Zoo Story (15 page)

In Berlin, where the crowds swooned over the hand-raising of a polar bear cub named Knut, a man climbed into the shallow pool of the polar bear exhibit in 2008 and tried to approach Knut, who by then was two years old and weighed 440 pounds. Keepers managed to lure the young bear away with a leg of beef before he reached the intruder. As the man was led away, soaked and cold, he explained that he had felt lonely and believed Knut was lonely too. A few months later, a teacher despairing over her inability to find a job climbed into the same exhibit and sloshed through the water toward several bears sunning themselves nearby. One, not Knut, promptly swam out and bit her arms and legs. She survived, but only after the staff pushed the bear away with poles and lowered a rope and harness to rescue her. Afterward, a spokesman noted that the woman had endangered not only herself but the staff and the bears. If necessary, he said, the zoo’s weapons team had been prepared to shoot the bear if that had proved the only way to save the woman.

A number of people have entered zoo enclosures to commit suicide. At the Lisbon Zoo, a man mourning the death of his son jumped into a pit with a pride of ten lions and was quickly dispatched by a lioness who broke his neck. In Washington, D.C., a drifter distraught over a custody battle for her children climbed down a nine-foot wall in 1995 and swam across a moat at the National Zoo to sacrifice herself in the jaws of two lions. A paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violent episodes, the woman told people she was the sister of Jesus Christ and that she and Jesus had grown up together in a house with President Clinton. She had once told a police officer to shoot her. The morning after she crossed the moat, a keeper discovered her body, face-up and mauled beyond recognition. Her arms and hands had been chewed off. On the blood-covered ground investigators found a barrette dislodged from her hair and a Sony Walkman containing a cassette of Christian singer Amy Grant’s
House of Love
.

At Lowry Park,
no one had ever heard a Code Two come across the walkie-talkies. As far as the staff could recall, a visitor had never fallen or climbed into any exhibit with a dangerous animal. A number of Code Ones had been declared over the years, but none where an animal or person was hurt. The primate department held the record for escapes. Chester was still infamous for his repeated ascents to the roof of the night house. From there it would have been no trouble for him to make a break into the rest of the zoo, but he never showed an interest. Perhaps he just coveted the glory of being able to gaze upon his fellow chimps from such a height. On another occasion, one of the Colobus monkeys had climbed onto a branch that reached too far across a moat and used it as a bridge to the public sidewalk. Covered in long black hair fringed with white, Colobus monkeys are striking, and this one gave visitors a jolt as it tore through the grounds, clearly distressed and lost. The monkey was soon retrieved, and the tree branch was trimmed.

The zoo’s most serious Code One had occurred in 1991 when the radios crackled with a report that one of the orangutans was out. Lex Salisbury, then the curator, worried for a moment that it might be Rango, the big male. But it turned out to be Rudy, a young female who inched her way up a rock façade and then scaled the roof of the orang building. Visitors who had watched her stage the breakout alerted the staff and then were evacuated. Once he arrived, Lex took over, as usual. He was confident that Rudy didn’t intend to attack anyone. She was new and was having trouble fitting in with the other orangutans and had only climbed out of the exhibit to escape another confrontation. Lex called to Rudy, holding out his hand, and she made her way down to him, ready to surrender. Obviously frightened, the orang needed comfort and climbed eagerly into his arms. She would not let go until he carried her back to the safety of her bedroom in the night house.

“As soon as I saw it wasn’t Rango,” Lex said afterward, “I knew it wasn’t going to be a problem, because the females we can walk right up to.”

In the zoo world, orangutans are known as escape artists. Typically much calmer and quieter than chimps, they are inquisitive and love to spend hours figuring out how to put things together or take them apart. Their species practices these engineering skills high in the jungle canopies of Indonesia, where they have been observed tying branches and vines together and manipulating the tension of saplings to move more easily through the trees. In zoos, they are famed for their ability to devise ingenious ways of slipping from their enclosures. According to Eugene Linden, author of
The Octopus and the Orangutan
, they sometimes make handcrafted tools to escape captivity. One orang used a wire to pick a lock, and another used a piece of cardboard to dislodge a security pin that held the doors of his cage closed. Others have proven their skill at unscrewing bolts. “Orangutans,” Linden writes, “have made insulating gloves out of straw in order to climb over electrified fences.”

In the twelve years since Rudy’s field trip on top of the orang building, there had been no particularly memorable escapes. A turkey got out one day, and guinea fowl were known to sneak from their pens and strut with impunity through the grounds, prompting the staff to send out an alert on their walkie-talkies.

“Code One, rooster,” they’d say, stifling giggles.

No one joked about the possibility of an elephant Code One, especially since the arrival of the four wild juveniles from Swaziland. Elephants were extremely unpredictable, especially ones who were unaccustomed to captivity, and their size and strength made them difficult to stop or bring down. When they broke free of their handlers at circuses or in parades, they sometimes went berserk, bulldozing through fences and into traffic, killing anyone in their path, even after they had been shot multiple times. To make sure that everyone on the staff knew what to do in case one of the elephants escaped, Brian French had posted a set of Code One recommendations on bulletin boards.

Do not approach animal, hide behind something, i.e. tree, vehicle, building, etc.

Do not fall down when getting away. This is what they look for when attacking.

Do not try to scare animal to direct it, it will take this as a challenge and likely charge. (Females will be more likely to complete the charge and males will likely stop about 10 feet short, but do not hold your ground, get out of sight, they can run 32 mph for about 10 minutes.)

If elephant is out of sight of its building, it will likely have to be shot, so all gun-trained staff (ACs, curators, vet) should be equipped with appropriate weapons. (We do have tranquilizers strong enough for elephants but can only be used in certain situations.)

Clearly the possibilities were awful. The perimeter fence, which ran only a few yards from the elephant building, would not present a serious obstacle. If an elephant went on a rampage, it would not take more than thirty seconds for the animal to break through and charge into neighboring backyards. By the time the weapons team was summoned, the elephant could easily be deep into the neighborhood.

In case anyone at Lowry Park needed reminding as to how dangerous elephants could be, a wall of the keepers’ break room was adorned with a memorial to Char-Lee Torre, the handler killed by an elephant. Char-Lee had worked at Lowry Park in the early 1990s, not long after the new zoo opened. Like so many keepers, she grew up with animals and was constantly rescuing cormorants and turtles and iguanas. When one of her animals died, she would preside over a funeral in the backyard. When she was hired, she had just received a degree in education from the University of South Florida. She was interested in conservation.

“The night before she died,” remembered her mother, Cheryl Pejack, “we were talking about her getting a bachelor’s degree in zoology.”

Char-Lee wanted to be the curator of a zoo. But at twenty-four, she knew she had to prove herself. Not long after she arrived at Lowry Park, she had been offered a chance to become an elephant trainer and work with Tillie, an Asian elephant who had spent most of her life in captivity. Around Tampa, Tillie was a minor celebrity. Aside from performing in shows every day at the zoo, she starred in television commercials for Bob’s Carpet Mart, where she was shown walking across carpet to prove the fabric’s toughness. At the time, Lowry Park’s elephant handlers worked side by side with the elephants, escorting them to and from the elephant building and guiding them through their daily performances, signaling them to raise their trunks and stand on their hind legs and turn in circles. For all her obedient displays, however, Tillie had begun acting erratically, repeatedly nudging and pushing Char-Lee.

The incidents followed a pattern frequently observed with Asian elephants contemplating a fatal attack on a keeper. According to a survey of elephant care managers from around the country, African elephants tend to lash out suddenly, while Asian elephants typically show more patience, waiting for the right moment to strike. Often they give warnings, shoving their keepers against a wall or flicking them with their tails. Sometimes the elephants are testing their keepers, assessing whether they’re weak enough to be nudged aside in the hierarchy; sometimes they simply don’t like the human assigned to care for them. New trainers, still learning the moods and personalities of their elephants, are particularly vulnerable. It would not have been surprising, then, if Tillie was contemplating a move against her new trainer. Char-Lee was not just the most inexperienced member of the elephant-care staff but also the youngest and smallest. And although she tried to be as commanding a presence as possible, Char-Lee exuded a gentleness that would have made it difficult for her to assert dominance over a thirty-three-year-old elephant. By the time she was introduced to Char-Lee, Tillie had spent three decades in captivity and was infinitely more experienced at judging the power dynamics between her species and humans. Tillie had been at Lowry Park, watching keepers come and go, for more than five years. Moved between institutions and owners most of her life, she had been studying a long line of handlers and had been assessing their strengths and weaknesses literally since Char-Lee was in kindergarten. How long would it have taken Tillie to size up her new trainer? A week? A day?

That spring, as Char-Lee struggled to assert her authority over Tillie, elephant-care managers across the country were sounding warnings at the alarming rate of deaths among keepers working free contact. The movement was already under way to abolish free contact and replace it with protected contact. Originally developed by animal behavioral specialists at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the new protocol radically challenged the methods humans had used to train elephants for thousands of years.

San Diego had decided to try the new safety protocol after the death of one of their own elephant keepers and after a particularly ugly scandal over the park’s treatment of its elephants. In 1988, the city erupted over the revelation that some of San Diego’s handlers had beaten a disobedient elephant for days with ax handles while she was chained and screaming. Backed up by their superiors, the handlers defended the beating by arguing that it had been necessary to bring a dangerous elephant to heel. Without physical discipline, they said, more keepers would die.

Protected contact, modeled after training methods used with killer whales, showed another way. Keepers would not step into an enclosure with the elephants. A barrier would always stand between them, allowing a handler to back safely away if an elephant became aggressive. Positive reinforcement and operant conditioning would guide every action. If an elephant followed a command, he would be rewarded with an apple. No more beatings. No more screaming. The worst thing that would happen to an uncooperative elephant would be for the keeper to withhold attention. Essentially, physical discipline would be replaced by a time-out. The elephant would always have a choice, and the keeper would no longer have to become the matriarch. The system was more humane for the elephants and much safer for the humans.

Skeptics scoffed, saying that elephants were not cocker spaniels who could be bribed with a biscuit. But a test run, conducted over months with some of San Diego’s most intractable elephants, proved otherwise. One subject, a twelve-thousand-pound African bull named Chico, was considered the park’s most dangerous elephant. He was so aggressive, his keepers risked their lives every time they went near him. He had been chained for years. Inside a zoo, caring for an elephant’s feet is essential. Their toenails and the thick skin on the soles of their feet require regular pedicures, because elephants tend to walk much shorter distances than they would in the wild, and their foot pads grow faster than they wear down. If the pads aren’t trimmed, the skin can crack and develop an infection that sweeps through the rest of the body—the leading cause of mortality in captive elephants. The San Diego staff was so terrified of Chico, no one had dared give him a pedicure in years.

When the team of behavioral specialists decided to try protected contact with Chico, they cut some openings, fitted with doors that locked, in the high gate of the African bull yard. A bar was welded over the top of the gate so Chico couldn’t get to them with his trunk. Then, using sliced apples and carrots and praise, they trained Chico to raise his feet, one at a time, into a cradle fashioned beside one of the openings in the gate, so the staff could reach his toenails and footpads. Sometimes the bull reverted to his old aggression and charged. When he was truly angry, he would lunge up onto the wall, roaring and rearing up like Godzilla. It didn’t matter. The keepers would back away and let him have his tantrum. When he calmed down, they’d lure him back with another treat and return to their work. By the time they were done, Chico had a pedicure on all four feet, and San Diego was ready to switch to protected contact for good. The behavioral specialists wrote papers detailing their methods and results—pamphlets for the revolution—and the word spread.

Resistance was apocalyptic. Veteran keepers insisted that the new protocol would not work, that it was unacceptable to erect a permanent barrier between them and the animals. They understood that free contact was dangerous, and believed it was their right to take that risk. Elephant handling was one of the few departments of the zoo where male keepers outnumbered the women, and the men responded the way male primates often do when confronted with a challenge. At San Diego, the elephants adapted quickly to the new system, but the humans did not. At first the old guard tried to ignore the specialist heading the conversion. Then they debated him. Then they vandalized his car. In the end, they lost anyway. Every keeper who had worked in free contact quit or was transferred. Soon the revolution reached other zoos, and protected contact gradually began to supplant the old system.