Zoo Story (11 page)

Herman’s antics soon transformed him into the most famous animal at the zoo. Hundreds of thousands of people stopped in front of his cage, some returning again and again, waving and shouting to get a reaction. Herman—or Big Herman, as some began calling him—rarely disappointed. Keepers who stood back and watched the chimp cavorting with the crowds noted the desperation under the manic displays. Herman was not just showing off. He was doing his best, day after day, year after year, to connect with the only species that truly interested him. Whatever wildness had remained inside him when he first arrived at Lowry Park was gradually slipping away. He had become a chimp who longed to be human.

One of his most faithful visitors was Ed Schultz, who loved checking up on his old friends. In keeping with his agreement with the zoo, the staff left Schultz a key to the cage, hanging nearby, so he could enter whenever he wanted. Schultz would sit on the cement floor and talk with Herman as the chimp searched his pockets for apples and bananas. Schultz was not afraid of Herman or Gitta. In fact, he was so at ease with the chimps that one day he actually fell asleep in the cage. When he awoke, Herman and Gitta were napping beside him.

“Whoa. What time is it?” he said, checking his watch. “Fellas, I gotta go.”

The adventures inside the cage didn’t last. A keeper told Schultz it was too much of a risk to allow him direct contact with the chimps, especially as they grew older. Schultz reluctantly agreed but continued to visit, spending so much time there that he soon signed up as a volunteer.

As the years stretched on, Herman’s charm gained him legions of admirers. When Jane Goodall visited Lowry Park in 1987, the renowned chimpanzee researcher instantly fell for him, praising his glossy coat, pleasant personality, and the “lovely, open expression on his face.” “Wonderful,” she called him. “Magnificent.” Along the way, she also offered some insight into Herman’s ostentatious display behavior in front of human alpha males.

“He wants to be the boss,” Goodall explained. “He doesn’t want you to be the boss.”

By then, the city of Tampa had closed the old zoo and was handing over the facility to the Lowry Park Zoological Society, a newly created nonprofit organization that would be running the zoo from that point on. Goodall was an ardent supporter of the new zoo and its expanded focus on endangered primates and other threatened species. She returned repeatedly to tour the remodeled grounds and to enthrall the public with heart-rending stories from her generational studies of chimps in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. Speaking one afternoon at a Girl Scout luncheon, she greeted her audience with a rousing imitation of a wild chimpanzee call.

Goodall, famed around the world, gave the remodeled zoo a fresh stamp of legitimacy. Even before the grand opening, she spoke glowingly of the more naturalistic setting where Herman and the zoo’s other chimps would soon be moved. The open exhibit, much bigger than his cage, was flanked by the canyon walls and featured a termite mound in which they could poke sticks in search of food, just as Gombe’s chimps did in the wild. Goodall was pleased that Herman would be able to walk in the elephant grass and feel the sun above his head.

In truth, the “naturalism” of the zoo’s new exhibits was a conceit. Like the rocks and the waterfall, the termite mound was not real. It didn’t even contain termites; instead it tempted the chimps with hidden caches of honey and jelly. As with so many other exhibits at zoos around the world, many of these design elements were carefully constructed props installed as much for the entertainment of the humans gazing into the exhibits as for the animals themselves. The public has long had a distaste for seeing animals in cages or enclosures with bars or other boundaries that symbolize captivity. Man-made waterfalls and other special effects, such as fake rocks made to appear weathered with air-brushed mineral stains and simulated bird droppings, encourage zoo visitors to feel as though they are witnessing wild creatures in their natural habitat and that in fact those creatures are roaming at will, perfectly happy to be there. The principle guiding such aesthetic touches has been called “imitation freedom.” Animals of any intelligence, presumably, are well aware of the difference. Certainly they are not fooled by the fake bird droppings. Some zoos are so determined to make their exhibits appear “natural” that they hide electrified wires around the trees and plants to prevent the animals from touching them.

The creators of Lowry Park’s new chimp exhibit had not taken their naturalistic designs that far. Electrified wires had been installed along the perimeter to discourage the chimps from climbing out, but no shocks awaited them in the tall grass of the moat. Though the exhibit was hardly a substitute for the verdant complexity of the African forest where Herman had been born, it was unquestionably a great improvement over the claustrophobic box in which he’d been trapped for the past decade and a half. The new exhibit was so radically different that it promised yet another life for Herman. Gitta, it turned out, would not get the chance to come with him. After so many years together, first with the Schultz family and then inside the cage, the female chimp fell ill with a viral infection and died shortly before the two of them were to be moved together.

Herman would not be alone for long. Other chimps were added to Lowry Park’s collection. For the first time since he was a baby, Herman became part of a chimpanzee social group, learning their habits and rhythms and negotiating his way atop the group’s hierarchy. On his first day in the new exhibit, as he stepped into the open air and walked onto the grass and the ground for the first time in years, Herman appeared tentative. Soon, though, he was climbing the exhibit’s tree and had claimed his perch on the rock shelf beside the waterfall, using the higher ground to survey both the crowds of human onlookers as well as the other chimps. In those first years, it was just him and a female named Rukiya and two sisters, Jamie and Twiggy, and a young male named Chester. As the elder male, Herman initially assumed control as the group’s alpha. But when Chester grew older and stronger, he challenged Herman and ousted him in a sudden coup. It didn’t take much, because Herman was not a typical alpha. Chester only had to attack Herman once, pummeling and biting him, and Herman immediately surrendered.

A counter coup was out of the question. Having been raised among humans, Herman was far too nice. He had no combat experience to guide him, no idea how to hold his own amid the violent upheavals at the heart of chimpanzee politics. In both the wild and captivity, male chimps vying for power will battle aggressively. Usually these conflicts do not result in serious injury, but on occasion rivals will resort to brutality. In one gruesome case at the Arnhem zoo in the Netherlands, two males apparently conspired to kill their group’s alpha one night when their keepers were gone. The next morning, the alpha was found in his cage with his toes and testicles bitten off, bleeding to death from numerous wounds. One primatologist, recounting the incident, called it “an assassination.” In Gombe, the forest where Jane Goodall conducts her research, males from one chimpanzee group have been repeatedly observed waging war on other chimp groups, hunting down and exterminating their weaker rivals. Males will kill females and their infants, eating their flesh. Sometimes, in the midst of these war raids, several male chimps will hold down an enemy while others dismember him.

“Their culture is just so aggressive—so naturally aggressive,” said Andrea Schuch, another primate keeper at Lowry Park. “It always surprises people.”

Even after seizing power, Chester continued to chase and slap Herman and the other chimps as a matter of routine, just to maintain his dominance. The primate staff didn’t want to interfere; they thought it best to let the chimps work out the power shift in their own way, provided the situation didn’t reach a point where the animals were getting hurt. Sometimes, when tensions between Herman and Chester grew high, the keepers would separate the two males, hoping to calm them. But the physical domination continued.

Lee Ann Rottman, still a young primate keeper at the time, remembers how upsetting those days were for Herman. It wasn’t just that he’d been overthrown; it was that he could not defend himself or the other chimps. Powerless to stop Chester from picking on the females, Herman showed signs of confusion. He would pace the exhibit, grinning with his mouth open, the chimp signal for fear.

“He didn’t know what to do,” Lee Ann said. “He would be very scared.”

Sometimes, when Chester was coming after him or one of the other chimps, Herman would turn to any keepers who happened to be nearby and reach his hand toward them. For a chimp who identified so closely with humans, the woeful gesture must have made sense. He had no way of comprehending the keepers’ reluctance to intervene. All he knew, from his decades at the zoo, was that people were his friends. Surely they would save him. Surely they would help him protect the others.

Chester’s behavior was to be expected of an alpha chimp. In many ways, his reign brought new life to the group. He was full of energy and verve, and unlike Herman, he was keenly interested in breeding with the chimp females. Still, he was a problem for the staff. He had a habit of cupping fresh droppings in his hand and hurling them at visitors. Even more disturbing, he displayed a talent for climbing up the rock wall beside the waterfall and eluding the electrical wire that ran across the top. He never wandered far. He seemed content to stand on the roof of the chimps’ night house, and when he saw the keepers coming, he simply climbed back down into the exhibit. Still, these excursions did not bode well. What if Chester really got out and hurt someone? A year or so later, he was shipped to another zoo, and Herman reclaimed his position at the top of the hierarchy.

The possibility of an escaped animal was something Lowry Park took seriously. The keepers communicated all day on walkie-talkies and had different codes for different emergencies. Code One signified that one of the animals had gotten out of its enclosure. Code Two meant a visitor had fallen or climbed into an exhibit. Code Three meant a venomous snake had bitten a keeper. The staff prepared for these emergencies, especially Code Ones. They had protocols for species on the loose—what to do if it was a wolf or a clouded leopard—and drills to practice carrying out those protocols. The zoo even had a weapons team, made up of keepers who were trained by law enforcement to use firearms, if other measures failed.

Lee Ann often considered what it would be like to hear the crackle of the radio and then the words, “Code One, chimp.” Inside her head, she would play through the scenarios. If Herman got out, what would she do? What if it was Rukiya or Twiggy? Lee Ann knew each of the chimps’ personalities better than some parents know their own children. She was fairly sure that she would feel safe approaching Rukiya if she were loose. Among the staff, the joke was that if Herman ever escaped, he’d just find a blond visitor and strip off her clothes. Still, the keepers knew they had to be careful, and never entered the exhibit with the chimps except in emergencies. Lee Ann did not believe she had anything to fear from Herman, either. But there was no telling what another chimp might do.

In the primate department, some preferred the orangs. Some had a thing for the lemurs. Lee Ann’s heart, always, was with Herman and his group. Showing the chimps to a newcomer inside the zoo, she would rhapsodize about how handsome Herman was, how smart and thoughtful and considerate of the other chimps, how he managed to be both strong and gentle.

“If I could meet a man like Herman,” she said, “I would marry him.”

For his part, Herman was deeply attached to Lee Ann, whose hair fell somewhere along the border between light brown and blond. He thought of her and the other female primate keepers as his. Once, when Lee Ann’s father visited the zoo, he placed a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, and Herman exploded, screaming and pounding his body against the walls of the exhibit. Lee Ann wasn’t offended. She understood that chimps were extremely emotional and that whatever they felt usually flashed straight to the surface. She identified with this trait, because sometimes she felt overwhelmed by her emotions too.

In the years since Chester had been sent away, Herman had ruled unchallenged over Lowry Park’s other chimps with a soft touch unusual for alphas of his species. If he needed to keep the others in line, he would shriek at them and sometimes even chase them. Afterward, the keepers noticed, he would always reconcile. He was their protector and leader. When a baby chimp named Alex was introduced into the group in 1998, Rukiya became his surrogate mother. But it was Herman who refused to leave Alex’s side when the baby got his head stuck in some netting.

Not long after Alex joined the group, another chimp—a male, a few years older than Herman—was brought to the zoo from another facility. Bamboo was a pathetic sight. He had almost no teeth and was therefore vulnerable, and when he arrived at Lowry Park, he was obviously shaken and unsure of himself. Another dominant male might have ignored him or beaten him to put him in his place. Herman welcomed Bamboo and accepted him before any of the others did.

Always, Herman was different. When new keepers were hired, he welcomed them by extending his fingers through openings in the mesh, offering to put the fingers in their mouth. In chimp language, this was an expression of faith, demonstrating that he believed the keepers would not bite off the digits. He wanted them to understand that he trusted them, and that therefore they could trust him.

At times, Herman seemed uncannily human, understanding things that eluded the other chimps. His unusual relationship with Dr. Murphy was a good example. Like many of the animals at Lowry Park, most of the chimps disliked the veterinarian because they associated him with the sting of a tranquilizer dart and other indignities required for their medical care. One day, Murphy appeared in the chimp night house with a tranquilizer gun so he could attend to Herman. Murphy was a good shot and almost never missed. But this time, his aim was off. The other chimps would have run and hid. Herman just picked up the dart, walked over to the mesh, and handed it back to Murphy so he could try again.