back in February, there was this cartoon (which, as I've already mentioned, was all the less forgiveable in view of the appalling nature of the incident that inspired it).

Then in June, after a gorilla escaped from Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, a local Republican activist, Rusty DePass, published a joke on his Facebook page: "I’M SURE IT’S JUST ONE OF MICHELLE’S ANCESTORS—PROBABLY HARMLESS". He swiftly apologised, sorta:

Busted by South Carolina political blogger Will Folks on his FITNEWS blog, DePass told WIS-TV in Columbia, “I am as sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in jest.”

Then he added, “The comment was hers, not mine,” claiming Michelle Obama made a recent remark about humans descending from apes. The Daily News could find no such comment.

Hendrik Hertzberg, in his New Yorker blog, analysed this beautifully:

Rusty starts by making his apology conditional (“if…”), sloughing off the blame onto p.c. killjoys. Then he pretends that his critics don’t understand that he was making what he considers a joke — that they think he seriously believes that Mrs. Obama is descended from a particular gorilla currently on the run from the Riverbanks Zoo, in Columbia, South Carolina.

And then, presumably after pausing to think, Rusty suggests that his insult to the First Lady is justified by the fact (never mind what she said or didn’t say, I’m sure it is a fact) that she believes in evolution.

And now we have Boston police officer Justin Barrett, suspended after sending an e-mail to a journalist about a report on the Henry Louis Gates Jr. affair. Apart from his disturbing suggestion that a criminal suspect has no rights, Barrett referred to Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" and "a bumbling jungle monkey", and suggested that an appropriate headline for the article (part of which he dismissed as "as pathetic as jungle monkey gibberish") would be "CONDUCT UNBECOMING A JUNGLE MONKEY - BACK TO ONE"S ROOTS".

Barrett also said "I am not a racist."

Tease by demons

A doubly Hitchcockian moment from Denmark, via William Gibson's Twitter feed (under the nom de tweet GreatDismal) and a Google translation:

A gracious woman escaped from a collision with a seagull, the other day when she was hit in the head while she sat in the Tivoli amusement new Vertigo.

It writes Berlingske Tidende.

The woman had scratches, gulls died.
Gull was flying at a very unfortunate time, when Vertigo approached a speed of 100 kmh.

The woman was hit near the eye, but she could leave with the sight of the inventory and scratches on his face after treatment with any of the Tivoli nurses. Gull died.

Have made changes
Tivoli regret the incident and has now changed to the surroundings around amusements, to avoid several accidents with birds

- We are very sorry that one of our guests have had such an unpleasant experience. We have the episode removed all the fish machines, facing the lake right next to Vertigo, as it is they who are the cause of the many gulls, says press coordinator Torben Plank the newspaper.

- But we will obviously keep the site under supervision in the future, adds Torben Plank.

Rarely birds driller
He does not believe that birds in entertainment is a general problem.

- I think I remember that there have been birds having tease by demons but it is not something we deal with, is the assessment of pressure coordinator.