In Search of Eden - Chapter 3

The Circus Menagerie                                   

Before zoos began to develop in North America, there was the circus menagerie. Traveling, tented circuses became popular in America in the early years of the nineteenth century, and their story was chronicled in William Cameron Coup’s 1901 book, Sawdust & Spangles: Stories & Secrets of the Circus. Coup was born in 1837 and ran away to join the circus as a teenager. He was an eye witness to its early history, which he wrote about in his book.

The circus and the menagerie, in those days, were separate and distinct attractions and, while the menagerie had the greater drawing power, it was only exhibited in the daytime. The circus, on the other hand, was presented at night. In the 1850's, according to Coup, proprietors began to merge and exhibit circuses and menageries together and their popularity exploded.

The supply of rare and exotic creatures for these traveling menageries fueled a robust, international trade in animals. According to Coup, there were at least two features of the animal business before the turn of the twentieth century which were seldom exaggerated. These features were the huge cost of stocking a menagerie and the danger inherent in the capture and handling of the wild animals. Coup found it thrilling to consider “the lives that have been lost, the sufferings and hardships endured, the perils encountered, and the vast sums of money expended in the capture and transportation of wild animals for the menageries, museums and zoological gardens”.

After he became the head of a circus, Coup had extensive dealings with the Reiche Brothers animal importers. Charles Reiche ran the New York office while his brother, Henry, operated a large supply farm in Germany that handled animals from around the world. Their most extensive field operations were in Africa where they had numerous stations, with sheiks or chiefs in their employ, and standing rewards offered to natives for choice specimens of rare birds or beasts. 

Jumbo

One of the most famous circus menagerie animals of all time was killed at 9:30 in the evening on September 15^th, 1885 when Jumbo the elephant was struck by a freight train while crossing the tracks in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada. Jumbo’s story began twenty-four years earlier in Northern Africa when he was captured, sold to an animal dealer, and transported across the Mediterranean. He spent time at the zoo in Paris and, in 1865, he was shipped to England where he became a popular fixture at the London Zoo. He eventually reached a height of about twelve feet at the shoulder and a weight of about seven tons.

In 1881, Jumbo came to the attention of circus magnate P.T. Barnum. Jumbo's size had become

legendary and Barnum wished to acquire the largest elephant in the world. He purchased Jumbo from the zoo for ten thousand dollars. In March of 1882, after considerable difficulty, Jumbo was packed into an enormous crate and left England for America. He arrived in New York on April 9^th with much fanfare, and the next day he was displayed at Madison Square Garden. Jumbo spent the next three years crisscrossing the Continent, transported in his own train car. He drew huge crowds for Barnum, even though he performed no tricks like the other elephants – merely his presence was enough.

From Circus to Zoo

By the turn of the twentieth century, circus menageries were the primary animal exhibitors in America. Few American zoos had large animals, like elephants, since most zoos were little more than deer parks. Circuses had far better collections and, of course, reached larger and geographically broader audiences. In fact, the first elephants, lions, rhinos, and hippos at many early American zoos came from circuses, and the zoo enclosures these animals entered were eerily like the ones I encountered at the beginning of my career at the old Toronto Zoo, nearly seventy years later.

Next #FridayBlog - the Toronto Zoo, Frank Buck, and "Bring Em Back Alive"

In Search of Eden – Chapter 2

Before there were Zoos

Clara was orphaned as an infant, but raised in elegant surroundings in a well-to-do household in India. By the age of eight, she had sailed more than ten thousand miles from Calcutta to Rotterdam, complements of the Dutch East India Company, and had begun a tour of Europe that would have been impressive by any measure – but in the 1740’s it was downright astonishing, especially considering that Clara was an Indian rhinoceros. Her story was chronicled in the book Clara’s Grand Tour by Glynis Ridley.

People have been capturing wild animals and bringing them into captivity for as long as we have had the capacity to do so. Part of the plunder of early explorers was a selection of the strange creatures that inhabited far-off lands. It seems that there is something in our nature that causes us to be fascinated by the rare and unusual.

 The first giraffe ever seen in France, according to Michael Allin in his 1998 book Zarafa: A Giraffe's True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, was a royal offering from Muhammad Ali of Egypt to King Charles X of France. Her name was Zarafa, the Arabic word for giraffe, and she had already traveled two thousand miles down the Nile and across the Mediterranean by the time she arrived in Europe in October of 1826. The young, female had been captured by Arab hunters in Sudan, taken to Khartoum on the back of a camel, and transported by boat down the Nile to Alexandria. She sailed to Europe standing in the hold of a ship with her head protruding through a hole cut in the deck and walked from Marseille to Paris. Zarafa was presented to the King of France in Paris on July 9^th, 1827 and took up residence in the Jardin des Plantes. She was seen by over 600,000 visitors in the first six months alone. This behavior of the French people may seem excessive, but it was not unlike the response to circus menageries in America fifty years later.

The Animal Trade

In the mid-19^th century, as the international trading companies began to fade, a new type of animal dealer appeared. Capitalizing on the proliferation of zoological gardens in Europe, the animal trade picked up in the early 1860s and German seafood dealer, Carl Hagenbeck Sr., was ready to step in.

Hagenbeck family legend has it that his animal trade began with six harbor seals caught in a fisherman’s net and dumped with the rest of the take on the doorsteps of the Hamburg fishmonger. Whether this is true or not, Hagenbeck certainly maintained a small animal dealership, along with his wholesale seafood business, through the 1850's. His animal dealership continued to prosper until it became wholly independent of the seafood store in about 1863. 

Hagenbeck’s eldest son, Carl Junior, expanded the animal dealership. In 1874, he moved the business from its crowded quarters to a small zoo in Hamburg which included a lion house, an elephant house, a monkey house, a reptile house, and a birds of prey aviary. In the 1890's, Hagenbeck revolutionized the zoo business when he created his first "panorama" exhibit, a concept he later patented and expanded. He surrounded animal exhibits with water moats and empty pits that he determined the animals could not cross. These moats allowed people to look across an expanse of the zoo and see many animals at once, as if in the wild. Hagenbeck junior died in 1913 and was succeeded by his sons Heinrich and Lorenz who kept the firm solvent until it went out of business shortly after the First World War.

Hagenbeck wasn’t the only animal dealer profiting by the proliferation of European zoos and American circuses in the mid-1800’s, and there is even some question about whether he was the largest. When the menagerie of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Fairgrieve was auctioned in Edinburgh Scotland in 1872, a local newspaper reported that the buyers were a Mr. Jamrach “the most extensive dealer in wild animals in the world” and “Jamrach’s almost equally great rival”, Mr. Reiche. Both Jamrach and Reiche had shops which were packed from floor to ceiling with exotic animals of every stripe. The Reiche Brothers were well known animal dealers in New York who dealt primarily with circus menageries. Jamrach operated out of an office in London.

Jamrach’s Menagerie

Author, Carol Birch, imagines the atmosphere of one of those old shops in her 2011 novel, Jamrach's Menagerie. The story is told through the eyes of eight-year-old Jaffy Brown who comes face to face with an escaped tiger in the streets of 1857 London and lives to tell about it.

 

As a result of the encounter, Jaffy was drawn to work in the shop of the tiger’s owner, animal importer Charles Jamrach. Though a work of fiction, the author conjures a vision of what those animal emporiums must have been like.

On Jaffy’s first visit to Jamrach’s shop he describes the air as “heavy, lush and rotting, filled with traces of bowels and blood and piss and hair, and something overall I could not name, which I suppose was wildness”. The shop, as imagined by Birch, would likely have had many rooms stockpiled in conditions that would be considered inhumane by modern standards but in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, would have been quite acceptable. There might well have been a parrot room (“a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes”), other quieter bird rooms, rooms with monkeys, rooms with reptiles, and an outdoor space out back for the large animals like camels, baby elephants, and big cats.  The animal business was, in those days, a heartless, brutal affair in which animals were little more than a commodity. A customer was anyone who had money – a wealthy landowner, a monarch, or, in America at least, a circus.

In Search of Eden - Chapter 1

Busch Gardens & A Career in the Zoo Business

In the spring of 1970, I underwent a transformation. I was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, fortunate to be completing my junior year on a basketball scholarship and, though I was studying Biology, I had no idea what I wanted to pursue upon graduation.

One of our regular activities every spring was to make the two hour drive north to Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium for an Atlanta Braves baseball game. The trips to Atlanta usually came with some time to kill. We often found ourselves at the shops and nightclubs of Underground Atlanta but on this trip, for some reason, we ended up at the Atlanta Zoo. This was a life-changing experience for me. I had never been to a zoo and I was well and truly hooked by the experience. Their famous gorilla, Willie B, was nine years old. The World of Reptiles building was state-of-the-art and would stand until it was replaced 44 years later. I saw elephants, big cats, apes, and bears. I was amazed at the varieties of birds and reptiles. And it occurred to me that this was a place I would like to work. This would be my career.

That summer, I gave up my scholarship and transferred to the University of South Florida in Tampa, where I eventually earned my degree in zoology. I held a series of menial, part-time positions at Busch Gardens that included gardener and monorail driver, before I landed that coveted position in the zoo department. It was a job that elicited passion, compassion, and a good measure of excitement and danger. I did not realize it at the time, but I was fortunate to receive my early training at one of the best zoos in the world – a zoo that, in fact, was far ahead of its time. Busch Gardens opened in late 1950’s as a beer-tasting area and tropical bird garden adjacent to the brewery. In the mid-1960’s, the attraction opened a large expanse of sandy, open pasture that resembled the Serengeti Plains of Africa. It was, as I recall, a hundred-or-so acres of hoofed animal pastures divided by long, meandering waterways. The larger, dangerous animals were contained behind deep, hidden dry-moats. Most of it was only accessible to visitors by monorail.

My first job at the Gardens was hosing debris and duck poop off of what seemed like miles of sidewalks that meandered through the gardens. After a summer driving the monorail, I eventually worked my way into the zoo department. Here is how I described my job in a March 1973 letter of application for a position at the Metro Toronto Zoo:

For the last 16 months I have worked the 4:00 – midnight shift in order that I might pursue my studies in the daytime. The first part of my night is involved in feeding and returning all display animals to their nighttime quarters. My partner and I are responsible for lions, leopards, cheetahs, river and pigmy hippos, black and white rhinos, cape buffaloes, baboons, gorillas, chimpanzees, gibbons, and okapi. Myself and two other men are responsible for walking the large male and 4 female African elephants to their nighttime quarters. The remainder of my evening is spent alone, patrolling pastures and inspecting herds of giraffe, zebra, antelope, and gazelles. Often my responsibilities include assisting in difficult births, bottle-feeding babies who can’t nurse, assisting the zoo veterinarian, and effecting emergency repairs on equipment whenever necessary.

Fearsome Creatures

It was great training because, while keepers at most zoos would have a defined area of responsibility, I had an opportunity to work with nearly every animal in the collection. And some of them were quite memorable, even more than forty years later.

Chimp Island, for example, was intimidating to a young zookeeper because our access was by boat and we were trapped on an island with one of the most fearsome animals in the park – the male chimp named Bamboo. The boat was a flat-bottomed, aluminum john-boat which was fastened to a rope that stretched from shore to shore. We pulled ourselves over to a cave-like opening in the rockwork that was protected from the chimps by an elaborate array of electrified wires. Once inside the holding area, Bamboo greeted us every day with his threat display of foot stomping, hooting and screaming, culminating in a shower of poop that he scooped up from the floor in a smooth underhand motion that peppered us with deadly accuracy.  The experienced hands knew to duck out of the doorway at the right moment, a technique that they failed to mention to the new guy. What made Bamboo even more frightening was his reputation. A few years earlier, a zookeeper had his calf muscle bitten off when Bamboo had crossed the hot wire surrounding the entrance and entered the night house behind him.

We had other fearsome animals, like the male Cape buffalo who, after I let him out of his night house one morning and closed the massive, steel sliding door, turned around and hit the door with such force that he sent it swinging up on its overhead track. The bottom track, which had been anchored into the concrete, came flying into the middle of the room.

A more subtle, but no less deadly creature was the quiet female African leopard, who would remain timidly snarling at the back of her night quarters every evening when I shoved her meat under the bars of her cage. One evening I dropped the empty meat bag in the gutter that ran along the front of her cage. When I casually reached down to retrieve it, she bolted from the back of the cage in the blink of an eye and hooked my hand with her claws. Fortunately for me, she only got me with one claw which dug into the fleshy part of my left hand leaving a scar that reminds me of that close call to this day.

An Emotional Commitment to Zoos

In the fall of 1971, Busch Gardens Tampa won the prestigious Edward H. Bean Award in the mammal category for the first captive breeding of the roan antelope. The Bean Award was presented by the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (currently known as the Association of Zoos and Aquariums – AZA) in recognition of a significant captive propagation effort that clearly enhanced the conservation of the species. The roan is a medium-sized, African antelope that stands about five feet at the shoulder and weighs in at five or six hundred pounds. It is light brown all over with the most distinctive markings being the black mask that covers most of the face. Ears are long and pointed, and horns are short, stout, and swept-back in a gentle backward arch. I was proud of the award, even though I had only worked at the Gardens for less than a month. I loved hoofed stock and this award, according to the criteria, was supposed to “demonstrate an exceptional institutional commitment”. So imagine my disappointment when it was announced the very next year that a new attraction was to swallow-up the roan antelope breeding pen. The section of the park known as "Stanleyville" opened in 1973 and was home to the park's first water ride, the Stanley Falls Flume. Animals, it appeared, would need to take a backseat to rides and other attractions as Busch Gardens faced some stiff competition up Interstate-4 in Orlando where Walt Disney was opening his new Magic Kingdom. As an aspiring young zookeeper, it was time for me to move on.

“The emotional commitment to zoos,” George Leposky wrote in his 1972 article, “which motivates Porter’s strivings is widespread among devotees of zoos – employees and visitors alike. It complicates immeasurably the debate over zoos’ continued existence, for the old cliché about love being blind applies. The blind sport which Porter shares with most supporters of zoos is an unwillingness to admit that the reasons he gives in defense of their survival are less a description of reality than a vision of what zoos could and should become.”

A Chimp Named Herman

Nowhere is this vision better illustrated than with the other individual in that long-ago article, a youngster named Herman. He was just a little guy in 1972 – about six years old – and he did not deserve to be behind bars. A photo of him in the St. Petersburg Times magazine evokes a sense of tragedy even though he appears relaxed with one foot propped up on the bars as he picks intently at a piece of fruit. He had only been in these cramped, dank quarters for about a year, but the real tragedy was that he would live there for another twelve years before our paths would cross again and I would be privileged to do something about his condition. Herman was a Chimpanzee who lived across town from Busch Gardens in what Leposky described as the “dilapidated, prison-like cages” at Tampa’s public zoo at Lowry Park. A decade later, I was destined to return to Tampa to direct the renaissance of the Lowry Park Zoo and see Herman walk on grass for the first time.  

Looking back from the perspective of today, it is difficult to imagine a society that would accept the keeping of animals in such conditions. But that was a different era – an era that stretched back hundreds of years to the very first menageries in the Western world.

An Uneasy Attitude Toward Zoos

On June 25th, 1972, 43 years ago this month, a feature article entitled New Zoos for Everyone, Bar None appeared in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday magazine The Floridian. The article explored the place of zoos in society and the essence of our fascination with animals.
“There is an uneasiness in the human attitude toward zoos,” George Leposky wrote, “an uneasiness that can be seen in the constant debate whether they are educational and useful or cruel and an outrage. This debate has been around as long as zoos have, which is thousands of years.”

Chimpanzee at Lowry Park Zoo – 1972

I saved the article after all these years because it featured me, as a 22-year-old student at the University of South Florida who was studying Zoology, working at Busch Gardens, and preparing for a career in zoo management. I also saved it because the subtitle of the article proclaimed that “most zoos are one part of a system that may be headed for extinction”. An investigator from the Humane Society of the United States was crisscrossing the country calling for the closure of many zoos. What had I gotten myself into?

Doug Porter at Busch Gardens – 1972

Now, 43 years later, I am a 65 year old zoo manager who can look back at a fascinating career. After Busch Gardens, I worked at or managed the Toronto Zoo, the Louisville Zoo, the Lowry Park Zoo, the Great Plains Zoo and Museum, The Toledo Zoo, and Chehaw Park. I have viewed wildlife in such exotic locales as Kenya, Botswana, the Galapagos, the Amazon and the Arctic. I have handled every type of animal from elephants to polar bears to rattlesnakes.
Zoos are far from perfect, but no industry engages more people on behalf of wild animals and wild places, and no one is sounding the alarm by standing up for endangered species like the zoos and aquariums of the world.
So, how do we answer for zoos in today’s rapidly-changing world? The answer, I believe, lies in how zoos and aquariums choose to change and adapt. As Leposky accurately foretold over forty years ago, “We want zoos to become scientific and educational institutions which help us place our civilized existence in perspective by offering insights into where our species has been and, hopefully, where it should be going.”
Zoos not only did not become extinct, they have become formidable advocates for wildlife and wild places. AZA accredited zoos contribute $160 million each year to wildlife conservation, supporting nearly three thousand projects in one hundred thirty countries.
As I face-off against my own retirement, I thought this might be a good time for a series of blogs, using my career as a lens to view the status of zoos. How far have they come and where might they be headed?