If there was such a thing as Zoo Hell, the Atlanta Zoo as it existed five years ago was it. Every animal in it was an endangered species, even the park squirrels.
It was the Titanic impersonating Noah`s Ark-with one major exception. That shipwreck never rose again from the bottom, while Zoo Atlanta, in a
”miraculous” resurgence, has shot to the top in just five years.
Founded in 1889 when a soft-hearted Atlanta lumberman bought up the impounded menagerie of a bankrupted circus and gave the animals to the city, the Atlanta Zoo is among the oldest municipal zoos in the nation.
In 1984, it looked it.
Never a showcase attraction, the ill-kept, poorly-attended city zoo plunged into national infamy that spring as the animals in it began dropping dead faster than their obituaries could be reported by the Atlanta press.
It began when Twinkles, the zoo`s beloved 13-year-old Asian elephant, was packed off to a farm to recuperate from assorted muscular and joint problems in May 1984. Instead of being put out to pasture, however, she inexplicably wound up in a traveling circus. And then she wound up dead.
Twinkles, who was supposed to be getting some rest and relaxation, was found buried in a shared grave with a dead pony outside Cherryville, a North Carolina mill town.
Three weeks later, proud zoo beasts Sheista the lioness and Topeka the tiger also died ignobly. Sheista had been diagnosed as having a uterine infection by the zoo`s veterinarian, who also ruled that the torpid Topeka was just not eating properly and needed a general checkup.
Because the zoo`s own veterinary school had been closed and condemned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the sick cats had to be shipped 100 miles for treatment at Auburn University`s veterinary school.
At Auburn, Sheista was found to have a cancerous tumor the size of a bread loaf. Topeka was also riddled with cancer. Both animals were judged incurable and injected with lethal chemicals at the university.
The Atlanta Zoo veterinarian who had misdiagnosed the two cats had some chronic problems of his own. The vet, who was the longtime personal physician to the pets of both Atlanta`s mayor and its city council president, was on professional probation when he made the misdiagnoses. The state licensing board had disciplined him for allowing an unlicensed veterinary student to operate on a puppy at his private clinic-unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
A year earlier, seven Atlanta zookeepers had given city administrators a two-inch-thick report charging the zoo vet with violating 12 civil-service regulations. The zookeepers claimed, among other things, that the vet had violated federal anticruelty laws by euthanizing a squirrel with an injection of air into its veins. The vet denied the allegation, saying the attacks on him were politically motivated.
Then again, all was not well with the zookeepers either.
Their list of sins, as ferreted out by reporters and a zoo task force:
– A misinterpreted work order resulted in all the prairie-dog holes being filled with cement, suffocating a half-dozen of the creatures.
– A bison was overfed and then transported in a truck. Its stomach exploded enroute, killing the animal.
– Several of the zoo`s ducks and a skunk were reportedly struck and killed by the zoo train.
– The zoo`s white-tailed deer enclosure was so muck-ridden that many of the deer were mired in place and could not move.
The final horror from Zoo Hell came after an inquiry into the disappearance of several rabbits from the Children`s Petting Zoo. A zookeeper admitted that he had taken the bunnies home and butchered, spiced, cooked and eaten them. It was his way of handling a bunny population explosion, he explained.
A less gruesome, but certainly sad, fact of life uncovered at the woebegone zoo was that Willie B., the locally-renowned western lowland gorilla, had reached his late 20s without ever having stepped outside his small and unsanitary indoor enclosure. Worst of all, because of limited space and funding, the big ape had never known the gentle touch of a female gorilla. Willie B., beloved by thousands, was secretly a lonely guy.
`One of the worst`
As these revelations were printed in a Gatling-gun round of exposes by the Atlanta newspapers, the vultures circled the Atlanta Zoo. The jackals were drooling and the hyenas were beside themselves with mocking laughter.
Parade Magazine and the National Humane Society called it ”one of the 10 worst zoos in America.”
The American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, summoned to inspect the scene of the crimes, came up with an icy ruling: ”As it now exists, the Atlanta Zoo is an indictment against zoos and the city.”
The association suspended the Atlanta Zoo`s membership, resulting in a freeze-out by other zoos and zoo professionals. The zoo`s administration, including the veterinarian, was dismissed.
Enter the magnetic, the visionary, the greatest thing to hit Atlanta since Coca-Cola and red goober peanuts, Terry Maple.
He was merely a low-profile professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology before he innocently joined a citizens` task force to deliberate the problems of the Atlanta Zoo, a zoo which at that point had nearly as many dead animals as live ones.
But to Maple`s surprise and horror, when the task force met, the members decided they needed to name an interim zoo director immediately to lead them. They others looked around the table, and all eyes fell on him.
Stunned, he offered only to take the job for three months. He is now in his fifth year.
Maple was not unfamiliar with zoos. His specialty as a psychologist is primatology and the effects of captivity on behavior. His resume included a term as deputy director of the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, affiliation with the famed Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta and consulting work around the country on the design of primate exhibits.
A master resuscitator
But there was a much more important factor at play in the selection process: blind ignorance, he said.
”I was not smart enough to turn them down,” Maple said. ”I was the only one who would take the job. The situation was so volatile that no self-respecting professional zoo director of any quality would step forward and take it.”
Maple took the zoo and shook it by the bars. Although he reluctantly became interim zoo director in June 1984, he willingly accepted the post of permanent director three months later. He discovered that he was good at zoo resuscitation.
Actually, the professor`s first step was to get the city of Atlanta out of the zoo management business. The city gladly bowed out.
The zoo task force established in its place a private, not-for-profit corporation that held onto one important governmental function-the power to issue revenue bonds. The corporation was given that authority by being placed under the auspices of a city-county recreational authority, Atlanta-Fulton County Zoo Inc.
The new zoo managers went to the trough quickly, issuing $16 million in bonds to finance a renovation. At the same time, Maple and his team undertook a $10 million fund-raising campaign aimed at the deep pockets of Atlanta`s corporate and private philanthropists.
In addition, Atlantans did one of the things Atlantans do best. They fired up a public-relations assault on a scale unseen in the Peach State since Herschel Walker, poet and running back, was a Heisman Trophy candidate in his junior year at the University of Georgia. (He won it.)
An early zoo PR move involved flip-flopping the very name of the place. The tarnished Atlanta Zoo became the sparkling new Zoo Atlanta. Simple as that.
Next, Maple`s minions set up zoo day-camps for kids during the summer, evening zoo programs for adults, zoo field trips, zoo teacher workshops, overnight zoo camp-ins, zoomobiles and zoos in the classroom.
Before long, Atlanta was swept with Zoomania.
Dining on crow
With the bonds, charitable funds and operating subsidies from the city and county, Maple set off to transform the decrepit old zoo into a state-of-the-art captive animal compound.
No bars. No concrete. Only moats 12 feet wide and 12 feet deep separating man from beast.
Maple yearned for a zoo designed by scientists, a zoo that not only exhibited animals but took a leading role in conservation and preservation. To that end, he has made recruiting raids on other zoos around the country, often bagging their top young management and scientific talent to join him.
It got so that when Maple visited a zoo, the directors were tempted to let the animals loose and lock up their employees, he said. ”People fear when I come to call,” he admitted.
There were many skeptics, including some among his colleagues in the zoo world. It seemed an impossible job. In this case, however, the zoologists have had to dine on crow.
Zoo Atlanta`s new Flamingo Plaza opened in 1987. Then came the African Rain Forest and Orangutans of Ketambe outdoor exhibits and the Zoo Atlanta Trading Company gift shop and Okefenokee Cafe in 1988.
In the next few weeks, ribbons will be cut on the new Masai Mara habitats, which include re-creations of the savannahs of Kenya and Tanzania complete with giraffes, lions, zebras, gazelles, impalas, ostriches, storks and cranes.
More important-as far as one lonely lowland gorilla is concerned-two female gorillas have been introduced into the life of Willie B. One of them shot a couple of left jabs at him shortly after the how-de-do`s but the other, a cute young thing, has been romping with the 31-year-old male.
It is difficult to get a lifelong bachelor gorilla to mate, zoo officials said, but hope springs eternal that one day Willie will.
The tales of glory from the revived zoo are marched out these days in numbers far greater than the tales of woe paraded publicly five years ago:
– In 1984, there were only 6,000 members in Atlanta`s Zoological Society. There are now 60,000 in the re-named Friends of the Zoo Atlanta.
– In 1984, there were 279,805 visitors. Last year, there were 799,800. Projections for 1989 are for 950,000.
– The city`s budget for the zoo five years ago was $859,000. Under its reorganized structure, Zoo Atlanta has an annual budget of $6.9 million.
– Since 1984, there has been a 95 percent turnover of employees. The staff has grown from 34 full-time employes to 100.
– The national zoological association that revoked the membership of the Atlanta Zoo, now, without hesitation, holds up Zoo Atlanta as one of the best in the country. The vultures were shot down. The jackals went home hungry.
”It has been absolutely miraculous and one of the greatest success stories in the zoo profession. They are on their way to becoming one of the very best,” lauded Robert Wagner, executive director of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums.
The ultimate testimonial to the zoo`s success, from a zoo-professional point of view, occured this spring when the regional conference for the association of zoo professionals was held in Atlanta. A record number of delegates, 320, came to see Zoo Atlanta risen from the ashes of its barbecued bunnies.
”It seems that in the last 100 years, Atlanta has to crash in flames before it rises back up,” said Bill Garrett, executive director the Atlanta Humane Society and one of the chief critics of the previous zoo
administration.
A more modern tagline on Atlanta and its zoo was provided not long ago by local author Pat Conroy (”The Great Santini,” ”Prince of Tides”), who, in a critical essay, described it as a city preoccupied with cutting business deals.
”Atlanta can write a contract, cut a deal, sell an insurance policy, transfer accounts, put up a building or clinch a deal as well as any city in the world,” he wrote.
Zoo Atlanta cut some deals. Some big deals. Willie B. now cavorts with his playmates in the Ford (as in Motor Company) African Rain Forest. The car company contributed more than $1 million to the outdoor exhibit that looks, except for the red Georgia dirt, like a West African tropical rain forest teeming with gorillas and orangutans.
Inside Ford`s forest, lies the Kroger (as in groceries) Wildlife Theater in which hawks, falcons, vultures, owls and other predatory fowl swoop on zoo visitors under a high net. The grocery-store company contributed more than birdseed, about $100,000, for the fancy canary cage.
Maple is only one-third of the way to winning total redevelopment of Zoo Atlanta, and he has at least five years of work ahead and many deals to make. ”We are a 100-year-old zoo with 95 years of mediocrity,” said the Zoo Atlanta director. ”We have to do a lot before we are counted among the zoos like Brookfield, Cincinnati and San Diego, but now, I think we have a shot.”
