The Toronto zoo, Part 1
New Arrivals
Opening the crate of a newly
arrived animal at the zoo is always a tense moment. You never know whether the
animal will walk out calmly, refuse to come out at all, or come flying out like
the human cannonball at the circus. That is why I was nervous and excited at
the same time. I didn’t know what to expect. It was late evening and my partner
and I had just returned to the zoo from the airport. Our job that evening had
been to pick up two wooden crates from an international flight at the airport,
return to the zoo, and uncrate the animals. We were to give them some food and
water and, if they appeared healthy, leave them for the night. The veterinarians
would give them a thorough exam in the morning.
I sat cross-legged in a twelve
foot by twelve foot holding stall in the Toronto Zoo’s quarantine building. The
heavy bedding of wood shavings and straw was both comfortable to sit in and
soothing in its scent of fresh pine. I had lifted the sliding door out of its
track and laid it on top of the wooden crate and settled a few feet from the
opening, peering into the darkness. My plan was to sit quietly and wait for the
baby gorilla to emerge. Would he remain inside, walk out calmly, or jump out in
a rage, biting and clawing everything (and everyone) in sight. The answer, as
it turned out, would be a little bit of everything.
We sat staring at each other for
a long time. His name was Joseph and he was settled with his back at the far
end of the crate, looking at me without making direct eye contact. He was
thirty pounds of black fur and dark eyes, clearly frightened and unsure of what
to do next. As I was about to give up and leave him to explore after I left, he
stirred and walked calmly out of the crate and into my lap. We sat for a few
seconds, with him in my lap facing away from me and then in slow motion, he
placed his mouth over my bare, right forearm and bit down – hard. So hard, in
fact, that I hollered in pain and jerked my arm away. I pushed him out of my
lap as gently as I could under the painful circumstances and left the pen to
examine my injury. The bite broke the skin slightly, leaving a bloody imprint
of his upper and lower teeth like some dental impression. My worries about what
diseases he might be carrying escalated ten days later, when he died. As it
turned out, he had no transmissible diseases and obviously, I have survived
with no ill effects.
An Old Zoo Disappears
In the early 1970’s, the city of Toronto
was in the process of building one of the finest, most progressive zoos in the
world. By the time I arrived on the
scene in late 1973, Toronto’s old Riverdale Zoo was little more than an animal
holding facility. Many of the cages had been abandoned. The park had opened in
1890 and the zoo’s first animals went on display in 1899 in conditions that
were typical of zoos in this era. Zoos in the Victorian period were “more like
curiosity shows than anything we’d be familiar with today and many of the
animals were kept in pens that were patently too small but had the benefit of
affording the best views for visitors”, according to Chris Bateman’s
blog at TO.com
Though I had little contact with
the old zoo and have forgotten much of what was there, I do recall the old
polar bear enclosure. It was about fifty or sixty feet square with a concrete
floor that was mostly taken up by a large, circular pool. Its heavy iron bars
reached a height of ten or twelve feet and since it was open topped, the bars
curled inward at the top in an upside down U-shape terminating in sharp tips. I
don’t know when it was constructed, but this photograph of the exhibit with two
cubs in residence has the date May 25, 1926 was scrawled across the bottom.
Toronto’s New Zoo
From its earliest days, the new
zoo was a product of grand ideas and forward thinking. Few cities could boast a
zoo of this magnitude. In the fall of 1973, I would become one of a few
Americans on a team of Canadian zookeepers from around the nation and a melding
of nationalities from the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Australia, and other
parts of the world. I doubt there has ever been assembled a more talented,
diverse, and eccentric group of zookeepers anywhere on the planet than those
who came together to open the Metro Toronto
Zoo.
The people who worked at the zoo in those days endured primitive working
conditions, low pay, harsh winters working outdoors, and injuries from wild
animals but the results, at least from my vantage point 40 years later, were so
worth it.
Opening an enormous zoo with
thousands of animals was a complex undertaking. Animals arrived daily and their
permanent homes were still under construction, so conditions were often
alarmingly makeshift. In the facility across the street from the zoo known as
the “Main Barn”, for example, we held two juvenile polar bears. They were in
adjacent pens with no shift doors. In order to clean their pens, we had to
shift them out into a nearby hallway, utilizing plywood shields for protection.
These animals were nearly a year old and probably over a hundred pounds each.
The process was exciting for us until they became large enough to snatch the
shields out of our hands. We were glad when our overworked maintenance crew
finally had the time to install some shift doors.
We had a few animal holding spaces on the
property, but on most mornings zookeepers would strike out in trucks, cars, and
even tractors, heading for the temporary holding areas that dotted the
countryside – the Finch barn, the Johnson barn, the Sedgewick barn, and the old
pig farm more than twenty kilometers away in Claremont. We dealt with icy,
treacherous winter roads; isolated, lonely locations; and challenging animal
medical conditions. We were kicked, bitten, head-butted, and at the end of the
day gathered at the Glen Eagles Pub to sing pub songs and laugh at our
tribulations.
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