Zoos had been run pretty much that way since the first one in America opened for business in 1868. It happened to be the Lincoln Park Zoo, started with the donation of a pair of swans from Central Park in New York City. The way Lincoln Park developed is pretty much the way all subsequent zoos developed for the next 50 years, as ”stamp book” collections of animals. That meant the zoos tried to maintain a pair of this and a pair of that and sets of as many species of animals as they could afford to house and feed.
If the pairs mated and had offspring, that was a plus. Baby animals made cute newspaper photos and provided free publicity. More often than not, animals in zoo collections died at younger ages than they would have in the wild, and that was bad, but such news was swept under the rug and forgotten. A dead animal was quietly disposed of, and an order given to a ”bring-`em- back alive” animal dealer who would replace it from the seemingly limitless supply in the wild.
By 1900 Lincoln Park had one of the largest collections of animals in the country. By 1920 most of its major buildings were in place, too. Once the lion, reptile, primate and bird houses were built, little was done for the next 50 years to alter the zoo`s physical plant.
Physically, Lincoln Park was typical of most large city zoos–generally splendid architectural facades, done in grand Victorian manner on the outside and in the viewing galleries. The animals, however, were provided only standardized sterile ”tiled-bathroom” cells, with cement floors and barred openings that made cleaning easy for keepers.
Even though the animals were the obvious attraction and keepers did as well by them as they could, it was the comfort and entertainment of the people that was paramount. Zoos were, in effect, largely run like permanent carnival sideshows or curiosity parks.
Though most zoos spoke of their worth in public education, conservation and research, it was largely lip service. A simple sign bearing the latinized name of the animal inside a cage took care of education. Keeping animals alive as long as possible constituted conservation. Finding cheap but adequate food sources took care of research.
Zookeepers themselves weren`t considered much more prestigious than parkland custodians. Most came to their jobs with no particular training or aptitude other than a fascination with animals.
Even Perkins and Bean, for instance, had little formal education to recommend them as zoo directors. Perkins was a college dropout who began working in his youth as a curator in the St. Louis Zoo. Bean took over Brookfield by virtue of having grown up in zoos. His father was Brookfield`s first director, coming to the job from the Milwaukee County Zoo. When his father was killed in a car accident in 1945, Bean inherited his job.
Despite the lack of expertise in their management, zoos were popular entertainment, and none was more popular than Lincoln Park. The most-visited zoo in the country since the 1920s, it gained world fame in the 1940s when Perkins arrived and when, coincidentally, Bushman, the zoo`s premier gorilla, came of age. Bushman had come to the zoo in the early 1930s as an infant. By the time Perkins took over in 1945 Bushman was, at 6 feet and more than 500 pounds, the largest gorilla in captivity. Perkins made Bushman an
international celebrity, and through the animal and the network television show, made a great name for the zoo itself.
In 1962 Perkins left Chicago for the zoo in St. Louis, handing over the Lincoln Park reins to Lester Fisher. What Fisher inherited was a lovely Victorian antique.
If Fisher looked upon Brookfield Zoo with some envy in his earliest days, it would be understandable. Brookfield, after all, had been built from scratch as a complete zoo. When it first opened in 1934, it benefited by incorporating the successes and discarding the mistakes of older zoos. It could boast with reasonable accuracy in 1934 that it was the world`s state-of- the-art zoo.
That it was built at all was something of a surprise, however. In 1917 Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller and wife of the heir to the McCormick reaper fortune, sold to the Cook County Forest Preserve District 100 acres of land in Brookfield that she had inherited from her father. Two years later she offered to donate to the district 100 acres more of adjoining land if it would combine the parcels to create a new zoo.
Mrs. McCormick stipulated that the new zoo would be supported by the forest preserve`s tax levy but that the zoo would be operated by a specially created, nonpolitical Chicago Zoological Society. Immensely rich and the doyenne of Chicago social life, Mrs. McCormick had fled to Switzerland for eight years in 1913 at the break-up of her marriage to study psychology under Carl Jung. She announced at a 1923 Union League Club meeting the reason behind her wish to create a new zoo:
”I am considered the mother of the zoo, and I want to give to the public for the first time my innermost motive. It is for the study of the psychology of animals. This is a science of which little is known. When we can make scientific deductions of the actions and reactions of animals, we will find ourselves in a position to reach the human being. We must get nearer animals to reach the human soul.”
Considered eccentric if not outright dotty at the time, Mrs. McCormick nonetheless had the power to push creation of the zoo in the face of strong political opposition. Even the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 did not stop the zoo`s construction, though Mrs. McCormick died two years before it was opened to the public on July 1, 1934.
From that day on, Brookfield has been considered one of the best zoos in this country. Borrowing heavily from European zoo design, it was the first American operation to feature barless exhibits, relying heavily on artificial moats to separate animals from spectators. It also featured some of the first extensive efforts in an American zoo to simulate natural surroundings in the animal habitats, mainly through the use of artificial rockwork.
Brookfield has always been one of the the country`s more progressive zoos. Bringing Rabb onto the staff to do research on animal behavior in 1956 represented a breakthrough. The continuing friendship he and Lester Fisher started helped as well, as the two zoo staffs began exchanging ideas and information frequently in the 1960s.
By the 1960s zoo staffs in general were becoming more professionalized. Veterinarians such as Fisher were insisting on such things as thorough autopsies of zoo animals when they died and the dissemination of the results to other zoos to prevent similar deaths. Similarly, scientists such as Rabb followed routine scientific protocol that insists on publication of all research. Such studies began to change entirely the way zoos were designed and run, enhancing greatly the survival and reproductive rates of zoo animals. But zoos really were forced to redefine themselves in the early 1970s. By then it had become glaringly apparent that the so-called ”limitless” supply of beasts from the world`s wilderness areas was shrinking.
Most nations–Third World, Free World and communist bloc–have passed strict laws to stop the wholesale capture and export of their remaining wildlife. It has made collecting for even the best-intentioned zoos prohibitively expensive. The U.S. government, recognizing the critical threat of extinction of many animals, passed the Endangered Species Act in 1969. The act makes it even more difficult for zoos, at least in America, to replenish their collections from the wild.
Being effectively cut off from supplies of wild animals was a sobering challenge to zoos. It soon became obvious that if a zoo`s rarer captive species, such as gorillas or rhinos, died off, the only source of supply was going to be another zoo.
That new reality forced zoos into a cooperative effort to maintain healthy animal populations and into reproductive research on animals that previously had trouble reproducing in captivity. Zoos organized the Species Survival Plan for 37 endangered animal species.
For example, Mark Rosenthal, Lincoln Park`s curator of mammals, was designated the keeper of the stud book for the South American spectacled bear, an endangered species, for all known spectacled bears kept by zoos around the world. These records enable zoos to shift sexually maturing captive bears from zoo to zoo to avoid inbreeding. The data kept on each animal include birth and health records, death and autopsy reports.
The recordkeeping also enables wide dispersal of up-to-date collections of scientific monographs in English, French and Spanish on the behavior, diet, feeding and mating habits of spectacled bears. Thus zoos keeping the bears are constantly fed the newest information on behavioral traits of the species, feeding and mating habits and recommendations on such things as ideal zoo habitats and successful diets for the bears.
”It just makes sense,” Rosenthal says. ”Take the lowland gorilla. We have 20 specimens, the largest collection in captivity, and they represent a pretty fair-sized genetic pool with which to work. But there are 350 captive specimens in the survival plan, and that represents a very large pool of genetic variability.”
The Species Survival Plan means zoo animals now mate in a fashion somewhat closer to natural selection in nature. They are moved about until they find compatible mates. It also means that zoos don`t necessarily ”own” their animals. At any given time a large percentage of the animals in Brookfield or Lincoln Park are temporary visitors on breeding loan from some other zoo, while many of their own animals are away on similar loans.
The survival plan also caused individual zoos to reduce the number of species they keep, forcing an end to ”stamp book” collections. Lincoln Park once had nine different bear species but has cut back to two to devote space to a larger, more viable collection of spectacled bears.
Most animals in any zoo now are fair game for a swap or a loan to preserve a species. Lincoln Park might be hard-pressed to send off Koundu, for example, because he is at 12 still a growing lad and shows promise of becoming the greatest captive specimen since Bushman. But most any other ape is available when needed.
”We happily sent one whole orang family to the San Diego Zoo,” Fisher says, ”and another entire family of gorillas to the St. Louis Zoo. Twenty years ago you wouldn`t ever do that.”
The American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, the zoo world`s own professional oversight organization, made such sharing of knowledge and animals mandatory for accreditation in 1980. In recent years the accreditation process has driven many badly run, underfunded municipal zoos and commercial ”roadside” zoos out of business. It has also forced larger zoos, such as Atlanta`s, to improve, revamp and professionalize its facilities and staff by nationally publicizing its shortcomings while suspending its accreditation.
”It would be nice to say all this has been done because of the altruism and wisdom of zoo people,” says Brookfield`s Rabb. ”But if you look at a zoo as a business, we have to invest heavily in research and development to survive like any other business. Without the collaboration and cooperation we have today between zoos, we wouldn`t have a long-term chance to keep these species around, and eventually that would mean a lot fewer zoos would be around, too.”
Seemingly simple nuts-and-bolts exercises, such as keeping good records of animal populations in zoos, might seem mundane. It is only in the last few years, however, that any but a handful of zoos bothered to do it, and now that it is being done, it is saving zoos and animals from costly mistakes.
Rabb recalls a story of early success Brookfield had in raising families of Arabian addax, an African antelope. The zoo received one of the first addax breeding groups ever brought to America, coming to Chicago from the Sudan in 1935. They bred so well that after a few years Brookfield traded off some of its addax breeding stock to a New York zoo.
”A few years down the road,” Rabb says, ”we realized we shouldn`t continue to unduly breed within our own addax herd, that we should introduce some new blood to ensure genetic variability. We shopped around and ended up bringing a male from the zoo in Paris. We thought we had solved our problem until it came to light that the Paris zoo had obtained the male from the collection we had sent to New York, thus making him an offspring of our own herd.”
Professionalizing zoo staffs has contributed to dramatic zoo changes, too, especially at Chicago`s two zoos. While Ph.D.`s were rare when Rabb came to Brookfield in 1956, enough of them are on staff now to make up a fair-sized university biology department. Indeed, Rabb has been lecturing at the University of Chicago for many years through the school`s Committee on Evolutionary Biology.
Members of Rabb`s coterie of Ph.D.`s admit the eyebrows of their peers were raised when they announced they were taking zoo jobs. The incredulity usually disappeared, however, when they mentioned they were working with the George Rabb, whose reputation is weighty in the world of natural sciences.
Using zoo animal populations for academic study has been a boon to scientists, Jean Altman says. Scarcity of animals and the rising cost of keeping animal collections in an academic setting, she says, has made it extremely difficult to keep enough animals in ideal social groupings for study.
”Having happy, well-socialized animals is very important to the results you get from research, something of which we only recently have been aware,” Altman says. ”Zoos have become very accomplished in achieving large family groupings of many species, so they are proving to be very valuable resources for scientists.”
Brookfield`s Dr. Robert Lacy spends most of his time in front of a computer in the zoo`s research building as a part of its six-member research team. A geneticist, he works with abstract mathematical models of small animal populations. Through the models, he attempts to determine when a given species is doomed to extinction because its numbers have fallen too low to continue successful breeding. By such theoretical work, he can also, it is hoped, determine how to avoid extinction in an endangered species by scientifically shifting individual members of its population to continue propagation without inbreeding.
Lacy`s work has direct impact on the Species Survival Plan, but it will ultimately have an impact on wild populations, too, he says.
”Zoos have always had problems of declining populations,” he says. ”So one area that zoos have been experienced in is moving animals from one place to another to avoid inbreeding, something wild-game managers have no experience in. It`s all very risky. You have to move enough animals of any given species to keep a healthy genetic pool, but not move too many.
”African game managers are beginning to realize they are going to have to artificially move animals like rhinos around from one game park to another to avoid inbreeding. The game managers are requesting assistance from U.S. zoos and are exchanging visits with zoo researchers in the U.S. for training and instruction, learning the intricacies of such moves, both genetically speaking and just as a sheer physical exercise. From zoo experience we know it`s very difficult to move tigers, almost impossible to move elephants, and if you are going to move giraffes, it is much easier when they are young.”
Lacy`s work is basic research, pure and simple. Brookfield recently received a $1 million MacArthur Foundation grant in an endowment that will ensure ongoing, long-term conservation research at the zoo.
It is one of four American zoos, along with the Bronx (N.Y.), National
(Washington, D.C.), and San Diego operations, that have created large-scale, permanent research divisions. Other large zoos that cannot afford research staffs nonetheless support and assist the research institutions. Lincoln Park, for example, works intensively with researchers from other zoos and academic institutions and will hire its first full-time researcher this year.
”Probably half the work I do here benefits other zoos as much or more than it does Brookfield,” Lacy says, ”yet Brookfield pays my salary and tells me to go ahead and do it.”
Besides genetics, Brookfield`s scientific staff concentrates heavily on animal behavior and ecology. In the behavioral study of captive animals for breeding purposes, the zoos want their specimens to be comfortable in their captive homes and still act as much as possible as they do in the wild. The behavioral studies confront one of the oldest philosophical questions faced by zoos about their animals: Is a zoo-born and bred animal–say a baboon–really a baboon?
One hypothetical example is an eighth-generation zoo baboon. For eight generations the baboon`s ancestors have never had to hunt for food, nor have they had to fight off predators. Are such skills as hunting and fighting instinctive or learned? If they are learned, would that make the eighth-generation zoo baboon something less than a full-fledged member of its species? Behavioral studies at Brookfield try to determine if captivity subtly alters a species` evolution.
Scientists are seeing behavioral changes in Brookfield`s baboons that are probably due to captivity. ”Young female baboons living in the wild don`t reach sexual maturity until they are 6 or 7 years old,” says Dr. Pam Parker, Brookfield`s conservation curator. ”In zoos, where they are fed healthy, controlled diets on a regular schedule, they are becoming sexually mature when they are 3 or 4.
”The zoo baboons are giving birth at far younger ages than wild baboons. They also have more frequent pregnancies. That, possibly, is because in the wild taking care of offspring is far more daunting with constantly having to hunt for food and facing periodic food shortages and other dangers.
”What does this mean socially? Do you really have, in captivity, 3- and 4-year-old adults or sexually reproductive children? In some cases, younger females with their first offspring are like some human teenage mothers in that they don`t show the appropriate maternal behavior with their babies.”
Such observations of zoo baboons are beginning to have application to wild baboons, too. Field biologists in Africa, for instance, have for several years been watching a wild baboon troop whose territory is slowly being eroded by human settlement. The troop has adapted from hunting its food in the normal fashion to subsisting by feeding off a garbage dump at a tourist camp. Just like their captive cousins at Brookfield, the garbage-dump baboons, too, are reaching sexual maturity at 3 years and showing aberrant maternal behavior.
