Zoo Story (10 page)

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.

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.