Inside the zoo, time was not human. More precisely, time moved outside human expectation. It did not settle into a single groove. Zoo time was fluid, changeable, unpredictable. It unfolded in different rhythms, at variable speeds, calibrated to the heartbeat and breathing patterns and behavior of each species.
The staff and visitors wore wristwatches and carried cell phones adorned with digital displays of the hour and minute as agreed upon by Homo sapiens. But all of this fell away once people stepped inside the mini-aviary that was home to dozens of lorikeets—rainbow-hued parrots from Indonesia and Australia. To enter the lorikeet domain was to be absorbed into a cloud of otherness. The birds murmured and chattered and swooped from every direction, their wings whirring like soft bursts from a velvet machine gun as they flew back and forth in a blur of blue and yellow and red. The lorikeets landed on visitors’ arms and shoulders and hair, then darted away, then came back. The birds meant no harm; they were simply curious and hoped for a sip of nectar from cups sold in the gift shop. Even so, people found their pulse accelerating, their own hearts beating faster, their sense of themselves becoming fragmented. Some were so overwhelmed they would lie on the ground until the birds went away. Others turned around and around, wondering where the next machine-gun burst would come from, and what made the lorikeets’ wings sound like that, and oh my God, how did nature turn up the dials enough to paint that shade of red in their chest feathers—a supercharged red constantly bursting like fireworks as the lorikeets careened above and around and back and forth in crisscrossing arcs.
“Whoa,” the humans said, not even realizing that they had spoken.
Inside that nebula of color and sound, the world sped up and slowed down simultaneously. Visitors forgot how long they had been standing there, even if it was only for thirty seconds, because the idea of a second and the notion of the number thirty were both out of reach. They had no time for time. They were caught up in the choreography of the lorikeets.
Wherever people went at Lowry Park, whatever animal they watched, one construct of time was obliterated, and another construct replaced it. Once visitors emerged from the lorikeet aviary, they could walk over to the python exhibit, only a few steps away, and study the seventeen-foot reticulated python and the two carpet pythons and the three Burmese pythons, all curled like shiny still lifes on the other side of the glass, their heads turned toward the humans but not moving, their eyes open but unblinking, their coils betraying nothing. People wondered if the pythons would ever move. Time slowed to something close to a full stop—no longer a linear progression, but a breathless waiting. If it was feeding day, the keepers would deposit dead rabbits inside the exhibit, and then the pythons would uncoil toward their prey in a flash, almost too fast for the onlookers to follow. In that microsecond, as the rabbits’ ears and heads disappeared down the pythons’ throats, time became an explosion that blossomed instantaneously from inertia to lethal movement. Children, their faces pressed close to the glass, would gasp and cry out.
Life was less violent over in the manatee exhibit. Visitors could walk down the tunnel that led to the underground viewing area and gaze as long as they liked, and they wouldn’t see the manatees eating anyone. The most aggressive behavior inside the pools came from the male turtles who swam beside the giant marine mammals and repeatedly tried to mount them through some insane overestimation of their sexual prowess. The manatees did tussle occasionally. Sometimes they bumped their heads into each other’s torsos or nudged each other with their tails. But these conflicts were fleeting and never resulted in injury. Most of the time, the manatees at Lowry Park lived up to the peaceful reputation of their species, spending their days quietly drifting around the pools, their bodies twisting and turning and slowly spinning as they nibbled on hydrilla and carrots. Occasionally they paused in front of the picture windows, suspended, and gazed toward the humans on the other side of the glass. If visitors stood there long enough, they soon relaxed, especially on a weekday afternoon when the zoo was quiet. Time became something graceful and seamless.
If you happened to be on the other side of the pools, where the keepers worked from a deck along the water’s edge away from the bustle of the crowds, the sense of calm was hypnotic. You followed the gray shapes moving beneath you, tracing parabolas in the depths, and you heard the occasional splash of their tails and the eruptions of air that burst forth every few minutes as they raised their whiskered nostrils above the surface, breathed deeply, then dropped back below. Soon you found yourself waiting for the next exhalation, and your own breathing would slow. In the distance another human’s voice would break the silence, and suddenly you realized that you had lost track not only of the time but what day it was. Without even knowing it, you had slipped outside of yourself.
Epiphanies like these were one of the reasons Lowry Park and other zoos endured. Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature’s impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it’s like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans, or fly above its forests—even though most of the animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild.
The staff at Lowry Park confronted this paradox every day. Only for them, it cut deeper because it was not an abstraction but a living, breathing reality that stared them in the eye. They understood, better than anyone else, the inherent difficulties of holding living creatures captive. But they also recognized that the public tends to romanticize nature. They knew that the notion of freedom is a human invention and that creatures in the wild are rarely free and are in fact confined by territory, hunger, and the constant threat of predators.
Against all this logic, some staff members still wished sometimes there was some way they could let the animals go.
“Any good keeper absolutely feels a guilty conscience,” a veteran on the staff confided one evening after Lowry Park was closed. “There are definitely days when you walk in and you look at the animals, and you say, ‘I wish they didn’t have to be here.’ ”
The only part of the zoo where the paradox got turned inside out—where animals were routinely returned to their native habitat—was the manatee section, which featured not only the viewing pools but a small hospital built around medical tanks. The sirens, as some called them, came in torn up by boat propellers or tangled in fishing line or suffering from cold stress, the marine version of frostbite. Sometimes they were on the edge of death from toxins they’d ingested during another outbreak of red tide. Lowry Park would slowly nurse them back to health, pumping them full of antibiotics to fight infections, feeding them vitamins to help them build back their strength, even performing surgery when necessary. Once the patients recovered, they were eventually set free again. Over the past decade the zoo had released sixty-four manatees back into the wild.
“We take ’em in, patch ’em up, and send ’em out,” said Dr. Murphy. It was a beautiful promise that reminded the staff why they worked at Lowry Park. Delivering on that promise was one of the more difficult logistical challenges at the zoo. Working with wild creatures that often weighed close to a ton required patience and brute strength. If Murphy needed to draw blood or gather a fecal sample—relatively routine procedures with most of the other species—the staff would isolate the manatee in a medical tank, then drain the water so that several people could climb in with the vet and hold the patient down. The keepers would drape themselves over the manatee’s body. They tried to be gentle; they would stroke the manatee’s thick skin and coo and tell it to relax. But they had to hold the animal as still as possible. If it decided to roll or lash out with its tail, one of the keepers could easily wind up with a broken leg.
“Watch it,” Murphy would tell the team when a manatee began to thrash. “Let him calm down a minute.”
Manatees did not appreciate being handled. Often, they would expel prodigious amounts of droppings as the humans worked on them. Murphy, accustomed to such indignities, seemed not to notice when the dung oozed between his toes.
As exhausting and hazardous as these procedures were, keepers from all over the zoo happily volunteered to help, especially when it came time to assist in a release. Nothing was more satisfying to the staff than seeing a manatee healed and returned to open water. A team would maneuver a giant sling under the animal, and a crane could lift it onto a bed of mats inside a truck. Keepers would sit in back with the manatee, dousing it with water and monitoring its breathing while Murphy drove to the release point. Usually they tried to release the manatees fairly close to wherever they’d initially been found—a river, a freshwater spring, an inlet off the Gulf of Mexico. The team would attach a satellite transmitter to a belt around the manatee’s tail, so researchers could follow its progress in the months ahead, and then hoist it down to the water and watch it swim away. Cheering was common. So were tears.
Not all of the manatees made it back to the wild. Often they arrived at Lowry Park in such forlorn condition that they didn’t survive. The odds were particularly daunting with newborn calves whose mothers had abandoned them or been killed. Many of these orphans died shortly after they were found, before a rescue team could rush them to the rehab center. The calves that did reach the zoo still faced an uphill struggle. They’d lost their mothers. They couldn’t nurse. They had trouble adapting.
“They don’t know the ways of the world,” said Virginia Edmonds, the assistant curator of Florida mammals, who oversaw the manatee section along with Dr. Murphy.
One day in May of 2003, not long before the elephants arrived from Swaziland, two fishermen in a boat in the waters of Buttonwood Bay, near Naples, spied a small gray leathery object on a beach and realized it was a newborn calf, maybe a day old, stranded and apparently abandoned by its mother. The calf was brought to Lowry Park, where the staff dubbed him Buttonwood. Usually they named the manatees after the body of water where they had been found; it was a way of remembering where the animals came from, and where the keepers hoped they would eventually return. For Buttonwood, as with all abandoned calves, the first forty-eight hours were crucial. If they could make it through two days, their chances improved dramatically.
From the start, it was a challenge getting enough food into Buttonwood for him to gain weight. The keepers tried bottle feeding him different combinations of formula and Pedialyte, but it didn’t work. His weight, already low when he arrived, remained unstable.
“It’s like finding a baby in a Dumpster,” said Murphy. “He’s in a very guarded condition. Cross your fingers.”
Buttonwood’s plight catapulted him into a media sensation. Soon his whiskered, rumpled face appeared in newspapers and on TV across the state. Elementary schoolchildren were phoning the zoo to check on his progress. Lowry Park decided to place Buttonwood on display—a risky move with a young animal whose survival was still far from certain. To accommodate the demand, the staff moved him from one of the medical tanks in the back into a brightly colored kiddie pool where the keepers could work with him in public view. Children were so mesmerized, they swarmed in front of a fence low enough for them to see the famous calf but high enough to keep them from trying to pet him.
The keepers were trying to feed Buttonwood around the clock. Sometimes, as they held him, he would fall asleep in their arms. But with his weight still rising and falling, they moved him back into one of the medical tanks and placed him with a lactating adult female manatee named Sani, hoping she would let him nurse. It worked for a couple of days, but then Sani rejected him. Finally the staff switched to a feeding tube, trying to pump vegetarian formula directly into his stomach. It appeared to be working. At last Buttonwood was gaining weight. But in mid-July, a couple of weeks after he started to improve, one of the keepers went to check on the calf and found his small gray body floating in the shallow water. When people from other departments heard the news, they didn’t want to believe it. Wasn’t Buttonwood growing stronger? The manatee keepers were too devastated to answer.
That fall, a second abandoned manatee calf arrived at the zoo. Another male, only several days old. This one was named Loo, because he was found in the Caloosahatchee River, a couple of hours south of the zoo. Now Virginia and the other manatee keepers were working around the clock to save Loo, just as they’d done with Buttonwood. After the emotional ups and downs of that experience, they knew the odds. The zoo’s public relations department understood as well. This time there were no press releases alerting the public to the drama quietly unfolding in the manatee section. Whatever was going to happen, it would be between Loo and his keepers. They placed him in one of the medical tanks, and every two or three hours they would climb in to feed him with a bottle. At night, when the rest of the zoo was closed and dark, one of the keepers stayed late to watch over him. The keeper would put on her wetsuit—at this point, almost all of the Florida mammal staff was female—and reach through the black water until she found the calf. Loo weighed barely sixty pounds and was relatively light, so the keeper pulled him onto her lap, cradled him in her arms, and tried to get him to take the bottle. If even a few ounces of the formula reached the calf’s stomach, it would increase the odds.
The feedings continued night and day for weeks. Virginia and the rest of her staff would not give up. Though it was not their habit to say such things out loud, they knew all too well that they were Loo’s only hope. At daybreak, as they held the calf in the water and tried again, they could hear the rest of the zoo rousing to life around them. If it was quiet enough, they could even make out the faint calls of the adult manatees in the nearby pools when they walked down into the underground viewing area. The vocalizations were like the chirping squeak of a dolphin, only more quiet; manatees are sometimes described as “soft-spoken.” Scientists believed that the species used the sounds to express fear or anger, to stay in contact with one another, to keep their calves from straying.
The high-pitched calls were both beautiful and enigmatic. It was easy to wonder what the sirens were communicating at that moment, what the calls sounded like to them rippling through the water. Whatever the message, perhaps Loo was listening too.
Summer was over, allegedly. According to the calendar, it was now October. But a stroll through Lowry Park still felt like a tour through the inner chambers of a giant kiln. By midmorning, an invisible shroud of heat settled over the grounds. It reflected off the walkways that curved past babirusa digging with their tusks and muntjacs darting in the shadows, and shimmered over the placid green water of the moats surrounding the ring-tailed lemurs and the Colobus monkeys, and burned in the scrub pines where the zoo’s lone red wolf patrolled the fence at the edge of his exhibit, avoiding eye contact.
The inferno did not slow the stream of cars and minivans pouring into the front parking lots. Observing each new wave of visitors was like standing before an exhibit that endlessly renewed itself. The species on display, however, was hardly soft-spoken. Elementary schoolchildren tumbled out of buses, fidgeting and scratching without shame, the girls quickly bunching into whispered huddles as they reinforced old alliances or established new ones, the boys elbowing and pushing as they maneuvered for position in their secret hierarchies. Adult couples smooched and locked hands and giggled loudly at coded allusions, public proof of their private pair-bond and a warning against interference from any potential reproductive competitors. In biological terms, the signals they were sending could not have been more clear. Walking toward the ticket windows, they rubbed each other’s shoulders and brushed dirt and picked lint off each other’s shirts and ran their fingers through each other’s hair—all classic precoital grooming behavior. (Possibly postcoital.) Mothers and fathers lingered at the rear of their Expeditions and Escalades—glittering emblems not just of status but of their determination to protect the future of their genetic line—and unloaded strollers built like tanks, designer diaper bags overflowing with juice packets and sanitary wipes, and enough sunblock to slather an army. In their car seats, their toddlers waited to be waited upon, spoiled like so many young primates, whining and kicking their legs like tiny despots impatient for their retinue to convey them forward.
If the visitors were listening, they could already detect the roar of Eric, the male Sumatran tiger. Possibly he was restless, eager for his turn in the exhibit. Definitely he was sexually frustrated, since his attempts to court Enshalla had so far been met only with scorn. If the humans heard the roar, it was doubtful that they would have guessed what animal was making it, or why. The deep bass note repeated over and over, punctuating the morning. It didn’t sound like tigers in the movies. More like a bellow than a roar, it declared the presence of something vaguely big and clearly ferocious and maybe hungry. Perfect. Much more enticing than the jungle drums, still pounding from the loudspeakers.
As visitors paid their money and pushed through the turnstiles, the predictable soundtrack reassured them that what awaited inside was not true wildness but a carefully staged illusion of wildness. At an almost subliminal level, the true message of the drums was that the zoo’s staff would control the experience ahead and that all the leopards and bears and panthers—not to mention any tigers—were safely behind lock and key and would not be allowed, no matter how peckish they might feel, to snack on any children.
Lowry Park prided itself as an institution custom-made for families with young kids. Even though the zoo was growing, it remained compact enough that it was possible to take in the highlights in a couple of hours or less. This was no accident; the new zoo had been designed not to overwhelm. The size of the place was ideal for a four-year-old’s attention span. Moving at a reasonable clip and fortified with enough liquids to stave off heat stroke, parents could whisk their brood from one end to the other and be gunning for the exit just as the little one crashed into a blissful stupor. From start to finish, the experience was tailored for the delight of impressionable children. The front courtyard was graced with a fountain where manatee statues swam in the air and toddlers squealed with joy as they jumped through jets of burbling water. Wallaroo Station, featuring species from Australia, offered a rock-climbing wall for older kids. At Stingray Bay, over in the Aquatic Center, children reached inside a shallow tank and ran their fingers along the sleek backs of Southern stingrays whose tail barbs had been removed. Every day, families crowded into an outdoor theater for Spirits of the Sky, a birds-of-prey show where the handlers invited the guests to admire Smedley the vulture and cued Ivan the Eurasian eagle owl to fly directly over the audience, his massive wings flapping so close that the churning air ruffled their hair. Inside the Discovery Center, kids studied toxic toads up close and were allowed to fondle a replica of a raccoon dropping. For their birthdays, children were encouraged to celebrate at the zoo with their friends, pet a skink or snake, and play Pin the Tentacle on the Octopus. On special evenings, the zoo sponsored slumber parties where third-graders climbed into sleeping bags next to the underwater viewing windows, drifting off to the sight of the manatees swimming. At Halloween, preschoolers were invited to a camp with bats and tarantulas. At Christmas, they met real reindeer and a not-so-real Santa.
One of the most popular attractions, all year round, was the petting zoo, a dusty corral where children waded happily among bleating sheep and fed them grain pellets and ignored the teeth and gums pulling at their clothes. Unbeknownst to parents, the herd included a billy goat named Cody who had somehow mastered the art of contorting himself so he could urinate on his own head. To impress the nanny goats, of course.
“We call him Pee Goat,” a keeper said under her breath one day, maintaining a safe distance. “He’s disgusting.”
Many of the kids, no doubt, would have been ecstatic to learn of Cody’s special talent. They howled at the raccoon poop. Why not a malodorous goat? From a child’s perspective, nothing could have been more enchanting.
Perched on a branch, two golden lion tamarins peered out with their tiny old-men faces, chirping as though they were birds, not tiny monkeys.
With silky, reddish gold manes that swept backward toward their shoulders, the tamarins were among the most striking creatures at Lowry Park. Weighing less than two pounds each, Kevin and Candy did in fact look like miniature lions. If they could have growled, they would have been doing so right now, because they were in the middle of a heated argument with Lee Ann Rottman. The best they could do was glare at her.
“You see ’em?” said Lee Ann, shaking her head as she pointed them out.
The curator and the defiant monkeys were facing off inside the zoo’s free flight aviary. Knowing how much the public loves tamarins, Lowry Park had long kept a pair of them inside the giant screened enclosure along with the emerald starlings and the masked lapwings and all the other birds. In their native forests of Brazil, tamarins lived in the canopy and nested inside holes in the tree trunks; at Lowry Park they roamed through the oaks of the aviary and slept in a camouflaged Igloo cooler that hung high among the branches. For years, another pair of tamarins had lived in peaceful coexistence with the birds and the human visitors, but recently they had grown too old and the staff had replaced them with Kevin and Candy. The two newcomers had become a headache, because they had chosen to spend their days on a branch that hung too close to the sidewalk that led guests through the trees. Much smaller than the average housecat, the tamarins were relatively harmless. But their teeth were sharp and they had been known to bite when their keepers approached to feed them crickets or fruit. The zoo had posted a sign warning not to touch the monkeys, but they were too cute to resist and too feisty to be trusted. Sooner or later, somebody was likely to get a hand chomped.
The keepers had tried everything they could think of to make Kevin and Candy abandon the low-hanging branch and choose another perch farther from the sidewalk. They had even collected some of Eric the tiger’s urine from his den and used it to spray the area, hoping the pungent menace of his scent would intimidate the monkeys. No luck. Nothing seemed to scare them, even the two boat-billed herons who grew agitated one day when Kevin and Candy wandered too close to the large birds’ nest.
“They were clacking at them,” said Lee Ann. “The tamarins didn’t care.”
Candy, the female, was especially territorial. She didn’t like taking orders from other species, no matter how much they dwarfed her. Whenever the keepers drew near, she retaliated with angry chatter. She was doing it now to the acting curator.
“She’s a little bitchy,” said Lee Ann.
Obviously Kevin and Candy were not destined to be permanent residents of the aviary. The staff would have to move them back to their previous home, a smaller enclosure with other tamarins and marmosets in Primate World. It was just one more task for Lee Ann’s never-ending to-do list. She was the ultimate troubleshooter, constantly dealing with the neuroses and complaints and quirks and insecurities and problems of multiple species. If a baby chimp was forsaken by its birth mother, Lee Ann found it a surrogate. If one of the Sarus cranes lost its appetite or a kangaroo suffered a miscarriage, she needed to know why. If an orangutan hurled her droppings at a bank president or the Bactrian camels humped again in front of the second-grade field trip, she heard about it. If one of her keepers was going through a divorce or couldn’t take another day of beak-pecking from the emus, typically they ended up crying in her office. Sometimes the humans acted like animals—not necessarily a bad thing in her view—and sometimes the animals behaved like complicated humans. All of it was her problem.
In a zoo, where dominance is often maintained through physical size and brute force, Lee Ann was a remarkably small and delicate alpha. Five feet tall, with a slight build and a natural shyness, she appeared almost frail. In reality, she possessed reserves of strength and resilience that had sustained her through emergencies most people could not imagine. Over the years, she had periodically taken leaves from the zoo to study and work with wild chimps in Uganda and Cameroon, and during her travels she had contracted typhoid, amoebic dysentery, and cerebral malaria. One day, as she and a group of other people were floating on a river in inner tubes, a hippo surfaced directly beneath her boyfriend and dragged him in its jaws toward the river bottom. Hippos are much more dangerous than their ungainly appearance would suggest—in Africa, they kill more humans than lions and elephants combined—and as she watched her boyfriend going under, Lee Ann was screaming. She doesn’t know how long he was down there, but suddenly he broke free and reappeared above the surface, bleeding from huge bites to his torso. At the hospital, doctors determined that the hippo’s teeth had barely missed his spinal cord and femoral artery. During his recovery, Lee Ann slept on the floor beside his bed and held his hand as he hallucinated.
The boyfriend survived, but the relationship did not. Eventually Lee Ann returned to Lowry Park with a vivid new appreciation for just how dangerous animals could be. The zoo was a more controlled environment than the wilds of Africa, but the hazards and difficulties of the job could not be discounted, as had been demonstrated by the fatal elephant attack on Char-Lee Torre. Caring for the animals at Lowry Park was so demanding, both physically and emotionally, that many keepers only lasted a few years before moving on. Lee Ann had stayed for more than a decade, starting in the primate department and then working her way up through the ranks. Being curator was easily the hardest position she’d ever had. Whatever situation she was dealing with, a dozen others awaited her immediate attention. Her face was often streaked with sweat. Her boot soles were caked with the droppings of who knew how many species. It was an exhilarating, appalling, glorious mess of a job that devoured almost every moment of every day, from before dawn until after dark. It required her to be a general, a therapist, a mind-reader, a diplomat, and a den mother to almost seventeen hundred individuals, some of whom walked on four legs and could kill her without even trying.
One of Lee Ann’s favorites was Rango, the zoo’s only adult male orangutan. Stopping in front of Rango’s exhibit, she waxed on about what a good father he was to his young son and daughter, who at that moment were climbing in some netting nearby.
“He’s very handsome, I think,” she said. “He has the most sensitive eyes.”
Lately, though, Rango had been snubbing Lee Ann, avoiding eye contact with her. He was mad because she was so busy that she hadn’t come to see him lately. She felt guilty, but what could she do? With the opening of Safari Africa on the horizon, she was more swamped than ever, coordinating the arrival of giraffes and zebras and monitoring the progress of the four Swazi elephants and Ellie. Lowry Park had great hopes that these five would form the nucleus of a breeding herd. In the coming spring, before the new wing opened, the zoo planned to attempt an artificial insemination with Ellie. The two females from Swaziland were not yet old enough to safely get pregnant, and the two males were not yet tall enough to mount Ellie. Considering Ellie’s skittishness with her own species, no one could predict how she would react if one of the bulls tried to breed with her. The fact that she’d never mated or been pregnant before complicated her chances of being able to conceive in the future. Just as with humans, elephant females can develop endometriosis as they get older, leaving cysts and scar tissue that render them infertile; such health issues are especially prevalent in elephants who have never been pregnant. If the zoo wanted Ellie to have a baby, then she needed to do it soon. Already the staff was tracking her menstrual cycle to determine the optimal time for the AI and was consulting with two specialists from Berlin—Drs. Thomas Hildebrandt and Frank Göritz, the same two who had carried out the field sonograms in Swaziland. These two specialists had distinguished reputations, but at zoos around the world, they were known as “the Berlin boys.” Soon the zoo would fly them to Florida.
Although the fears of sabotage from animal-rights activists at the airport had never materialized, Lee Ann and the rest of the staff were on alert for the possibility of further protests. Work crews had already raised the height of Lowry Park’s perimeter fence to make sure no one entered at night to interfere with the elephants. Lee Ann did not harbor antagonism toward PETA or the other groups that had fought the elephants’ importation. Speaking to the docents one evening, she acknowledged that the coalition’s campaign had ultimately been useful because it focused everyone’s attention on the elephants’ well-being.
Even so, Lee Ann knew how far such activism could go. Fifteen years before, in the wake of highly publicized criticisms over the treatment of an Asian elephant at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, a shadowy group called the Animal Liberation Front had vandalized the homes of three of the park’s elephant keepers, splashing red paint and paint thinner on the keepers’ cars and houses. The letters “ALF” were etched into a window with acid.
Lee Ann steered clear of such extremes. She was aware of her institution’s appalling history. She knew the sad stories of how so many animals had ended up in captivity over the centuries, the terrible losses different species suffered as various zoos dispatched animal traders into jungles and forests around the world to seize new wonders. But she was also aware of the role that Lowry Park and other zoos were now taking to defend many species against obliteration.
The golden lion tamarins were a compelling example. Kevin and Candy had been born in captivity. But in decades past, the tamarins had been so coveted for their beauty—and so prized by zoos and private collectors—that they had nearly been hunted to extinction before a coalition of scientists and zoo officials led a battle to protect them in their native swamp forests of Brazil. Thirty years ago, fewer than a hundred were left in the wild, but since then their numbers had surged, thanks partly to the introduction of breeding males and females born at the National Zoo and other institutions and then released into the forest populations. Zoos, in other words, had been agents of both the golden lion tamarins’ annihilation and their resurrection. The rampant desire to display them as gorgeous trophies had pushed them to the brink. The recognition that such practices were not only repugnant but harmful to the future of the planet had then led to a coordinated campaign for their conservation. Despite these efforts, the tamarins’ future is considered bleak. Logging and farming have destroyed more than 90 percent of their habitat in Brazil. Unless something changes, the only golden lion tamarins found on the planet by the end of this century are likely to live in zoos.
Lowry Park had been involved in the campaign to increase the tamarins’ numbers in the wild. Over the years, the zoo had placed other tamarins in an oak on the grounds to acclimate them to living in the trees in preparation for a return to the Brazilian forest. But none had ever been selected by the program. Still, in the years since, the institution had tried to do its part for conservation, especially with its work in rehabilitating manatees and releasing them back into their native waters. Lee Ann was proud of these efforts and wanted the zoo to do more. Like many keepers on her staff, she would have preferred to see Lowry Park’s animals returned to the wild.
“In a perfect world,” she said, “we wouldn’t have animals in captivity.”
With most of the animals at Lowry Park, though, freedom was impossible. Take Rango, for instance. It would be wonderful, Lee Ann said, if someone could spring the male orangutan out of Lowry Park and transport him around the world to the forests of Borneo, where remnants of his species still live high in the trees, eating figs and mangos and lychees. But after a lifetime in zoos, Rango would have no idea how to fend for himself. Some captive-born animals can learn those skills, but it’s almost always a complicated transition. Over the decades, hundreds of orangutans have been rescued from the illegal pet trade and returned to the forest canopies. But many of these captive-born animals were released without any training to teach them how to search for food and fend off predators, and researchers believe that most did not survive. When they were taken into the wild, some of the orangs would not even attempt to climb into the trees. For Rango, it was far too late. Besides, there wasn’t much wild left for him or any other orangutans. Most of their habitat had already been cleared away for gold mining and logging and palm oil plantations. Bornean orangutans were so endangered that some experts predicted they could vanish from the wild in the next few years.
The same dilemma repeated itself over and over. For many of the species at Lowry Park, very little of the wild remained. Outside the zoo, there was no place else for them to go.
Lee Ann wasn’t convinced that most of the zoo’s animals would have been happier in the wild, even if they’d had the choice. After her stints in Africa, studying chimps in the forest, she could testify that nature played nothing like a Disney movie. During her travels she had seen animals dying of hunger, dying in droughts, in the teeth of predators, in the gun sights of humans who hunted them for bushmeat.
“The wild,” she said, “is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
For most of the animals she worked with, maybe the zoo was the best option left.