The king and queen of Lowry Park ruled over twin kingdoms, enclosed by high walls and electrified wire and deep moats, erected to ensure that the king and queen never set foot in the outside world and that the outside world never reached them.
Though their domains stood less than a hundred yards apart, they had never met or even laid eyes on each other. Their species, in fact, hailed from tropical forests on opposite sides of the world and were never intended to cross paths. Still, the queen had grown up hearing the king’s hoots and cries, and like nearly everyone else at the zoo, he undoubtedly had spent years listening to her roars and moans. Their individual histories could not have been more different. He had been born in the trees of Africa but had long since lost almost every trace of wildness. She had been born and raised in the care of humans but had never been tamed. He had forgotten who he was and would one day pay for that omission. She had always remembered, and would pay for that, too.
In ways neither could begin to understand, their lives would be intertwined forever.
Liberia, December 1966. An American named Ed Schultz, working for an iron ore mining company in the west African port of Buchanan, got word that someone at the mess hall was selling baby chimps.
Schultz knew all about the bushmeat trade. Hunters killed adult chimpanzees, knocking them from the trees, then sold their flesh for food and their young as pets. The mothers made for an easier target, because as they held on to their young they could not flee as quickly through the trees. The hunting had been going on for decades, with chimps and other species, and would continue for decades more. The losses were devastating. For every chimp sold as a pet, many others—sometimes ten or more—would be slaughtered.
When he heard about the man in the mess hall, Schultz saw it as a chance to save one of those babies. Four decades later, he would still remember that day. He went to the mess hall and found a man waiting with an open orange crate. Inside were two chimps, each only a few weeks old. One looked up at Schultz and reached up with both arms.
“You’re my Herman,” said Schultz, scooping up the chimp. He didn’t know where the name came from. It just seemed right.
Schultz paid $25 in cash, got a receipt marked with a thumbprint—the seller didn’t know how to write—then took Herman home to meet his wife, Elizabeth, and two young children, Roger and Sandy. At first, the family put Herman in diapers and fed him from the bottle Sandy used when she pretended to feed her doll. A few months later, they started caring for another young chimp, a female named Gitta. Before she came to the Schultz household, Gitta had been confined almost exclusively to a small cage and was extremely shy and unsure of herself around humans. When she saw Herman, she clung to him and rocked nervously back and forth. Herman tolerated her neediness; even then, he seemed more patient than other chimps. Though Herman and Gitta slept in a crate on the front porch, the Schultzes often treated them more like members of the family than pets. Herman, naturally affectionate and overflowing with personality, featured more prominently in the family’s daily life. The Schultzes taught him to sit at a table and drink from a cup and eat fruit without making too much of a mess. They dressed him in children’s clothes and tickled his feet and toted him on their shoulders and took him swimming at the quarry. They let him play out in the yard and climb high into the trees. As the years passed and the Schultz children grew, their parents penciled their changing heights on the wall. As Herman and Gitta grew, height marks were made for them, too.
“Herman was probably as close to a human as a chimp could be,” said Roger Schultz, recalling those days. “I don’t think he really believed he was a chimp.”
LAMCO, the multinational company where Ed worked in Liberia, employed people from around the world, including an abundance from Sweden. At company parties and picnics, Herman—young, impressionable, and decidedly male—was constantly being swept up in the arms of Swedish women. It was during this time period when he apparently developed his weakness for blondes. Most of the Swedish women at the gatherings were blond. Mrs. Schultz was blond, too, and so were the Dutch girls who came to the house. If Herman had not been ripped away from the forest, he would have spent his infancy in the arms of his mother. Instead he was surrounded by fair-haired human women who showered him with attention. He never recovered from their kindness. The Schultzes hoped that he would eventually mate with Gitta, but as he grew older, it became apparent that he had no interest. Though he was friendly to Gitta and other female chimps, his libido had already turned away from his own kind. The Schultz family did not foresee any of this. Believing they had saved Herman, they embraced him into their lives without realizing exactly what that embrace would mean.
A year or so later, when Schultz found a new job back in the United States and moved the family to Ohio, he arranged for both Herman and Gitta to join them. Their first Christmas back home, they bundled Herman into winter baby gear and carried him outside to play in the snow drifting across their front lawn. When he tried to walk, he tumbled into a snow bank and cried for someone to pick him up and dust him off. In a photo from that day, Ed Schultz is shown balancing the chimp on his knee. In front of them stretches some kind of animal, possibly a lion, that the family had made in place of a snowman. Herman, his small head tucked inside a bonnet knitted with a pompom, stares out at the frozen landscape, bewildered.
Soon Schultz took another job in Tampa, working as a manager for a phosphate company, and moved the family with him. Herman and Gitta, almost five years old and on the cusp of chimp adolescence, spent increasing amounts of their time in a large cage the family constructed in the backyard. The chimps were growing stronger and more difficult to control, and Elizabeth Schultz and her daughter were no longer comfortable taking them into the house on their own. It became clear that Herman and Gitta were reaching an age when they could no longer safely stay with the family. Unlike the precocious young chimps seen grinning on old TV sitcoms, adult chimps can be extremely dangerous. They’re bigger than most people realize and much stronger than humans. Even in the presence of people they know and trust, chimps are volatile. When they get upset or angry, they simply react. Over the years, adult chimps have repeatedly mauled humans with startling brutality, sometimes biting off their fingers or even plucking out their eyes. In a 2009 incident in Stamford, Connecticut, a pet chimp who had been raised like a human—taught to drink from long-stemmed glasses, to dress and bathe himself, even to use a computer—took his owner’s keys from the kitchen table and slipped outside. When the owner asked a friend to help retrieve him, the two-hundred-pound chimp attacked the friend in the driveway and refused to be pried off her even when the owner stabbed the animal with a butcher knife. “He’s ripping her apart!” the owner told a 911 dispatcher. By the time police arrived and shot him, the chimp had blinded his victim, severely maimed her hands, and torn off her nose and much of her face. She survived but remained hospitalized for months.
Ed Schultz did not believe that his beloved Herman or Gitta would attack his family. But he wasn’t willing to take the chance. So in 1971, he donated the chimps to Lowry Park. In exchange, the family made two requests. The first was that Herman and Gitta be allowed to live out their lives at the zoo, without being sold or transferred to another facility and possibly ending up in some research lab.
“We weren’t going to let anybody put an electrode in Herman’s head,” recalls Schultz’s son, Roger.
The second request was that on the off-chance Herman and Gitta ever mated, the family wanted custody of their offspring, at least for a few years. If Herman and Gitta had a baby, the Schultzes wanted to ensure that it was well cared for, and they had little confidence that the zoo was up to the task. At that time, Lowry Park was still more than a decade away from its remodeling. Herman and Gitta were headed for the shabby old zoo, which was small and claustrophobic and had no facilities for raising an infant chimp. Ed Schultz knew Lowry Park was far from ideal. Even so, he believed it was the only realistic choice available. Besides, the zoo had promised to give Herman and Gitta a cage of their own—one larger than the one that housed them now in the family’s backyard—that would keep them safely away from another chimp known for his aggressiveness. The staff had also agreed to allow Schultz to visit Herman and Gitta whenever he wanted and even hold them, provided he still felt safe getting that close.
On the morning of the big move, the Schultz family drove the chimps to downtown Tampa for a ceremonial visit at City Hall. A Tampa Tribune photographer snapped pictures of Mayor Dick Greco hamming it up with Herman and Gitta. One shot showed the chimps seated beside Greco, pondering the city budget. The staged frivolity did not take away the bittersweet emotions of the day, but the Schultzes were pleased to see Herman reveling in the spotlight. From the moment he’d entered their lives, his hunger for human attention had always made him quick to please. That day, as he posed for the news crew, he was being trained to perform for a larger audience. For better or worse, he was about to become a star.
Once they finished at the mayor’s office, the family escorted the chimps to Lowry Park. On their way inside, Herman scaled a light pole. After a childhood in the trees, he would never again have a chance to climb anything that tall. When the zoo staff led them to Herman and Gitta’s cage, the Schultzes climbed inside with the chimps. Roger and his little sister, Sandy, understood the reasons for the move. But as they said good-bye to their friends, the children could not help crying.
It’s almost impossible to envision what a shock the farewell must have been for Herman. Already confused about so many things, he would have had no way to understand why he and Gitta were being abandoned. When the cage door locked shut and the Schultzes walked away, he called out after them, as he often did when they placed him inside his cage at home. When they didn’t return to retrieve him the next day, or the day after that, did he still harbor some hope that they would eventually return to retrieve him? How long must it have taken before the truth sank in?
That was the start of Herman’s third life. First he had clung to his mother in the forest, only to be ripped away from her and everything else he’d known. Then he had been adopted into his human family and had learned to act as though he were one of them. Now that family was gone too, and with them, an entire world of possibilities. There would be no more picnics or trips to the water, no more sitting around the dinner table. All that remained was Gitta and a never-ending parade of strangers passing in front of the bars.
Herman stayed at the old zoo for the next sixteen years. The place was awful, both in its treatment of animals and sometimes of humans. Several years before Herman’s arrival, when segregation was still enforced through much of the South, Henry Cabot Lodge Bohler and his wife and three children were refused admittance to Lowry Park because they were black. Bohler, who had served his country as a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, was not a man easily intimidated. After his family was turned away at the zoo, he sued the city for discrimination. Ultimately he won, and a federal judge ordered Tampa to desegregate its parks and recreational facilities.
Bohler’s victory was a rare bright spot in Lowry Park’s dismal history. News clips from over the decades tell a harrowing story. The animals paced in rusted and dilapidated cages, too close to the public for their own safety. Razor blades were flicked into the cages, arrows were shot into the compounds. Sea lions collapsed from copper poisoning after eating pennies that had been tossed into their tank. Two Bengal tigers died after vandals fed them amphetamines and barbiturates. One tiger only lasted two days before collapsing. The mayor at the time, Dick Greco, was stunned when a zoo official inquired whether he wanted the tiger’s skin for his office. “I didn’t even want to talk about it,” Greco said later. In a stunt that seems impossible today, someone stole one of the zoo’s lions and tried to sell him on the black market for three hundred dollars. Eventually sheriff’s deputies tracked the thieves to a mobile home park in nearby Dover and rescued the lion. The captors went to jail, while the lion returned to the zoo.
As others died around him, Herman survived through his skills as an entertainer. Expanding his repertoire of tricks, he learned to flirt and blow kisses, to clap and dance and turn somersaults—anything to delight the masses. People tossed him lit cigarettes, so he smoked for them. Sometimes, he acted out. Other captive chimps, when bored or upset, often throw their droppings. Herman, fastidious about his bodily functions after growing up in diapers, would not touch his waste. Instead he threw dirt. Even Mayor Greco became a target. This was in 1972, a year after Herman arrived at Lowry Park. The zoo’s appalling conditions had attracted the attention of the National Humane Society, and a representative from the society inspected the facility, accompanied by the mayor. As they approached Herman’s cage, they noticed him scooping up a handful of dirt.
“I want to see if he’ll throw it,” said Greco, drawing closer.
Always obliging, the chimp hurled away. Did he remember the mayor from their brief encounter at City Hall? Possibly. Herman had a remarkable ability to recall faces. Sometimes keepers who had left the zoo long before would return for a visit, and invariably Herman would recognize them and raise his arm in greeting. It was also possible that he recognized not just Greco’s face, but his status. Over the years Herman’s keepers had noted that he tended to display aggressively when he saw human males with powerful positions and reputations. The staff wasn’t sure what cues these men gave off to announce their rank; perhaps it was the confidence in their stride or the way other people standing nearby deferred to them. Invariably, though, Herman read the nonverbal signals correctly and felt the need to assert himself in the presence of his fellow alphas.
Herman’s antics soon transformed him into the most famous animal at the zoo. Hundreds of thousands of people stopped in front of his cage, some returning again and again, waving and shouting to get a reaction. Herman—or Big Herman, as some began calling him—rarely disappointed. Keepers who stood back and watched the chimp cavorting with the crowds noted the desperation under the manic displays. Herman was not just showing off. He was doing his best, day after day, year after year, to connect with the only species that truly interested him. Whatever wildness had remained inside him when he first arrived at Lowry Park was gradually slipping away. He had become a chimp who longed to be human.
One of his most faithful visitors was Ed Schultz, who loved checking up on his old friends. In keeping with his agreement with the zoo, the staff left Schultz a key to the cage, hanging nearby, so he could enter whenever he wanted. Schultz would sit on the cement floor and talk with Herman as the chimp searched his pockets for apples and bananas. Schultz was not afraid of Herman or Gitta. In fact, he was so at ease with the chimps that one day he actually fell asleep in the cage. When he awoke, Herman and Gitta were napping beside him.
“Whoa. What time is it?” he said, checking his watch. “Fellas, I gotta go.”
The adventures inside the cage didn’t last. A keeper told Schultz it was too much of a risk to allow him direct contact with the chimps, especially as they grew older. Schultz reluctantly agreed but continued to visit, spending so much time there that he soon signed up as a volunteer.
As the years stretched on, Herman’s charm gained him legions of admirers. When Jane Goodall visited Lowry Park in 1987, the renowned chimpanzee researcher instantly fell for him, praising his glossy coat, pleasant personality, and the “lovely, open expression on his face.” “Wonderful,” she called him. “Magnificent.” Along the way, she also offered some insight into Herman’s ostentatious display behavior in front of human alpha males.
“He wants to be the boss,” Goodall explained. “He doesn’t want you to be the boss.”
By then, the city of Tampa had closed the old zoo and was handing over the facility to the Lowry Park Zoological Society, a newly created nonprofit organization that would be running the zoo from that point on. Goodall was an ardent supporter of the new zoo and its expanded focus on endangered primates and other threatened species. She returned repeatedly to tour the remodeled grounds and to enthrall the public with heart-rending stories from her generational studies of chimps in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. Speaking one afternoon at a Girl Scout luncheon, she greeted her audience with a rousing imitation of a wild chimpanzee call.
Goodall, famed around the world, gave the remodeled zoo a fresh stamp of legitimacy. Even before the grand opening, she spoke glowingly of the more naturalistic setting where Herman and the zoo’s other chimps would soon be moved. The open exhibit, much bigger than his cage, was flanked by the canyon walls and featured a termite mound in which they could poke sticks in search of food, just as Gombe’s chimps did in the wild. Goodall was pleased that Herman would be able to walk in the elephant grass and feel the sun above his head.
In truth, the “naturalism” of the zoo’s new exhibits was a conceit. Like the rocks and the waterfall, the termite mound was not real. It didn’t even contain termites; instead it tempted the chimps with hidden caches of honey and jelly. As with so many other exhibits at zoos around the world, many of these design elements were carefully constructed props installed as much for the entertainment of the humans gazing into the exhibits as for the animals themselves. The public has long had a distaste for seeing animals in cages or enclosures with bars or other boundaries that symbolize captivity. Man-made waterfalls and other special effects, such as fake rocks made to appear weathered with air-brushed mineral stains and simulated bird droppings, encourage zoo visitors to feel as though they are witnessing wild creatures in their natural habitat and that in fact those creatures are roaming at will, perfectly happy to be there. The principle guiding such aesthetic touches has been called “imitation freedom.” Animals of any intelligence, presumably, are well aware of the difference. Certainly they are not fooled by the fake bird droppings. Some zoos are so determined to make their exhibits appear “natural” that they hide electrified wires around the trees and plants to prevent the animals from touching them.
The creators of Lowry Park’s new chimp exhibit had not taken their naturalistic designs that far. Electrified wires had been installed along the perimeter to discourage the chimps from climbing out, but no shocks awaited them in the tall grass of the moat. Though the exhibit was hardly a substitute for the verdant complexity of the African forest where Herman had been born, it was unquestionably a great improvement over the claustrophobic box in which he’d been trapped for the past decade and a half. The new exhibit was so radically different that it promised yet another life for Herman. Gitta, it turned out, would not get the chance to come with him. After so many years together, first with the Schultz family and then inside the cage, the female chimp fell ill with a viral infection and died shortly before the two of them were to be moved together.
Herman would not be alone for long. Other chimps were added to Lowry Park’s collection. For the first time since he was a baby, Herman became part of a chimpanzee social group, learning their habits and rhythms and negotiating his way atop the group’s hierarchy. On his first day in the new exhibit, as he stepped into the open air and walked onto the grass and the ground for the first time in years, Herman appeared tentative. Soon, though, he was climbing the exhibit’s tree and had claimed his perch on the rock shelf beside the waterfall, using the higher ground to survey both the crowds of human onlookers as well as the other chimps. In those first years, it was just him and a female named Rukiya and two sisters, Jamie and Twiggy, and a young male named Chester. As the elder male, Herman initially assumed control as the group’s alpha. But when Chester grew older and stronger, he challenged Herman and ousted him in a sudden coup. It didn’t take much, because Herman was not a typical alpha. Chester only had to attack Herman once, pummeling and biting him, and Herman immediately surrendered.
A counter coup was out of the question. Having been raised among humans, Herman was far too nice. He had no combat experience to guide him, no idea how to hold his own amid the violent upheavals at the heart of chimpanzee politics. In both the wild and captivity, male chimps vying for power will battle aggressively. Usually these conflicts do not result in serious injury, but on occasion rivals will resort to brutality. In one gruesome case at the Arnhem zoo in the Netherlands, two males apparently conspired to kill their group’s alpha one night when their keepers were gone. The next morning, the alpha was found in his cage with his toes and testicles bitten off, bleeding to death from numerous wounds. One primatologist, recounting the incident, called it “an assassination.” In Gombe, the forest where Jane Goodall conducts her research, males from one chimpanzee group have been repeatedly observed waging war on other chimp groups, hunting down and exterminating their weaker rivals. Males will kill females and their infants, eating their flesh. Sometimes, in the midst of these war raids, several male chimps will hold down an enemy while others dismember him.
“Their culture is just so aggressive—so naturally aggressive,” said Andrea Schuch, another primate keeper at Lowry Park. “It always surprises people.”
Even after seizing power, Chester continued to chase and slap Herman and the other chimps as a matter of routine, just to maintain his dominance. The primate staff didn’t want to interfere; they thought it best to let the chimps work out the power shift in their own way, provided the situation didn’t reach a point where the animals were getting hurt. Sometimes, when tensions between Herman and Chester grew high, the keepers would separate the two males, hoping to calm them. But the physical domination continued.
Lee Ann Rottman, still a young primate keeper at the time, remembers how upsetting those days were for Herman. It wasn’t just that he’d been overthrown; it was that he could not defend himself or the other chimps. Powerless to stop Chester from picking on the females, Herman showed signs of confusion. He would pace the exhibit, grinning with his mouth open, the chimp signal for fear.
“He didn’t know what to do,” Lee Ann said. “He would be very scared.”
Sometimes, when Chester was coming after him or one of the other chimps, Herman would turn to any keepers who happened to be nearby and reach his hand toward them. For a chimp who identified so closely with humans, the woeful gesture must have made sense. He had no way of comprehending the keepers’ reluctance to intervene. All he knew, from his decades at the zoo, was that people were his friends. Surely they would save him. Surely they would help him protect the others.
Chester’s behavior was to be expected of an alpha chimp. In many ways, his reign brought new life to the group. He was full of energy and verve, and unlike Herman, he was keenly interested in breeding with the chimp females. Still, he was a problem for the staff. He had a habit of cupping fresh droppings in his hand and hurling them at visitors. Even more disturbing, he displayed a talent for climbing up the rock wall beside the waterfall and eluding the electrical wire that ran across the top. He never wandered far. He seemed content to stand on the roof of the chimps’ night house, and when he saw the keepers coming, he simply climbed back down into the exhibit. Still, these excursions did not bode well. What if Chester really got out and hurt someone? A year or so later, he was shipped to another zoo, and Herman reclaimed his position at the top of the hierarchy.
The possibility of an escaped animal was something Lowry Park took seriously. The keepers communicated all day on walkie-talkies and had different codes for different emergencies. Code One signified that one of the animals had gotten out of its enclosure. Code Two meant a visitor had fallen or climbed into an exhibit. Code Three meant a venomous snake had bitten a keeper. The staff prepared for these emergencies, especially Code Ones. They had protocols for species on the loose—what to do if it was a wolf or a clouded leopard—and drills to practice carrying out those protocols. The zoo even had a weapons team, made up of keepers who were trained by law enforcement to use firearms, if other measures failed.
Lee Ann often considered what it would be like to hear the crackle of the radio and then the words, “Code One, chimp.” Inside her head, she would play through the scenarios. If Herman got out, what would she do? What if it was Rukiya or Twiggy? Lee Ann knew each of the chimps’ personalities better than some parents know their own children. She was fairly sure that she would feel safe approaching Rukiya if she were loose. Among the staff, the joke was that if Herman ever escaped, he’d just find a blond visitor and strip off her clothes. Still, the keepers knew they had to be careful, and never entered the exhibit with the chimps except in emergencies. Lee Ann did not believe she had anything to fear from Herman, either. But there was no telling what another chimp might do.
In the primate department, some preferred the orangs. Some had a thing for the lemurs. Lee Ann’s heart, always, was with Herman and his group. Showing the chimps to a newcomer inside the zoo, she would rhapsodize about how handsome Herman was, how smart and thoughtful and considerate of the other chimps, how he managed to be both strong and gentle.
“If I could meet a man like Herman,” she said, “I would marry him.”
For his part, Herman was deeply attached to Lee Ann, whose hair fell somewhere along the border between light brown and blond. He thought of her and the other female primate keepers as his. Once, when Lee Ann’s father visited the zoo, he placed a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, and Herman exploded, screaming and pounding his body against the walls of the exhibit. Lee Ann wasn’t offended. She understood that chimps were extremely emotional and that whatever they felt usually flashed straight to the surface. She identified with this trait, because sometimes she felt overwhelmed by her emotions too.
In the years since Chester had been sent away, Herman had ruled unchallenged over Lowry Park’s other chimps with a soft touch unusual for alphas of his species. If he needed to keep the others in line, he would shriek at them and sometimes even chase them. Afterward, the keepers noticed, he would always reconcile. He was their protector and leader. When a baby chimp named Alex was introduced into the group in 1998, Rukiya became his surrogate mother. But it was Herman who refused to leave Alex’s side when the baby got his head stuck in some netting.
Not long after Alex joined the group, another chimp—a male, a few years older than Herman—was brought to the zoo from another facility. Bamboo was a pathetic sight. He had almost no teeth and was therefore vulnerable, and when he arrived at Lowry Park, he was obviously shaken and unsure of himself. Another dominant male might have ignored him or beaten him to put him in his place. Herman welcomed Bamboo and accepted him before any of the others did.
Always, Herman was different. When new keepers were hired, he welcomed them by extending his fingers through openings in the mesh, offering to put the fingers in their mouth. In chimp language, this was an expression of faith, demonstrating that he believed the keepers would not bite off the digits. He wanted them to understand that he trusted them, and that therefore they could trust him.
At times, Herman seemed uncannily human, understanding things that eluded the other chimps. His unusual relationship with Dr. Murphy was a good example. Like many of the animals at Lowry Park, most of the chimps disliked the veterinarian because they associated him with the sting of a tranquilizer dart and other indignities required for their medical care. One day, Murphy appeared in the chimp night house with a tranquilizer gun so he could attend to Herman. Murphy was a good shot and almost never missed. But this time, his aim was off. The other chimps would have run and hid. Herman just picked up the dart, walked over to the mesh, and handed it back to Murphy so he could try again.
Enshalla’s life was so much simpler. Everything about her was clean and clear and imbued with ruthless purity. Unlike Herman, she never betrayed the slightest confusion about what she was. She didn’t perform. She didn’t accommodate or negotiate. She was a tiger through and through, with almost no interest in humans, except when they brought her another slab of horse ribs. When her keepers worked in her night house, she would wait until their backs were turned, then leap toward them against the mesh, growling and hissing.
Tigers have distinctive personalities, both in zoos and in the wild. Some have been characterized as daring and rash, others are relatively mild-mannered. Even though she had been born and raised in captivity, Enshalla’s personality was irredeemably, wondrously savage. She was such an intimidating animal, some keepers from other departments were reluctant to walk down the narrow, dimly lit corridor that led past her den, only a couple of feet past the piercing stare of her emerald eyes. Even though these keepers knew they were safe, it unnerved them every time she jumped at them, so close they could see her fangs gleaming in the semidarkness.
To those who worked with her every day, Enshalla’s unwielding ferocity only deepened her beauty.
“What I loved about her the most was that she was nasty,” said Pam Noel, who had worked with her for years. “She was true to her species.”
The public found Enshalla mesmerizing. On the boardwalk that overlooked her exhibit, people would throng at the railing to stare and point and yell. They loved to watch her circle the perimeter, lick her paws, jump onto her elevated platform. They were especially fascinated when the staff tossed her another serving of meat. Once, a man had asked one of the keepers why they insisted on serving meat to the zoo’s tigers. Wouldn’t a vegetarian diet be better? The keeper explained that tigers are carnivores with deeply bred instincts for hunting prey. The man was not satisfied.
“Couldn’t you give them tofu shaped to look like their prey?”
Enshalla ignored the crowd’s provocations. She didn’t bother growling at the gawkers who called out to her from above, and she didn’t pounce against the viewing window even when they pointed at her from the other side, only a few inches away. The visitors would pound the glass, trying to prod a reaction. Enshalla would gaze in the opposite direction with regal indifference, refusing to acknowledge the humans’ vulgarity with so much as a twitch of her ear.
She was an independent female, born from an independent mother. Her parents, Sumatran tigers named Dutch and Tuka, came to Lowry Park from zoos in Rotterdam and San Diego. Their early courtship bore a strong resemblance to the dynamic that would later unfold between Enshalla and Eric. Just like her daughter, Tuka was older and more experienced and confident than the male suitor brought before her. Just as with Enshalla, she lived at Lowry Park first and considered the tiger exhibit her kingdom. When Dutch arrived, she treated him as an intruder. Even though he outweighed her, Tuka dominated him at first, snarling and hissing until he hid from her wrath.
Finally Tuka relented and allowed Dutch to get close enough to mate. Even then, though, the danger was not over. Fatal violence between tigers is common. In the wild, they tend to be solitary animals, highly protective of their territories, and when two males cross paths, their conflicts sometimes end in death. Males and females typically don’t meet unless the female is in estrus; even then, the male may kill the female. And once a female gives birth, it’s not uncommon for her to kill a cub, either accidentally or to protect it from another threat. Dutch and Tuka lost their first cub, Shere-Khan, in the spring of 1990 to just such an accident. Witnesses reported that Shere-Khan was sitting near the pond that lined the front of the exhibit when he called out to his mother in a low growl, sounding like a whiny child demanding attention. Tuka went over to the cub and picked him up by his throat instead of the scruff at the back of his neck. As she held him, seemingly unaware of his distress, Shere-Khan struggled and suffocated. Once he went still, Tuka carried his body to the water at the front of the exhibit. As sobbing visitors watched, she pulled the limp cub through the water, as though she were trying to revive him. When keepers coaxed Tuka back into her den inside the night house, she dropped Shere-Khan and left his body in the exhibit. A vet tech ran out to retrieve the cub, and several staff members performed CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for an hour, to no avail.
Six months later, Dutch and Tuka had another cub, a female named Kecil. Then, on August 24, 1991, Tuka gave birth to a litter of three more cubs—Raja, Sacha, and Enshalla. For the first few months, the cubs stayed inside Tuka’s den, nursing and walking on wobbly legs. For their protection, they were kept separate from their father. When the cubs were about eight weeks old, Tuka’s keepers decided to briefly take Enshalla from her mother, too. Enshalla had a sore behind her ear and the keepers had noticed that Tuka was overcompensating, licking the sore incessantly. To give Enshalla a chance to heal, the staff hand-raised the cub for a couple of weeks, taking turns bringing her to their homes at night.
Ged Caddick, then the assistant general curator, remembers the young Enshalla padding across the wood floors of his south Tampa home. She slept in a pet carrier in the kitchen and accepted feedings of a gruel made of formula and meat powder, squirted into her mouth with a syringe. Before he fed her, Caddick would put on gloves so as not to leave his scent in her fur. He would pick her up by the scruff of her neck, just as a mother tiger would, and feel her body go limp. Even then, she was far from docile. She wasn’t eager to be held and had no desire to cuddle.
“She wasn’t aggressive, but she wasn’t seeking human companionship,” said Caddick. Still, “she was cute as the dickens. Cute as can be.”
Taking the cub home was a rare treat for her keepers. Once Enshalla grew, it would be far too dangerous for them to venture into the same room with her. In the zoo world, big felines are notoriously unforgiving of humans who get too close. A senior keeper at the Miami Metrozoo was slain one day when he walked into the Bengal tiger exhibit without realizing that one of the tigers was still inside the paddock. The tiger heard the keeper approaching through the night house and was waiting for him the moment he opened the service door. In another incident, a keeper at Busch Gardens was giving a behind-the-scenes tour for her parents and boyfriend when she briefly steadied herself against the bars of a lion’s cage. The lion bit down on her hand and severed her arm near the elbow. She survived, but doctors were unable to reattach her arm.
Cradling young Enshalla late at night, feeling her squirm in their laps as she gulped down the gruel, allowed Caddick and the other keepers to appreciate her with a vivid intimacy that would never again be possible. Even wearing the gloves, they could stroke her paws, which seemed far too big for the rest of her body and held the promise of how much she would grow. They could touch the smooth brown pads under those paws, and feel the rhythmic rise and fall of her lungs. When she was full and yowled to get down, they could sense the vibration rising from her throat. Holding a baby tiger is nothing like holding a housecat. The body of a fully grown cat is not nearly as thick or muscular as that of a tiger cub, and cats tend to turn in your arms with a lightness that’s completely missing from a cub. Even when it’s being playful, a baby tiger moves with a heaviness that has nothing to do with how much it weighs and everything to do with what it’s becoming. When you hold a tiger cub, it’s impossible to forget even for a second that very soon this stunning creature now nuzzling your arm will be capable of hunting and killing you. The tension between those opposites—the adorability of the fluffy cub, the menace of the apex predator waiting to emerge—is electric.
Enshalla was soon returned to Tuka. That November, she and her siblings were introduced to the public. In preparation, the staff baby-proofed the exhibit, lowering the water in the moat to eighteen inches, and allowed Tuka to take the three-month-old cubs out on a trial run, early one morning before the zoo opened, so that they could explore the exhibit quietly. By then the staff had also built a platform, raised five feet off the ground, where Tuka could retreat when she needed a moment of peace from the clamoring litter. The next day, the cubs made their debut. Tuka stepped out first while her cubs remained inside. She studied the gawkers on the boardwalk above, then decided it was safe enough to bring out the babies. She went to the doorway where the cubs were waiting and chuffed at them, making a sound, similar to a cough, that tigers use for greetings or friendly encouragement. To the crowd, it sounded like she said “poof.” At once the cubs bounded forward into the light. For the next hour or so, they followed their mother, jumping on her and splashing through the pond and shredding the exhibit’s plants and batting one another with their paws.
The cubs were an instant hit, but their time together would be brief. As they turned one, they were all shipped to other zoos. Kecil had been sent away too. Lowry Park’s tiger exhibit and night house was not spacious enough to hold them all as they grew. Enshalla and Rajah were sent on loan to Zoo World in the Florida Panhandle. By the time she arrived at the Panama City zoo, Enshalla was no longer a fuzzy cub. She had grown into a juvenile tiger, still maturing but already showing her fiery temperament. Don Woodman, now a veterinarian in Clearwater, Florida, worked at Zoo World at the time and was one of Enshalla’s keepers. He remembers her as extraordinarily beautiful, even for a tiger, and extremely aggressive. Her moods were mercurial. She seemed torn between a desire for affection and a determination to attack anyone who tried to give it to her. When Woodman approached her den, she acted friendly and rubbed the white fur of her cheeks against the bars of her cage. But when he turned, she threw herself at him against the bars. Even though he always knew what was coming, the explosions startled him every time.
“She was a mean little cuss,” Woodman said. “If you moved, she would hiss like she was going to rip you apart.”
Enshalla’s brother, Rajah, lasted less than a day at Zoo World. The night he and Enshalla arrived, the two young tigers were still recovering from the sedatives they’d been given for the journey from Tampa. Both of them were out of it when the keepers placed them in their dens. The next morning, when the staff returned to check on them, they found Rajah dead with an injury to the back of his neck.
At first, the cub’s death was a mystery, since he had been in his den alone. But during the necropsy, it became clear that his injury was a fatal bite from a fully grown male lion in the adjoining den. During the night, the lion had managed to raise the drop gate that separated them—a guillotine gate, it’s called—and attacked Rajah while he was still half-asleep. Enshalla, housed in a different den, was not harmed. Although she had only been a few feet away, it was unclear if she would have been sufficiently awake from her drug-induced sleep to see or hear her brother being dragged into the lion’s jaws. Already separated from her mother and other siblings, she was on her own.
Sudden death hovered over Enshalla’s family, striking again and again across the generations. First Shere-Khan, then Rajah. Then one spring day in 1994, Enshalla’s father killed her mother. Dutch and Tuka were still at Lowry Park, on their own after the cubs were sent away. Although their earlier courtship had been tumultuous, the two tigers had been together for five years and seemed to be getting along well enough that the keepers were routinely pairing them. They were outside in the exhibit around noon one day when something set them off. Whatever it was, the fight did not last long. When it was over, Dutch had crushed Tuka’s windpipe. Dr. Murphy, who performed the necropsy, said afterward that the zoo did not know what had led to the death.
“Whatever produced the exchange between the two, I know that instincts took over with the male, and he reacted,” said Murphy.
In the days after, the keepers saw Dutch skulking through the dens in the night house, obviously looking for Tuka. “Certainly he knows she’s missing,” said Murphy.
Eventually, Dutch was sent to the Louisville Zoo. His departure, and Tuka’s death, left Lowry Park with openings in its tiger exhibit, and Enshalla was brought back from Panama City later that year. By then she was turning three, a fully grown young adult, much stronger and more indomitable than when she’d been sent away. Returning to the place where she had been born, she was ready to claim it as her own.
In the nine years since, male Sumatrans had been rotated into the exhibit for Enshalla’s approval. With each of them, there had been no doubt who was in charge. The keepers admired her refusal to submit, either to other tigers or to humans. Even when the keepers fed her, leaving her meat inside her den, Enshalla would growl at them to get out and let her eat in peace. They were trained to check and recheck every lock in her night house and to maintain a safe distance. They never entered the same enclosure with her or the other tigers. These precautions did not lessen the heart-quickening awe Enshalla inspired. In the early mornings, when she was still inside her den and the keepers went into her empty exhibit to clean and rake, they saw horse ribs scattered on the ground and smelled the tang of the scent she sprayed to mark her territory. Standing in that place, they knew they were no longer at the top of the food chain. Still, they did their best to let Enshalla know they loved her. At Halloween, they gave her pumpkins to tear open. For Cinco de Mayo, they gave her a piñata stuffed with horsemeat. They even learned to chuff for her. Sometimes, she chuffed back.
One of her keepers, Carie Peterson, showered her with sweet-talk.
“Hi, baby girl,” Carie called out to her one morning. “Hey, princess.”
Enshalla answered with a half-roar, half-snort.
“She’s mad at me,” Carie said, laughing.
She didn’t mind the tiger’s moods. Enshalla was her favorite, and she made no attempt to hide it. She insisted that Enshalla was hers and hers alone.
“She’s my cat,” Carie would say. “If she ever leaves, I’m leaving with her.”
Like the rest of the staff, she was closely following Enshalla’s and Eric’s courtship dance. She prayed that eventually Enshalla would warm to the young virgin and that together they would conceive a litter, thereby adding to the world’s dwindling number of Sumatran tigers. Even so, as a modern woman with modern notions, Carie took great satisfaction in Enshalla’s refusal to automatically concede to the male imperative. It made the keeper happy that many of the female animals she worked with dominated the males in their exhibits.
“All our girls are like that here,” said Carie, beaming.
Enshalla’s invincibility posed a threat to the future of her species. Feminism was a human invention, just like morality and ethics and the vegan principles espoused by the man who wanted to feed the tigers tofu. Nature was indifferent to the hopes embedded in these ideas. It unfolded outside our notions of progress, justice, right and wrong. If Enshalla was going to ever have a litter, it had to be soon. She had just turned thirteen and was approaching the end of her reproductive window. If she rejected Eric, how many more suitors could be brought before her? How many more chances did she realistically have? Like her species, she was running out of time.
Patrolling her territory, the queen circled quietly. She slinked past the rock walls that held her in and traced a path along the edge of the moat. In the water, her reflection moved with her—a shimmer of orange and black, disappearing.
Across the way, the king was chasing his minders. It was a game they had played for years, and one of his favorites. The keepers would dash along the exterior of the high mesh wall at the back of the chimp exhibit, and from the other side, Herman would tear after them, laughing and nodding ecstatically.
The keepers loved it too. It made them happy to lure Herman away from another nap on his rock shelf and to see him so engaged and excited, running hard, showing a glimpse of youthful energy. To many staff members, Herman was Lowry Park. Waves of primate keepers had worked with him, and as they all came and went, he had always been there. Zoo-keeping tends to be a young person’s profession, and many of his current keepers had not been born when he first arrived. They could not picture Lowry Park without him. Still, they wondered how much longer he could hold on. Sooner or later, his heart had to give out, or another chimp would topple him from the throne.
At the moment, Herman had no rivals. There were still only two other males in the group. Bamboo was even older and slower than him and was relegated to such a lowly status in the hierarchy that the females sometimes felt at liberty to bully him. Alex, the adolescent male, looked up to Herman so much that he often imitated him, puffing himself up and rocking back and forth and acting as though he were in charge. But inside any chimp group, even a small and stable one like Herman’s, power is always fluid. Alliances shift. Secret deals are made. A new male, stronger and more ambitious, could be transferred from another zoo and take over, just as Chester had done before. Alex, growing fast, might look at Herman one day and gauge the slowness of his gait and decide it was time for a change.
It was hard to imagine what Herman would do then, what he would have left. If he were no longer the king, who would he be?
No need to worry about that right now. There were no threats on the horizon, no challengers looming. For the moment, Herman could while away whatever days he had left, indulging in the privileges of his position—flirting with pretty women, rolling in the dirt with Bamboo, sticking his long black leathery feet through the mesh of his den so his keepers could give him another pedicure. Sometimes, when the afternoon light turned amber and they summoned Herman inside for the night, the chimp ignored them. If he was especially stubborn, they asked one of his favorite blondes on staff—he was particularly enamored of a woman in the Asia department—to stand near the door and call his name. Ever hopeful, Herman would race toward her, running on all fours.
After so many years in this place, he had become a gray eminence. An old man at dusk, hanging on.