It`s a hot weekend day in the middle of the summer, and it`s time you, the spouse and the kids did something together. You wouldn`t mind going to an air-conditioned movie theater, but you know the headaches the 2-year-old can cause after becoming bored and fidgety 15 minutes into a film. Besides, the 7-year-old wants to do something outdoors. Both kids are too young to enjoy a Cubs or Sox game, and you got sunburned at the beach last weekend, so that doesn`t appeal to you.
How about the zoo? your spouse suggests. Yes. Of course. The kids always enjoy the zoo, and you always feel properly responsible as a parent taking them. It`s so educational, you know. And, if the truth be known, you like the zoo because it`s just sort of fun to leisurely amble around seeing what there is to see.
The next question, because this is Chicago, is which zoo. There`s Lincoln Park in the city and Brookfield in the suburbs. It`s kind of nice to have the choice. Only three other cities in the world have two major zoos. Tokyo and Mexico City have the same sort of set-up–a zoo in the city and one in the suburbs. Berlin has two big zoos, too, but one`s in East Berlin, the other in West Berlin, with an Iron Curtain separating them, so there`s really no choice there.
Okay. Okay. You`ll go to Brookfield because it`s the bigger of the two zoos in Chicago.
Not exactly. It`s true that Brookfield far outstrips Lincoln Park in area, 204 acres to 35. But both zoos have the same number of animals in their collections, about 2,400. And Lincoln Park is a free zoo, with no admission charged at the gate or into any of its exhibits. Even the zoos in the two great citadels of communism, Moscow and Beijing, charge a fee to get through the gate.
Big deal. You live in the suburbs, and Brookfield`s easier for you to get to; the four of you can spend the whole afternoon there without forking over much more than 10 bucks, and that doesn`t exactly break the weekly budget. A zoo`s a zoo, and if you`ve got to choose between two that have the same number of animals, you might as well go to the one that is the least hassle.
That is how most Chicagoans choose their zoos. If you live in the city, you probably favor Lincoln Park, and if you`re a suburbanite, chances are you prefer Brookfield.
That`s sort of a pity. It may have been true some years ago that one zoo wasn`t much different from the next, but it isn`t true today. And nowhere else in the world can you see two zoos more radically different than in the Chicago area. The two institutions are totally distinct. Each has a history that differs radically from the other`s. Each as a physical entity could not be more dissimilar from the other. Each has a philosophy of keeping and exhibiting its animals that opposes the other`s.
And yet the two zoos both enjoy international reputations for excellence, both regarded as leaders in a field that has changed dramatically in the last 15 years.
How Brookfield and Lincoln Park differ can be seen in how they handle similar animals. Gorillas, for example, are an endangered species. Each of the zoos keeps them, but the gorilla styles of life at the two institutions are as different as those of humans opting for suburban or city life. Consider Koundu and Samson, both 450-pound silverback male gorillas–one at Lincoln Park, the other at Brookfield.
Koundu, the Lincoln Parker, is an immigrant who came to Chicago from England as a youth. Samson transferred to the Chicago area from homestate New York some years ago and settled into suburban Brookfield to start raising a family.
Koundu, husband of three and father of three, lives in the Great Ape House at Lincoln Park. He and his family have one of six apartments in the ape house, which shelters, besides Koundu`s family, two other gorilla families and one family each of chimpanzees and orangutans.
The circular, three-story underground building constructed in 1976 provides what perhaps could best be described as ”modernist/minimalist`
` living quarters. No attempt is made in the spartan ape house to adorn it with any realism of the plants and animals with which the apes would live in their wilderness habitats.
Each apartment is fitted with water pools for drinking and wading that are sculpted into the cement floors. Each has several steel pole ”trees,”
several cement-block platforms and wall outcroppings, and a profusion of thick ropes for swinging, climbing and lounging. There are private upstairs chambers open all day if they wish to get away from the endless parade of gawking people.
All that separates the people from the apes are walls of 5/8-inch reinforced glass, so humans and apes can and do meet each other almost nose to nose, eyeball to eyeball, hand to hand. The arrangement provides subtle but great drama daily.
Koundu spends a good part of his day sitting by his window, like many urban dwellers, mesmerized by the passing parade of humanity. In human terms, Koundu is one hip, streetwise, sophisticated gorilla, very aware of and full of himself. Most animated when there are large crowds outside his quarters, he is the most theatrical ape in the house and attracts the most people.
He moves along the windows to size up individuals and examine clothing or handbags and often sits in front of a person he finds interesting. His reactions are important when considered in the continuum of history. Unlike gorillas kept at Lincoln Park just a generation ago, such as the late Sinbad, who showed signs of neurotic, alienated behavior, Koundu`s behavior seems that of a healthy, engaged gorilla intellect. Rather than staring dumbly and forlornly at the people who come to see him, he seems genuinely amused and attracted by them.
A number of people are so taken with Koundu that they visit him daily, standing by his cage communing with him for as much as a half an hour or more. Koundu lavishes attention upon those people, pressing himself against the windows where they stand. Sometimes he gently raps the glass in front of the regulars, as if to acknowledge that ”I know you, and I am glad you have come today to see me.” Sometimes he mischievously but violently slams the glass when his regular visitors are not looking, visibly giggling when he sees he has startled them.
Koundu`s lifestyle is in marked contrast to that of his counterpart, Samson, at Brookfield`s sprawling zoo. Samson`s home is one of four cavernous exhibits in Brookfield`s great Tropic World. Appropriately enough for the suburbs, the luxury Samson has that Koundu does not is space, generous and landscaped, for himself and his family of two mates and three children.
Deep moats separate visitors from Samson and his family. The physical distance means that the sheer scale of size of the animals compared to humans is not is as apparent as at Lincoln Park. The distance, too, means there is far less interaction between Samson and visitors.
But Samson and his family have perhaps five times more room in which to roam than Koundu`s family. They have a craggy hill of boulders to climb, realistic but artificial trees to roost on, realistic epoxy vines to swing from, a stream to wade in, a waterfall to cavort in. They are surrounded by real tropical plants and visited by monkeys from a neighboring habitat, while African birds soar and nest among them.
The space between the visitors` gallery and Samson has an insulating effect, much like a suburban lot. A suburban father lounging in a spacious yard barely takes secondary interest in the traffic passing in front of his house; Samson likewise shows only slight interest in the people who daily troop through Tropic World.
People are too far away to relate to individually, and they do not threaten his immediate space. Samson spends most of his time lounging regally in various parts of his habitat, watching over his mates and children. But a half hour of carefully observing Samson is well spent, for one can walk away with more of an understanding of how gorillas live in nature than one might get at Lincoln Park.
So which is better, Brookfield or Lincoln Park? Whose children have a better chance at growing up healthy and well adjusted, Samson`s or Koundu`s?
Which has the most virtue for humans and for zoo animals–suburbs or city?
Each argument has its partisans noisily trumpeting that one is better or more attractive.
Behavioral scientists have known for years that there is no answer. The key is that whatever the environment–urban, suburban, rural or wilderness
–individual humans and animals have to be brought up and schooled in the ways of their species in loving, nurturing family life. If they are, they will turn out to be healthy, well-adjusted adults.
Though the styles of exhibits in which Koundu and Samson live are totally different, they both meet the most important criterion of success for keeping wild animals in captivity–Koundu and Samson are happy. We know that because they are healthy, mating successfully, respectful of their ladies and are loving, adoring fathers.
If that sounds sentimental, it is not. The happiness of the animals has many ramifications important to the zoo world, to the world of natural sciences and to the cousins of the zoo animals living in the wild, often precariously.
Dr. Jean Altman is a renowned baboon expert who made her reputation both as an academic biologist at the University of Chicago and as a field biologist in Africa. Until 20 years ago, academic and field biologists often held zoos and zookeepers in contempt, pitying the animals they held captive. Today Altman remains on the university faculty but also does research at Brookfield, where she studies the zoo`s baboon colony and uses it to train her students before they go to Africa to work with wild specimens.
Altman is just one of many Ph.D.`s and field biologists working at zoos who probably wouldn`t have been caught dead in one a couple of decades ago. World events have transformed the way wild animals live, making them in many respects more and more like captive zoo animals.
In Africa, for example, the explosion of the human population has meant the gradual expansion of human settlements into most of the continent`s once vast wilderness areas.
There are now many island wildernesses in Africa that have no corridors left between them for wild animals to move freely and naturally in search of space, food or new mates. And that means many wild species in Africa are beginning to suffer the effects of inbreeding and a gradual slide toward extinction.
As such problems have intensified in this century, academic scientists and field biologists, who traditionally had little time for each other, began working together to find answers. The two disciplines lacked expertise, however, in a couple of the knottiest problems they faced. One was convincing the public that there is a problem. The other was a paucity of knowledge about how small populations of animal species could be manipulated to avoid inbreeding.
There was an institution, of course, that has had long-standing experience in both those areas–the zoo. People love and romanticize anything that has feathers or fur, and zoos have always been the only place, other than nature, to which the public can go to lavish their affections upon large collections of creatures feathered and furry.
Zoos, moreover, by their very nature have had to deal with inbreeding of animals. They haven`t always dealt with it effectively or efficiently, but they have had more experience with it than any other institution. And so it has happened that in the last few years an increasing number of field and academic biologists have ended up knocking on zoo doors, looking for answers. ”The first scientists to work at zoos looked at them as a library that hadn`t been opened yet,” says Dr. Pam Parker, Brookfield`s conservation curator, one of six scientists who make up the zoo`s new research division.
”As a result there`s a lot of interesting cross-pollination of ideas going on now between field biology and the controlled zoo environment.”
Altman says the balance between extinction and survival of hundreds of animal species now hangs on that cross-pollinating. Last year the leading practitioners from the worlds of academia, field biology and zoos banded together for the first time to found the international Society for
Conservation Biology. It is an organization dedicated to pooling all available knowledge, manpower, skills and political influence to conserve the world`s existing natural resources.
”Some of the skills and insights called into play in the zoo are becoming extremely valuable in the field,” Altman says. ”The Kenya Wildlife, Conservation and Management Department has asked American zoos to set up a workshop for them in animal population management. The Nairobi National Park is pretty much a safari park, now that all the natural routes of animal dispersion have been cut off.
”Zoo people may not have talked directly with scientists years ago,”
she says, ”but they read the scientific papers and applied whatever seemed practical to their own operations. The animals have to be watched 24 hours a day, every day of the year, their nutrition and health constantly and carefully monitored. With so many animals to look after, a zoo almost every day has problems and emergencies requiring crisis management. In many ways the whole operation takes on the aspect of a hospital.”
Altman`s zoo-as-hospital reference seems particularly apt. The growing body of knowledge of the physical needs of individual species and introduction of new technology have forced zoos, like major hospitals, to reconstruct themselves totally in recent years.
Certainly that is why Lincoln Park constructed its Great Ape House and Brookfield put up Tropic World. Though the two buildings were designed out of totally different philosophies, both are successful. The differing philosophies and styles of the two zoos are the result of the two men who run the institutions, Dr. George Rabb at Brookfield and Dr. Lester Fisher at Lincoln Park.
Rabb and Fisher are good friends and have been for more than 30 years since Rabb came to Brookfield in 1956 with a Ph.D. in biology fresh out of the University of Michigan. Hired to start Brookfield`s research department, he was only the second Ph.D. ever to work in an American zoo. Fisher was something of a pioneer himself. Few zoos employed veterinarians until after World War II, and he had been hired as Lincoln Park`s part-time veterinary consultant in 1948, later becoming full time.
That Fisher and Rabb became friends almost immediately is important to the success of the two zoos and perhaps even helped forge the new directions in which most zoos are now going. Fisher`s first boss at Lincoln Park was its then-director, Marlin Perkins. The man who hired Rabb was Brookfield`s director, Robert Bean.
Perkins and Bean were outstanding zoo leaders in their day. Perkins in some ways did more than anyone else to popularize natural science and zoology through his pioneering television work, first with his network series ”Zoo Parade” from Lincoln Park, and his later, even more elaborate series, ”Wild Kingdom.” Bean was one of the first zoo administrators to take a serious interest in field biology as a way of discovering better methods of care for zoo animals.
But Perkins and Bean did not like each other. They rarely spoke, and the staffs of the two zoos had little or no contact to exchange either information or animals. About the only contact between the two zoo staffs was through personal relationships such as Fisher`s and Rabb`s.
The situation in Chicago wasn`t unusual, however. ”Individual zoos used to be pretty much self-sustained islands unto themselves,” Fisher says. ”And zookeepers used to be jealous of their individual collections and their secrets of management. If you were able to keep a left-handed dingbat alive in captivity when nobody else in the zoo world could, you never told anybody what it was that you were doing right. You weren`t going to tell zoos X, Y and Z the secrets of your success because that was how you made your name and the reputation of your zoo–the only place in the world able to keep left-handed dingbats.
”Conversely, if you had a family of another species that suddenly and mysteriously died, you didn`t talk much about it.”
