Dawn, and already the highway was overrun. A chorus of muttered curses rose from the great steel and chrome herd jammed, snout to tail, in the middle of another morning migration along Interstate 275 toward the towers of downtown Tampa.
Trapped inside their climate-controlled cars, alone with their cell phones and their iPods and their satellite mapping systems, the drivers fought back the urge to swerve onto the shoulder and break free. Instead they inched forward, thumping fists on steering wheels, snarling at other cars that drifted into their lane, allowing themselves a few controlled bursts of aggression even as they stayed in line.
Just off the Sligh Avenue exit, another chorus was sounding. The drivers couldn’t hear it. But it was there.
At Lowry Park Zoo, the beasts were waking.
The Malayan tapirs whistled, calling to one another in the early morning light. The orangutans lounged in the rope netting of their exhibit and sighed their philosophical sighs. Through serrated teeth dripping with toxic saliva, the Komodo dragons hissed. From their hiding places under the rocks and logs, the clouded leopards—secretive and mysterious and nearly invisible in the shadows—panted and meowed. A raven cawed and flapped its black wings; a leopard gecko yowled, sounding almost like a cat. The hammerkops cackled; the New Guinea singing dogs barked; and the sloth bears snuffled and sniffed, their long, curved claws clicking on the rocks as they padded out into the sun. A fever of Southern stingrays, flying in slow-motion circles around their shallow pool, were silent except for the tiny splashes of their wingtips cresting the surface.
High above them all, Cyrus and Nadir serenaded each other with another duet in the sky. The male and female siamangs—Asian gibbons, with long arms and thick black fur and big bulging throat sacs—swung from poles thirty feet in the air as they traded the exact same sequence of hoots and wails that they performed every day. Mated for life, the siamangs sang to seal their bond, to declare their shared history, to warn away intruders. Their duets carried to every corner of the zoo, cutting through the recorded jungle drums beating incessantly from the P.A. system.
Other songs joined the soundtrack. Cries of desire and hunger, protest and exultation. A multiplicity of voices from nearly every continent, at nearly every frequency, of almost infinite variation. Hearing them together on a bright, clear morning was to contemplate the audacity of creation. Not just God’s audacity, but man’s.
From the argus pheasants to the goliath bird-eating spiders, each of Lowry Park’s sixteen hundred animals offered living proof of nature’s endless gift for invention. In the curves of their skulls, in the muscles of their wings, in their blood and bones and the twisting nucleotides of their DNA, each carried millions of years of the planet’s biological history. But their presence inside these walls also testified to the epic self-regard of the species that had seen fit to build the zoo and so many others like it around the world.
Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to becoming the property of this particular zoo—could have filled an encyclopedia with insights into human behavior and psychology, human geopolitics and history and commerce. Lowry Park’s very existence declared our presumption of supremacy, the ancient belief that we have been granted dominion over other creatures and have the right to do with them as we please. The zoo was a living catalogue of our fears and obsessions, the ways we see animals and see ourselves, all the things we prefer not to see at all. Every corner of the grounds revealed our appetite for amusement and diversion, no matter what the cost. Our longing for the wildness we have lost inside ourselves. Our instinct to both exalt nature and control it. Our deepest wish to love and protect other species even as we scorch their forests and poison their rivers and shove them toward oblivion.
All of it was on display in the garden of captives.
By now the sun was climbing in the sky. The front gates weren’t open yet, but the staff was busy feeding the animals and raking the empty exhibits and searching for any trash that might have blown or been tossed into the enclosures. When they were done, they shifted the animals into the open air of their exhibits, ready for public viewing.
An Indian rhino, seeing his keeper, ran over and pressed against the thick gate that separated them. Begging for attention, he whimpered like a puppy.
“Hi, Naboo,” said the keeper, scratching his snout through the bars.
The rhino’s official name, the name shared with the public, was Arjun. But in private the staff called him Naboo, after a planet in Star Wars. They loved bestowing the animals with Star Wars names. There was an otter named Chewbacca and a camel who answered (or didn’t) to Leia. One of the young howler monkeys had been christened Anakin, as in Anakin Skywalker, which was Darth Vader’s name before he grew up and went to the dark side. The name made sense, because howler monkeys are born with tan fur and then turn black as they mature. It was an inside joke. A keeper thing.
In the herps department, the section of the zoo reserved for snakes and turtles and other cold-blooded creatures, the blue poison-dart frogs were peeping, very softly, inside a small warm closet clouded with manmade mist. The room was designed to replicate, as much as possible, the atmosphere of a rain forest. The males planted their legs on the rocks beneath them, the heart-shaped pads at the ends of their toes gripping like tiny suction cups. Their bodies were so bright blue, they seemed radioactive. Their calls to the females were so quiet, they were almost drowned out by the hum of the ventilation system.
Poison-dart frogs were vanishing from the wild. All over the globe, from the forests of Panama to the spray zones of waterfalls in Tanzania, frogs and toads were dying off. So many species were disappearing so quickly—disappearing much faster than the mass extinctions that had wiped out the dinosaurs—that there was no time to save even a sampling of them all for posterity. Many of these species would simply fade away. Others, selected for survival, would live out the rest of their time on Earth in aquariums and zoos, in small rooms like this one at Lowry Park.
At the zoo, every day was another lesson on living in a world where there were no more pure choices.
Inside the birds-of-prey building, the cement block walls echoed with screeches and caws and chittering mating calls. A parade of raptors—a bald eagle, a merlin falcon, a Eurasian eagle owl, and a pair of Harris hawks—stood at their perches, talons clasping tightly. In the wild they would have been swooping down on voles and rabbits and salmon. Bald eagles have been known to grab dogs and to attempt to lift small children into the air. Harris hawks are famed for hunting above the desert in coordinated teams. Now their dark eyes shined as they waited for someone to bring them another offering from a nearby freezer full of rodents. “Ratsicles,” the staff called them.
A trainer extended her arm toward a black vulture named Smedley. Time for his daily weighing.
“What do you say, bubba?”
Smedley shuffled from foot to foot, considering the invitation. Then the trainer offered him a tidbit of dead quail and cued him with a little sound.
“Doop!” she said, and the vulture flew onto her arm to claim his treat.
The department worked with almost any bird brought to their door. They nursed baby screech owls that had tumbled from nests, peregrine falcons that had crashed into power lines, hawks and eagles with birth defects that would have led them to starve in the wild. Some of the birds had been born into captivity and were too dependent on humans to ever make it on their own. Others eventually recovered and were given a chance to fly away for good. The staff found it deeply satisfying to help the birds heal and then set them loose, watching them power toward the trees. But the transition was rarely simple, especially after the birds grew accustomed to the zoo’s routine and to the presence of the humans and the steady diet of ratsicles. The keepers tried to ease their way back into the wild with a protocol known as “a soft release.” Instead of simply abandoning the birds, they would let them go at the end of the day, but leave a supply of food for them in case they weren’t ready to strike out on their own. Sometimes, after a few nights of experimenting with freedom, the birds would not be seen again. Sometimes they would find it too hard to break away and never leave.
Not long ago, the staff had tried a soft release with a young mourning dove named Myrtle. Someone had found her as a newborn squab, on the ground and away from her nest, and then brought her to Lowry Park. A ball of fluff, she weighed less than an ounce and still lacked most of her feathers. For weeks her handlers nursed her. They cradled her in their hands, listened to her coo, made a little home for her in a small enclosure outside the building, safely away from the bigger birds. Though it was impossible to avoid becoming attached, they knew it was time to let her go when she began experimenting with test flights, flitting and hopping. The wings of mourning doves tend to whistle, especially when they’re taking off and landing, and it made her handlers happy to hear that explosion of musical fluttering as they said good-bye and watched her dart into the late-afternoon sky. But every morning, she came back. To thwart her homing instinct, the department supervisor took her to his house, fifty miles away, and tried another release in a big field out back. The first couple nights, Myrtle stayed close. Then one morning the supervisor couldn’t hear her cooing anymore. At last she was on her own.
One night not long afterward, one of the other trainers dreamed about Myrtle. In the dream, the dove returned to Lowry Park yet again. This time, she didn’t return to her roost outside. Instead she flew through an open door into the birds-of-prey building and landed near the red-tailed hawk. Always ready for another snack, the hawk seized and devoured her.
Days later, the dream still haunted the trainer. She wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Was it a foreboding that something terrible had happened to Myrtle once she was back in the wild, vulnerable to predators? Perhaps it was a parable, bubbling up through the subconscious, on the difficulties of introducing new creatures into the garden, even with every intention of setting them free.
Across that long summer of 2003, Lowry Park waited for the elephants. In federal court the battle over the Swazi Eleven raged on. PETA and the rest of the animal-rights coalition hurled accusations and innuendoes. Wildlife lovers from around the world e-mailed fiery protests. Weary of the stress and drama, the staff at Lowry Park wondered when, if ever, the case would be over and the elephants would start toward their new lives in Florida and California.
The war kept escalating. Animal-rights protesters gathered in front of Lowry Park to wave signs that proclaimed swazi elephants: born free, sold out. PETA, with its gift for macabre theatrics, staged a media event outside the San Diego Zoo, cheering as a man dressed in a fuzzy gray elephant costume parked a rented dump truck in front of one of the zoo’s entrances and unloaded a large mound of horse manure onto the street. The elephant man would not leave the truck until the police summoned a locksmith and led him away in handcuffs. By then he had removed the head of his costume so that he could issue a statement to the news crews.
“I’m going to be in jail for a while,” he said. “But those elephants are going to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.”
While the fate of the Swazi Eleven remained in limbo, Lowry Park added to its collection with a stream of other animals. The northern section of the grounds, undeveloped until now, crawled with bulldozers and construction crews, all of them erecting acres of new exhibits designed to showcase African species. If the importation went forward, the elephants were to be the centerpiece—not just of the new wing, but of a completely new vision for the zoo.
Lowry Park was in a hurry to get bigger. Reinventing itself for a new century, the medium-sized zoo was deep into the most ambitious and most daring expansion of its history, a radical overhaul almost entirely dependent on the elephants. The potential gains for the zoo—increased profits, higher visibility—were almost as huge as the animals themselves. For years, Lowry Park had surveyed visitors on which species they most wanted the zoo to add to the collection, and every time, elephants were number one. But the risks inherent in the plan were also enormous.
Beloved as they were, elephants tested a zoo’s limits. They were expensive to feed and house, they were extremely dangerous to work with, and their very nature—their independence and intelligence, their emotional sensitivity, their need to bond with other elephants and walk for miles a day—made it difficult to provide them with surroundings in which they would not lapse into misery. At a time when some American zoos were considering closing their elephant exhibits for good due to these ethical and logistical problems, it was striking for a zoo to consider adding any elephants at all, even those raised in captivity. To rip them from the wild and use them to crown an upgraded collection was incendiary. The plan had already catapulted Lowry Park into the public spotlight as never before. If anything went wrong, either during the flight or after the new arrivals settled in, the zoo would be cast into disgrace. Animal-rights organizations from around the world would point to any such failure as proof that elephants did not belong in zoos, period.
Until that summer, Lowry Park would have seemed an unlikely target for international furor. The place was too small, too low-profile—a respected zoo, accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and known for its commitment to endangered Florida species, but not particularly flashy. With the move to bring in the wild elephants, the zoo was announcing that it was ready to step onto a bigger stage and embrace a whole new set of possibilities and challenges.
Lex Salisbury, Lowry Park’s hard-charging CEO, was well aware of the risks. A tall man with light blond hair and the swagger of a silverback gorilla, Lex was gambling millions of dollars and his own reputation in a bid to transform his institution into one of the most dazzling zoos in the country. Lex was often hailed as a visionary, even by people who didn’t like him, and of those there were plenty. He was living proof that visionaries can be hell on the minions who toil beneath them. Depending on the circumstances, he could be inspiring or vengeful, seductive or tyrannical. He spoke of zoos and their mission with religious intensity—a passion so pure that it made audiences visibly swoon—but treated Lowry Park as his own fiefdom. He did not tolerate employees who challenged him. He had a beguiling smile, a taste for the kill, and a penchant for appearing in publicity photos and even the zoo’s annual reports in bush khakis and a safari hat, as though he had just jetted in from the Serengeti. “Blond, blue-eyed, with chiseled good looks,” a reporter once wrote, “he resembles the great white hunter portrayed by Robert Redford in Out of Africa.”
Lex’s reputation had been sealed a decade before, when he was the zoo’s general curator, and one of the groundskeepers took to calling him “El Diablo Blanco.” According to the legend, this groundskeeper had studied Lex’s already volatile management style and pronounced, “One day, El Diablo Blanco will run this zoo.” Among discontented members of the staff, both past and present, he was still known as “the White Devil.”
Lex was aware of the nickname and did not let it trouble him. He enjoyed being larger than life and did not mind instilling a healthy fear in his employees if it helped him take Lowry Park to the next level. He had a talent for getting things done, no matter the cost. More than anyone else, he was the architect of the plan to import the elephants and create a new zoo around them. He had spent several years attending to all the details. He had traveled to Swaziland to see the elephants in the game parks and to help select the four who would be brought to Tampa. Negotiating the purchase, he had comported himself favorably in the exalted presence of the Swazi king, Mswati III. Back in Florida, he had lobbied the Tampa city council to grant the zoo more land for its expansion and for the funds to build the new facilities to house the elephants. He had personally insisted on implementing a protocol that would allow the keepers to work with the animals more safely. With the arrival of the wild elephants, he wanted to push Lowry Park into the forefront of defining what a zoo could be, all that it might accomplish. If such boldness courted the wrath of PETA, so be it.
Lex knew what could be accomplished if he had the support of the city. Fifteen years before, when he was hired at Lowry Park as a young assistant curator, he had witnessed another transformation. Lex had been brought to the zoo, in fact, as part of a larger team whose job it was to turn around an institution that had become a civic embarrassment.
The city’s zoo had started in the 1930s as a tiny menagerie—a handful of raccoons and alligators, a few exotic birds—and then had slowly grown into a larger collection of lions and tigers and bears and even one elephant, a female Asian named Sheena who had been transported from India on a jet in 1961, making her the zoo’s original flying elephant. The undisputed star in those early years, Sheena performed twice a day in a circus ring and then gave rides to children. Admission was free. The place was sometimes called “the Fairyland Zoo,” because the animal attractions were merged with a panorama of storybook houses and scenes re-created from Mother Goose and other children’s tales. Kids skipped across the Rainbow Bridge and darted among replicas of the Seven Dwarves, Humpty-Dumpty, and the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs. They clambered onto a small train that chugged and curved across the grounds, and spun on the Tilt-a-Wheel, and threw food over a fence within reach of Sheena’s trunk. Just north of the zoo stood Safety Village, a miniature replica of Tampa, with a shopping mall and a fire station and a tiny City Hall, where police officers tutored young citizens in how to recognize traffic signs and use crosswalks and repel the advances of molesters. Second-graders even got to ride small electric vehicles as they practiced braking at stoplights on Happy Drive and Polite Boulevard.
Nick Nuccio, the Tampa mayor who had started it all, called the zoo “a children’s paradise.” As the years passed, though, Lowry Park aged poorly. What was once quaint became dreadful. The train rusted, and two toddlers were injured when a kiddie roller coaster derailed, and Sheena the elephant was shipped off to Canada, where she died of a heart attack. Worst of all was the soul-killing collection of dilapidated cages where the animals kept dying from abuse. Years later, adults who had visited the old zoo as children still shuddered when they recalled the grimness of the place. The National Humane Society declared it one of the five worst zoos in America.
“It was a rat hole,” one city councilman remembered.
In the 1980s, in response to widespread concerns about the appalling conditions, the old zoo had been torn down and a new zoo had been built. Today the cages were gone, replaced by more spacious enclosures where the animals were separated from the public not by bars, but by moats and raised walkways. In the section of the zoo devoted to Florida species, visitors wandered a boardwalk that led through stands of pine and palmetto, where black bears dug under logs for grubs and whooping cranes strutted their mating dance, and tiny Key deer darted in the shade. Waiting at the end of the boardwalk was a bunkerlike building where the guests descended into darkened subterranean chambers to gaze through picture windows into crystalline pools made to look like freshwater springs teeming with bass and snapping turtles and manatees who dived and spun and nibbled on romaine lettuce.
Around Tampa, Lowry Park was hailed as a jewel. More than a decade after the improved version was opened to the public, area residents remained so pleased—and so relieved by the abolishment of the forlorn cages—that they still referred to it proudly as “the new zoo.” Mayors and city council members applauded the zoo’s dedication to its endangered species and its long, steady climb from shame to redemption. At ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new exhibits, the politicians beamed for the news cameras and posed with massive scissors. Every year at budget time, they nodded in appreciation when Lex reminded them that the zoo was a paragon of fiscal caution. The zoo, Lex assured the city council repeatedly, was living within its means even as its capital construction projects blossomed.
A nonprofit organization, the zoo relied on Tampa’s benevolence. Leasing its grounds from the recreation department, it occupied fifty-six acres of a city park that stretched along the western banks of the Hillsborough River. This was the place that had given Lowry Park its name, the same spot where the old zoo had once stood. The location was hardly prominent. The park was miles north of downtown, tucked inside a sleepy, slightly run-down neighborhood filled with bungalow houses that had long needed a fresh coat of paint and dusty streets that seemed frozen in time. Cats slunk under old cars covered in yellow blankets of pollen. Thick beards of Spanish moss, bleaching gray under the monstrous Florida sun, dangled from the branches of live oaks above forgotten yards where no one appeared to have lifted a rake since the Eisenhower administration. Some of the houses lined the zoo’s exterior fence, their backyards scarcely fifty feet from some of the exhibits. On many mornings, the residents woke to the duets of the siamangs and the piercing cries of seramas.
For all its successes, the zoo lingered in the shadows of its competition. It was dwarfed by central Florida’s other two major animal attractions—Busch Gardens of Tampa, a couple exits away on 275; and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, located outside Orlando, barely more than an hour away. Both were gargantuan tourist meccas that combined roller coasters and other theme-park thrills with carefully scripted safari tours through counterfeit savannas that teemed with lions, zebras, hippos, giraffes, and Nile crocodiles. Busch Gardens had a Serengeti section so huge it single-handedly outstripped the size of all of Lowry Park’s exhibits put together. Animal Kingdom, literally ten times bigger than the Tampa zoo, featured a 145-foot-tall replica of a baobab tree, with a tapestry of dolphins and baboons and hundreds of other animals carved into its massive trunk and a movie theater hidden inside the tree’s maze of fake roots. As the theater darkened, swooning children donned special glasses to watch an animated 3-D short called It’s Tough to Be a Bug, starring a host of adorable insects who danced in a chorus line and belted out show tunes that chronicled the travails and triumphs of cockroaches and dung beetles.
With its limited budget, Lowry Park had no hope of competing against Disney’s armies of Imagineers or Busch Gardens’s beer-drenched millions. It had no 3-D movies, no flumes, no rustic trains chugging through the jungle, no skycars that sent the guests soaring above the animals. By necessity, its charms were more intimate. The only ride in the entire zoo was a jungle carousel that offered children a spin on the galloping backs of handcrafted endangered animals. It was unclear if their endangered status rendered the ride any more meaningful than a typical merry-go-round. It didn’t matter. Lex and the zoo’s board of directors recognized that they could not duplicate the scale of Busch Gardens or Disney’s Animal Kingdom. But they didn’t have to. They were running a zoo, not a theme park. The entrance fees were lower, the expectations of the guests less grandiose. People didn’t come to Lowry Park hoping to twist upside-down on a screaming roller coaster or to laugh at an animated bug. They came to see real animals, and the zoo had plenty of those. In fact, the zoo’s collection was not that much smaller than what awaited them at Busch Gardens or Disney.
Even before the elephants arrived, Lowry Park was blessed with an abundance of “charismatic megafauna”—zoo jargon for larger animals immensely popular with the public, such as the rhinos and the bears and the manatees. The most beloved species were typically mammals, because people identified with them more readily than with an emu or a moray eel and because they loved to watch the animals court and mate and nurse their babies. Humans found it easier to project their own lives and emotions and assumptions onto such creatures. They responded with special fervor when the mammals exhibited traits that were discernible, even across the barriers that separated them, and behaved in a way that declared their individual character. It made it easier not just to connect with the animals but to believe the animals were opening a window into their mysterious inner selves.
Out of all the charismatic megafauna, none had more personality or was more beloved than the king and queen of the zoo.
The alpha chimp crouched at his throne. Every morning, he claimed the same spot on the shelf of rocks beside the waterfall, a perfect vantage point from which to survey his domain. The rocks were replicas, airbrushed to look like a weathered canyon wall; the waterfall was an illusion, too, a stream pouring from a PVC pipe. But there was nothing fake about Herman. He had reigned at Lowry Park for three decades, longer than any other animal or any of the humans who worked here. He was the zoo’s most famous resident, its living memory, the walking embodiment of its history. Each of the zoo’s sixteen hundred animals was assigned a number. Herman’s was 000001.
By now the years were catching up with him. His chin hairs had gone gray. He grew winded more easily than in the past. Still, he seemed to miss nothing. If one of the other chimps in his group was upset, he offered comfort. If a dispute erupted, he stepped in. Often, though, he held himself apart from the others and stayed at his stony perch. Tired of standing, he lay down on the rock shelf, studied the black nails of his fingers. His empty gaze suggested not just boredom but a deeper weariness. Who could blame him? He had never asked for the responsibilities of an alpha. This existence had been thrust upon him long ago. Several lifetimes ago. On another continent, in another century.
“See the big monkey?” a mother said to her child.
At the sound of the woman’s voice and the sight of her blond hair, Herman jumped to his feet. Suddenly he was alert and energized, delighted to find someone he could impress. He marched back and forth along the shelf, parading like a general. He rocked and swayed, puffed up his chest, bristled the thick black hair on his shoulders and back, all to make himself look strong and powerful.
The woman smiled and laughed. Clearly the big monkey liked her.
“Isn’t he funny?” she said, and her child nodded.
They were so trusting, the moms with their golden bangs and their tanned shoulders, shining in the sun. They almost never caught on to what was really happening. But sometimes, if the women stood there long enough, watching Herman strut, a hint of recognition played across their faces. Possibly they had encountered other males who acted this way. In a bar, maybe, or in the last hazy hours of a party.
When the moms turned and left, taking their children with them—and all of them left soon enough, whether they’d figured it out or not—Herman cried out after them. He knew when he was being dismissed. After more than thirty years at Lowry Park, he had endured more than his share of rejection. For the record, he was not a monkey. Chimpanzees are apes. It was understandable if some of the moms were offended. No one goes to the zoo expecting to be propositioned by an ape. The women might not have taken his advances personally if they had understood that Herman’s mixed-up libido was not his fault. If they had known his background, they might have understood how things had gotten so turned around inside him.
His early life had unfolded like something coauthored by Dickens and Darwin. Born in the wilds of west Africa, he was taken from his mother as an infant—he almost certainly saw her die, trying to protect him—and then sold in an orange crate for twenty-five dollars. He was raised as a pet for the first few years, then was eventually brought to Florida and donated to the zoo, where he was installed in a cage and taught to depend on the imperfect love of strangers. He charmed Jane Goodall, threw dirt at the mayor of Tampa, learned to clap and smoke cigarettes—whatever it took to entertain the masses. Whatever was required to survive.
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.
At Lowry Park, the staff had heard the official rationales and read the press releases describing the importation as a mercy mission to rescue the elephants from another cull. Yet for all the altruistic pronouncements, there was no question the zoo was gaining four coveted and valuable prizes in return. Once the elephants went on display, profits were certain to spike. Taking these creatures from the wilds of Africa was complicated enough, even if it did save their lives. But to build a new vision of the zoo on their backs? Some keepers worried about what this move would mean for the well-being of the elephants, what it might reveal about the future priorities of Lowry Park and the compromises it was willing to make. To them, the zoo’s resources had already seemed stretched to the breaking point, even before the bulldozers had broken ground on the multimillion-dollar elephant facilities. What would happen to all the other species, with so much money being diverted to the new wing? In so many ways, the importation had become a battle over the zoo’s very existence—a crucible that challenged its vision of itself as an ethical institution where animals were revered above all else.
PETA and its warriors may have been ideologues, uninterested in facts that clouded the purity of their dogma, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were wrong. Did it make sense to bring these elephants to the United States? Even some members of Lowry Park’s staff weren’t sure. They wondered if their zoo, in its dreams of expansion, might have crossed a line from which there was no return.