Zoo Story (14 page)

“I don’t know why we call them cold-blooded anyway,” he’d say, headed toward the herps building. “Most of the time, their blood’s about eighty-eight degrees. Do you think that’s cold? I don’t think that’s cold.”

The preceding is only an approximate rendering of what he said. He was talking fast and walking even faster, making it impossible to catch every word. Wait. He wasn’t done yet.

“I think we should call them ectotherms.”

He explained that the term referred to any animal whose body temperature matched the temperature of its surroundings.

This was Dustin’s crusade. He wanted the warm-blooded world to embrace ectotherms. He understood it wouldn’t be easy, but he was in no hurry. He and Dan and the rest of their staff were biding their time, working under the radar on behalf of all reviled species: feeding bunnies to the pythons, urging the frogs and spiders to increase their numbers, slipping another turtle into public view.

The sun was barely
in the sky when the keepers ducked into the night houses to start the daily routine.

In the primate department, a cluster of howler monkeys eager to be let out whooped in rhythmic, escalating waves that echoed off the cement block walls. A few feet away, in their den, the Colobus monkeys stayed silent, unable to compete with the howlers’ volume. But the alpha, Grimaldi, declared his presence with an emphatic stream from his bladder.

“Lovely, Grim,” said a keeper named Kevin McKay, mixing a breakfast of mashed bananas and ground-up vitamins.

In the Asia department, Carie Peterson sweet-talked Enshalla and Eric, as always, and said hello to Naboo, the male Indian rhino, and teased Madison, one of the clouded leopards, for being so shy.

“You’re such a crazy girl,” Carie said.

A pair of bar-headed geese honked and complained when she went into their exhibit to rake. Their names were Ken and Barbie, and Carie insisted that they were the meanest animals in the zoo. In the wild, their species soared above Mount Everest. At Lowry Park, where their wings are pinioned, they could only nip at their keepers’ ankles.

“Stop,” Carie told them, gently nudging them away with the rake. “You’re brats.”

Inside the venomous snake room, above the copperhead and the rattlers and the young crocodiles, Led Zeppelin wailed on. There was something perfect about the union of the thunderous music and the deadly species. Also something slightly supernatural, since Led Zeppelin always seemed to be blaring from the radio on the shelf.

A few feet away, in the dart-frog closet, Dan Costell shuffled between the terrariums to check on the powder blues. Looking under the breeding huts, he stopped and smiled.

“Eggs,” he said.

Carefully, he transferred the clutch to one of the deli cups. As his hands reached into the terrarium, the nearby frogs looked extra tiny. He didn’t have to worry about them touching him. In the wild, poison-dart frogs carry paralytic alkaloids on their skin that can indeed be deadly; one species, the golden poison-dart frog, is said to be so toxic that a single frog can poison fifty men. In captivity, Dan explained, poison-dart frogs did not secrete the toxins, because they were no longer eating ants in the rain forest that had consumed the plants from which the toxins are synthesized.

When Dan talked about the frogs, he usually referred to them by their scientific names. The bumblebees, bright yellow and black, were
Dendrobates leucomelas.
The powder blues were
Dendrobates azureus.
He distinguished the individuals by their size and markings; if necessary, he could refer to the numbers under which they’d been registered at the zoo. What he pointedly did not do was name them.

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m no bunnyhugger.”

Aside from their respective departments, many of Lowry Park’s keepers unofficially divided themselves into two groups. There were bunnyhuggers, and there were non-bunnyhuggers. Bunnyhuggers spoke in baby talk to the animals, remembered their birthdays and baked them cakes, gave them wrapped presents at Christmas. More than anything else, perhaps, bunnyhuggers relished thinking up new names. They named the animals after candy bars, famous gangsters, characters on
Seinfeld
and
Will & Grace
, even one another. Naboo the rhino? Anakin the howler monkey? Bunnyhugger names, given in tribute to a much-admired veteran keeper who worshipped all things
Star Wars
.

Sometimes bunnyhuggers grew giddy with naming. In the Asia department, Carie christened every creature that wandered into view. She had even become attached to an anole—a small brown lizard commonly seen in Florida, often sunning themselves on sidewalks—that had recently staked a claim to a log inside the tiger dens. Carie named him Timmy.

“Everybody’s named,” she said. “Every single plant. Every emu.”

In the herps department, almost everyone was a certified non-bunnyhugger who scoffed at the notion of naming frogs or snakes.

“I just can’t see a reason,” said Dan.

Beneath the surface of this seemingly frivolous debate, an important question simmered. Namely, how should we relate to nature? The bunnyhuggers were drawn to whatever aspects of their animals reminded them of something in themselves. They watched Enshalla dominating male tigers, and they identified with her. They saw the siamangs bonding for life—even holding hands when they went to the clinic together—and it reassured them that enduring love was possible. The non-bunnyhuggers reveled in the otherness of their creatures. The very qualities in the animals that terrified and disgusted other people, the non-bunnyhuggers loved.

The bunnyhuggers and the non-bunnyhuggers didn’t sit around the break room and preside over philosophical discussions on Man and Nature. Instead they waged guerrilla warfare. The herps keepers resorted to shock and awe. They dropped spiders on unsuspecting shoulders; they slipped the molt of an emperor scorpion inside a bunnyhugger’s work boot. The bunnyhuggers retaliated by sneaking into the herps office and plastering Dustin’s and Dan’s lockers with flower power signs and Barbie stickers. They coddled the feeder mice that the herps keepers saved for the snakes, brightening the bare tanks of the doomed rodents with wheels and tunnels and little mouse houses, anything to make their short lives more interesting.

Back and forth the battle raged. One day, Dan abducted Carie’s lizard, Timmy. “She cried so much,” Dan said, “that we gave it back.” Carie denied that she had cried. She also insisted she did not yelp when she found one of the emperor scorpion molts in her boot.

Seeking vengeance, Carie told anyone who would listen that Dan was a closet bunnyhugger. Her evidence? The tenderness he bestowed on his poison-dart frogs.

“He makes houses for them out of coconut. He talks about them like they’re his little kids.”

Dan threatened
to remove arms from the sockets of anyone who suggested Carie was right. Still, he acknowledged that he was not immune to the charms of warm-blooded creatures with names and personalities. He was especially fond of Bamboo, the oldest member of the chimp group. Even though Herman looked out for him, Bamboo remained the lowest-ranking adult. The three females still chased him and vented their frustrations at him.

When he wasn’t busy in the herps building, Dan liked to stop behind the chimp exhibit and visit with Bamboo. When Bamboo saw him, the chimp ran up to the fence, head bobbing in excitement. Knowing that Bamboo needed a friend, Dan told him to hang in there.

“You’ll be all right,” said Dan. “Don’t let the girls push you around.”

A Code One drill, again. This time for a black bear.

The Florida mammals department only had one at the moment, a female named Ladybug, but a new male was due to arrive in a few days, and Virginia Edmonds thought it would be a good idea to do a run-through, especially since there were several new keepers who didn’t know what to do if one of the bears got out and ambled in their direction. Virginia didn’t worry too much about Ladybug, because she was a low-key bear who had never shown the slightest sign of wanting to leave her exhibit, a placid swath of woods and thick grass, with a big dead log where she rooted for grubs and napped for hours.

The only way Ladybug was likely to escape was if someone accidentally left a gate open. Even if that did happen, she was likely to walk right back into her exhibit without a fuss if her keepers approached her slowly and waved an orange within range of her nostrils.

“Ladybug likes oranges and peanut butter,” Virginia explained to a handful of keepers, all of them standing in a circle beside the black bear exhibit. “She’s really easygoing.”

As any keeper quickly learned, animals responded to different types of bribes. Some, such as Herman, were tempted by the promise of human attention. Others, such as Ladybug, followed their stomachs; keepers referred to such animals as “food-motivated.” Since the other bear had not yet arrived at the zoo, Virginia knew nothing about his temperament. All she knew about Sam, the new male, was that he had been captured in the wild as an orphaned cub. If food failed to compel him, Virginia told the keepers, they might have to resort to pepper spray or air horns to frighten him into retreating back toward his exhibit.

“Would a hose turn him around?” asked one keeper.

Virginia nodded. Sometimes, when animals attacked one another in their displays, the staff separated them with a high-pressure hose. “It’s usually a pretty good deterrent,” she said, “except for when you have otters in a pair fighting. They don’t care.”

If either Sam or Ladybug slipped out, it would be imperative to get them back quickly, one way or the other, before they had any chance of barreling through the perimeter fence. This was more for their well-being than the public’s. Black bears tend to be solitary and rather shy. But any large animal that stumbles into a city neighborhood runs a high risk of getting hit by a car or dying in a hail of police bullets, even if the animal hasn’t so much as growled. Lowry Park’s Code One protocols instructed the zoo’s own weapons team—including not just Virginia, but Lee Ann Rottman and Dan Costell—to kill any potentially dangerous animal before it managed to leave the grounds and enter the surrounding neighborhood.

The idea of shooting down Ladybug, or any other animal in the zoo’s collection, was almost too upsetting for Virginia or the rest of the weapons team to contemplate. The assistant curators scheduled the Code One drills regularly, rotating between species, so that their staffs were well versed in all the ways to safely return an animal to its exhibit without resorting to lethal force. Zoos around the world have similar protocols, each adapted to the specific animals in their collections and other variables dictated by their layout and location.

At the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, the staff prepares for a breakout by one of their polar bears, the species known among zookeepers as among the most likely to kill humans when confronted face-to-face. The keepers stage drills twice a year to simulate a polar bear escaping through a damaged exhibit during an earthquake.

Natural disasters, the ultimate rebuke to human assumptions of control, have a way of obliterating a zoo’s defenses. In the predawn hours of July 17, 1969, a torrential rainstorm flooded the polar bear moat at the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago and enabled seven of the hulking predators to swim to solid ground. At that hour, the zoo was still virtually empty of humans, but the other exhibits teemed with living snacks the bears could have easily devoured. “However,” writes Vicki Croke, who chronicled the escape in
The Modern Ark
, “these were the days when zoogoers fed the animals, and the bears headed directly for the snack stand. They ripped open the ice-cream chest and cash register. And after gorging on chips, marshmallows, and ice cream, they were herded back into their enclosure by a Volvo, a pickup truck, and a few blasts from a shotgun.”

When Hurricane Andrew roared through south Florida in 1992, much of the Miami Metrozoo was smashed to rubble, even though its building had been designed to withstand winds of up to 120 miles an hour. The free-flight aviary had literally been blown away and with it several hundred rare birds, including hornbills and fairy bluebirds. The majority of the zoo’s most dangerous animals were secure, having been locked up before the Category 5 storm made landfall, but the crocodile pool was jammed with so much debris that the keepers literally couldn’t see if the man-eating reptiles were still in the water. Later, one croc was discovered strolling in a service hallway. Other animals roamed aimlessly among the ruins. An antelope was seen walking through what was left of the administration building. A 450-pound Galápagos tortoise was recovered from a nearby street. A state trooper sighted an argus pheasant on the Florida Turnpike and returned it to the zoo in the backseat of his cruiser. A group of monkeys was caught while running down Coral Reef Drive, but it was later discovered that the storm had liberated them not from the zoo but from a nearby primate research center.

Lowry Park, located a short distance from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, had been buffeted by tropical storms in the past, but had never taken a direct hit from a monster like Andrew. The zoo’s hurricane plan called for most of the animals, including the birds, to be evacuated into the zoo’s night houses and into the underground chambers of the manatee viewing center. Even so, there was no guarantee that the manatees would be spared from whatever was cast into their pools or that the buildings could withstand a sustained assault by Category 5 winds. The possibilities of such a catastrophe were sobering. But if an animal were going to be freed from an exhibit at Lowry Park, it was likely to be due not to nature’s fury but to human error. The majority of zoo escapes, all around the world, result from mistakes made by keepers or by the architects who design the barriers. In recent decades, as cages have been replaced by open exhibits bounded by moats and walls instead of metal bars, the challenge of containing the inhabitants has become more complex. Sometimes zoo designers underestimate how high a certain species can leap or how well it can swim. No matter how carefully the humans draw their blueprints, they cannot predict every variable that might motivate an animal to act in unexpected ways that propel it into the world waiting on the other side of the moat.

In one of the more disturbing animal escapes of recent years, a Siberian tiger named Tatiana scaled the wall of its grotto at the San Francisco Zoo just as the zoo was closing on Christmas Day. She attacked three young men, killing one and severely injuring another. Calling 911 from his cell phone, one of the men frantically pleaded with a dispatcher to send the paramedics to help his brother, who was bleeding from bite wounds. Both of them were outside one of the zoo’s snack bars, but the manager would not let them inside because he believed they were drunk and had been fighting. The dispatcher explained that the paramedics could not enter the zoo grounds until police went in first and located the tiger.

“What do you mean?” said the caller. “My brother’s going to die out here!”

“OK, calm down, all right? . . . I’ll stay on the line with you. If the paramedics get hurt, they cannot help your brother, so you need to calm down and—”

“Send more paramedics, then! . . . Can you fly a helicopter right here? Because I don’t see no ambulance here.”

As officers made their way to the scene, they found the dead man on the ground outside Tatiana’s exhibit, his throat gashed, and a trail of blood that led to the snack bar, where the seriously wounded man and his brother had fled as the brother called for help. By now the tiger had stalked the two survivors to the outside of the snack bar and was standing over the wounded man. As the officers approached, she pounced on him again and continued biting him until the officers distracted her and got her to move away before they opened fire and killed her.

The San Francisco Zoo and police investigators scrambled to piece together some explanation of how Tatiana had managed to climb over a wall that had held her inside for years. Reports quickly surfaced that the three young men might have antagonized the tiger. Shortly before the attack, two of them had been seen taunting lions in a nearby exhibit. An attorney for the men denied they had done anything wrong, but later, one of the men acknowledged to his father that he and the others had stood on a railing in front of the tiger’s wall, yelling and waving at Tatiana. In the blizzard of news articles that followed, zoo officials theorized that perhaps the men had dangled a branch or even their legs over the wall, giving Tatiana something to grab. Chunks of concrete had been found in her hind claws, suggesting the intensity of her determination to climb the wall. It became clear that the zoo bore some responsibility, however, when investigators announced that the wall was only twelve and a half feet high—barely half the height the zoo had previously claimed and several feet shorter than the AZA recommended for tiger enclosures.

The zoo drew more criticism that March when a team of AZA inspectors completed a report showing that the zoo was seriously understaffed and generally unprepared for a serious Code One. Although the inspectors praised the zoo’s response once it became clear that a tiger was on the loose, the report laid out the failings that had combined to turn the incident into such a nightmarish muddle: the refusal of the snack bar manager to give the two injured men safe haven inside the restaurant; confusion over how many tigers had escaped, or whether it was a tiger or a lion; rusted and broken cages in the night houses that had almost resulted in the escape of a snow leopard earlier that year; employees who either didn’t know or didn’t follow the Code One protocols; others who had left their walkie-talkies back in their offices and therefore had not heard the warning. Because it was Christmas, almost all of the staff had been sent home early. Only two keepers and one vet tech remained on the grounds, and one of those keepers—a member of the weapons team—did not have keys to the room where a shotgun was stored. Once he got the shotgun, he could not find the keys for a zoo vehicle to drive to the site of the attack. The inspectors saved their most damning criticism for the final paragraph:

It appeared to the inspection team that the zoo lacks enough supervisory personnel in the animal care department to effectively train, oversee, and enforce existing policies and procedures. The zoo is too often chasing problems rather than proactively addressing known concerns. This will require a shift in culture and the supervisory and maintenance to make it happen.

The message was clear: An understaffed zoo with untrained employees, attempting to watch over dangerous animals, was a tragedy waiting to happen. If more keepers had been on duty late that day, one might have seen the young men teasing the lions and kicked them out of the zoo before they moved on to the tiger grotto. Nobody would have died. Tatiana would have been called back into her night house to sleep through what remained of Christmas.

On the night of
the tiger escape, the AZA’s top public relations official received an emergency call from the San Francisco Zoo’s P.R. man, alerting him to the bad news. The AZA spokesman, an expert in crisis management, was just leaving a holiday celebration at his in-laws’ house, but he and the San Francisco spokesman immediately began coordinating a response to the coming deluge of media phone calls. For the AZA, and for all zoos, a high-profile escape resulting in the death of a human being was a catastrophe that struck at the core of their mission. For years, the AZA had been working to counter the critiques of PETA and other animal-rights groups who dismissed zoos as wretched prisons and publicized lists of all the occasions when animals had broken free and attacked. From the organization’s viewpoint, almost nothing could be more horrendous than an escaped Siberian tiger slashing one man’s throat and then stalking another in front of a snack bar.

A high-profile escape was much more damaging than a barrage of scare headlines. Such incidents undermined the promise on which all zoos are built and the assumptions that all visitors embrace as they enter the front gates. Whenever an animal unlatched a gate or leaped a fence, it breached the allegedly impenetrable divide between the spectators and the spectacle, proving that the humans were not in control and that the animals retained a will and a determination that could not always be thwarted. Every animal escape, even with a species that was relatively harmless, was a slap at our claim of dominion.

The truth was, animals broke out of their enclosures more often than zoos were eager to admit. Gorillas burst through doors of their night houses. Elephant calves squeezed through the bars of their stalls. In the majority of cases, the animals were returned safely without injury to them or anyone else. The San Francisco tiger case was the first time a zoo escape had resulted in the death of a visitor at any AZA institution since the group had been founded in 1974. One of the most unsettling things about the case was that the young men had stepped to the edge of the barrier between themselves and the tiger and essentially dared her to cross it. Convinced of their own inviolability, they seemed unaware that they were at the precipice, taunting death.

Humans are drawn to danger every day in zoos around the world. Like the young men in San Francisco, many feel at liberty to lean over the railings and yell. Sometimes they throw things, just to provoke a response. Other visitors stand in silence, mesmerized by the awareness that they are staring across a frontier between life and death, the past and future, the noise of their own interior monologues and the unmapped worlds inside the animals. At that frontier, primal energy surges. A few people, overtaken with mania, climb across the rail and into the exhibits, compelled to either embrace nature or conquer it. In
The Looming Tower
, Lawrence Wright tells how Taliban fighters became possessed with such a sense of omnipotence after the fall of Kabul that one jumped into a bear’s cage at the city zoo and cut off the bear’s nose, “reputedly because the animal’s ‘beard’ was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion’s den and cried out, ‘I am the lion now!’ The lion killed him. Another Taliban soldier threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived the Taliban rule.”