Zoo Story (6 page)

Herman reigned through the death of the old Lowry Park and the birth of the new. He still executed handstands and blew kisses. Now, though, the flirtatious behavior had evolved into something beyond mere performance; underneath the playfulness ran a streak of possessiveness and frustrated desire. He thought of the female keepers as his, and if he spied a man standing next to one of them in front of the chimp exhibit, a clump of dirt was certain to fly in the interloper’s direction.

“We better move out of sight,” the keeper would say.

To anyone who lingered in front of the exhibit for more than a few minutes, it became obvious that Herman suffered from an identity crisis. For all his intelligence and personality, he did not appear to fully understand that he was a chimp. His early years, with a human family who had clothed him and diapered him and taught him to sit at the dinner table, had left him in profound confusion, and his years of isolation in the cage had increased this confusion and imbued him with an unceasing need for human attention. Though his alpha status conferred upon him sexual privileges, he never tried to breed with the three female chimps available to him. Instead he was attracted only to human females, preferably athletic blondes. Herman demonstrated this cross-species fixation every day. When female keepers greeted him in the mornings, he often became aroused, especially if he happened to glimpse the skin of their shoulders under their Lowry Park polo shirt. Herman had a thing for shoulders, which explained his fetish for tank tops.

The misdirected libido was disastrous for Herman, since it prevented him from ever mating or reproducing or joining fully with his own species. Surrounded by other chimps, he remained fundamentally disconnected. The female keepers understood this and felt for him. They found it a little odd to be regarded as a sex object by a chimp, but they didn’t make a big deal of it. They respected Herman, quirks and all, because he had so many other admirable qualities that far outweighed his obsession. From watching him with the other chimps, the keepers knew he was a benevolent leader, ready to reach out to any chimp who was vulnerable. He was a good listener. He was loyal and forgiving and patient. Looking into his brown eyes, they had no doubt that he possessed a soul.

Being the alpha was not easy. “Drama queens,” the keepers called the chimps, and for good reason. They were always cycling through another episode of their daily soap opera. They shrieked and screamed, raising such bedlam it seemed impossible there were only six of them. They chased one another in circles, arms flailing, and jumped into the dry moat that curved along the front of the exhibit. They climbed the high mesh wall at the back and cried out to anyone who would listen. The staff almost never knew what triggered these outbursts, but usually they could count on Herman to resolve them. He had a gift for keeping the peace and for observing the social formalities. He knew when to stomp after the others and intimidate them into submission, and when to stand back and let them release the tension on their own.

Eventually the chimps would calm down, grooming one another and climbing into the tree at the center of the exhibit to gaze toward the horizon. But even when they were quiet, the emotions percolated, elemental and palpable, sometimes even frightening. It was like a force that could barely be contained.

Herman’s job was to monitor that force and channel it. He had done it for longer than almost anyone at the zoo could remember. As long as he kept doing it, everything would be fine.

The queen entered
from the back, through a hidden corridor that led to the waiting eyes of her public. The Sumatran tiger had been lounging in her private quarters, in the suite of secret rooms where she was born, where she saw her mother for the last time, where she now passed her nights and the idle hours of her mornings, preening and flying into rages at her minders, where she toyed with any males misguided enough to believe that they could possess her. Now she was ready for a walk.

A door slid open, and Enshalla appeared, cloaked in a calm both hypnotic and terrifying. She moved through dappled shadows and into the sun, every step a promise, every breath a warning. She padded across ground littered with bones and stained with blood, past the large picture window where admirers stood with mouths agape, so close they could see the emerald of her eyes and watch the shoulder muscles shift beneath her stripes.

“Here kitty-kitty-kitty!” a man called out.

Enshalla ignored the taunt. She raised her great head and sniffed and tested the air to see if her attendants had left her a token of their devotion. They loved to please her. Knowing that tigers revel in different scents, the keepers would venture into the exhibit in the early morning, when Enshalla was still locked away in her den, and spray the area with dashes of cinnamon, peppermint, even perfume. She preferred the muskier brands. Her favorite was Obsession.

That August, the staff was introducing Enshalla to a male Sumatran named Eric. The zoo hoped that eventually the two tigers would breed, but the outlook was not promising. Eric was only four years old and sexually naïve. Enshalla, almost twelve, was more experienced and confident. Born at Lowry Park, she viewed the tiger exhibit as her territory and ruled it with the titanic force of her personality. She was perhaps the most beautiful creature at the zoo and certainly one of the most fierce. She was imperious, independent, hostile to the expectations of not just humans but other tigers.

By human standards, Enshalla’s family history was like a Greek tragedy. Her mother and father had been brought from zoos on two continents and paired at Lowry Park. Her mother had accidentally killed one of her first cubs. Later, when Enshalla was still young, her father had slain her mother in front of a crowd of onlookers.

There was no way to know if Enshalla had any memory of her parents. She seemed to glide through her days in a state of perpetual now, unconcerned with the past and unburdened with any awareness of the future. Words have not been invented to adequately describe how she moved, though the poet Ted Hughes came close when he wrote about another big cat whose stride, he said, contained “wildernesses of freedom.” Everything Enshalla did, even the way she curled on the ground for an afternoon nap, radiated both fluid grace and a sense of terrible power.

The staff was enthralled with her. They adored her haughtiness, the deep orange of her coat and the dark black of her stripes and the long white fur that ringed her neck like a mane, the daintiness with which she approached the water at the front of her exhibit, trying not to get too wet. Sumatrans have webbed toes and tend to be excellent swimmers, but Enshalla usually preferred to stay dry. Her delicacy fooled no one. She was remarkably aggressive, even for a tiger, and especially for one born into captivity. Her keepers noted her skill as a huntress, even within the confines of her enclosure. They held their breath every time a neighborhood bird was foolish enough to land in her exhibit and linger.

Over the years, various suitors had been brought to the zoo for Enshalla’s approval. With each of them, there had been no doubt who was in charge. The male Sumatrans had the advantage of size and brute strength. But Enshalla, relatively petite at 180 pounds, dominated them all with the force of her will, making it clear that the exhibit was hers and that she would do as she pleased. If she was in estrus, she would warm to them, chuff at them, rub her cheeks against theirs, roll playfully at their feet—give all the signals that she was ready to mate. But when they responded, she ran away or even turned on them. Ignoring the fact that they could easily have killed her, she chased them and cornered them and stalked them as though they were her prey.

Now it was Eric’s turn to test her defenses. The staff had not yet released the tigers together into the exhibit to mate. They were letting the couple get acquainted slowly, putting the two of them in separate but adjoining dens in the night house so they could eye and smell each other up close without either of them getting hurt. Lethal violence seemed unlikely from the new suitor. Eric had arrived on loan from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and was still getting acclimated to his new environment. He looked and sounded ferocious enough. When he growled, his lips pulled back to reveal canines longer than human fingers. But compared to other male tigers, Eric so far seemed relaxed. Too relaxed, perhaps, for the task before him. Enshalla bristled with a menace he could not muster. Against her cunning and experience, the young virgin hardly stood a chance.

The staff remained hopeful that Eric would find some way to assert himself and overcome Enshalla’s resistance. Like so many species at the zoo, Sumatran tigers were rapidly dwindling toward extinction. With fewer than six hundred left in the wild, they were the single most endangered subspecies of tigers and one of the most critically endangered animals on the planet. If Sumatrans were to survive, they needed to reproduce, either in their native forests in Indonesia or in institutions such as Lowry Park. As an added bonus, it would also be a boon for the zoo’s bottom line. Animal babies of many species tended to be a good draw at the box office. But tiger cubs, with their soft fur and tiny growls, were golden.

Nobody at Lowry Park was crass enough to talk about this out loud. Nobody had to.

The keepers pairing Enshalla and Eric weren’t thinking about filling Lowry Park’s coffers. What they wanted, more than anything, was to populate the planet with more tigers. It wasn’t even up to the keepers, or the zoo, to decide whether Enshalla and Eric could breed. Before putting them together, Lowry Park had to seek permission from a program that oversees the welfare of endangered species in captivity. The program was called the Species Survival Plan, and it was run by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Under the AZA’s direction, there were plans for dozens of different species in captivity—not just Sumatran tigers, but frogs, cranes, giant pandas, lowland gorillas—and the plans tracked thousands of animals’ reproductive histories to make sure that no single individual’s DNA was over-represented. Since neither Enshalla nor Eric had any offspring so far, there had been no problem getting permission to put them together. If the tigers produced a litter of cubs, it would be good for the genetic future of their species. And for Lowry Park’s profits.

At the zoo, higher aspirations overlapped with economic motives. The desire to save the planet was woven with the necessity of economic survival. The zoo was a nonprofit organization, but it still had to earn its way. In that summer of 2003, the zoo had embarked on its expansion and was building the new exhibits for the elephants and the other African species. To make all these things happen, Lowry Park needed more money, more attractions, more paying customers pouring through the gate. A few baby tigers added to the mix wouldn’t hurt.

Before that could happen, Enshalla would have to decide if she was willing to surrender. It would be her choice, not Eric’s, and at the moment it seemed almost impossible.

Gazing down at Enshalla
from the boardwalk, watching her stealthily crawl toward a sparrow, it was easy to understand the ambivalence so many people felt toward zoos. To know that she had spent her entire life in captivity, on the other side of the world from the peat swamp forests where she belonged, it was impossible not to feel a sense of loss. But watching Enshalla triggered wonder as well. Suddenly she was not just some vague notion of a tiger, a picture in a book. She was a Sumatran, one of the few remaining in the world, and the untamed reality of her—the specificity and physicality and undeniability of her—made onlookers catch their breath.

The same tangle of reactions twisted inside visitors as they stood in front of Herman’s exhibit and watched him with the other chimps. The conflict nagged at them as they walked through the rest of the zoo and saw all the animals collected inside these walls. Joy vied with regret. Delight was weighted with guilt.

All zoos, even the most enlightened, are built upon an idea both beguiling and repellent—the notion that we can seek out the wildness of the world and behold its beauty, but that we must first contain that wildness. Zoos argue that they are fighting for the conservation of the Earth, that they educate the public and provide refuge and support for vanishing species. And they are right. Animal-rights groups argue that zoos traffic in living creatures, exploiting them for financial gain and amusement. And they are right.

Caught inside this contradiction are the animals themselves, and the humans charged with their well-being.

Keepers see the realities of zoo life up close, every day. More than anyone else, they know when animals are treated well at their zoo and when they are not.

“The keepers,” a veterinarian at another institution once wrote, “are the core of the zoo’s conscience.”

At Lowry Park, most of the keepers would say, even in private, that they worked at a good zoo—not a perfect zoo, but one where the animals were generally well cared for and where the staff took pride in the difference it made in the survival of so many species. Yet these same keepers admitted that to work in any zoo was to live with ambivalence. They saw it when they went to the grocery store and glimpsed the delight on some shoppers’ faces, and the distaste on others, when they spied Lowry Park’s insignia on their shirt. They saw it at parties when they told someone where they worked and the other person grimaced.

The keepers wrestled with their own thicket of emotions. They loved animals and were deeply attached to the ones in their care. But their attachment did not blind them to the moral complexities of what they did for a living. Since it was announced that Lowry Park and San Diego were purchasing the eleven elephants from Swaziland, many keepers had reacted with quiet unease. The difficulties of caring for elephants were well known in zoo circles. The journey from Swaziland—all those animals crated in the hold of the plane for all those hours—was almost too much to contemplate. Making elephants fly across an ocean represented a fundamental inversion of the natural order. It required a confidence that bordered on hubris.