In Search of Eden – Chapter 9. The Memoir of a Zoo Career

The Toledo Zoo, America’s most complete zoo

The words Toledo Museum of Science are etched into the facade above the entrance to the massive brick and stone building at the Toledo Zoo. The museum was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) between 1934 and 1937, and it was one of the factors that led me to Toledo. Museums, as I had come to appreciate in Sioux Falls, can be a powerful tool in the conservation message of zoos, especially when live animal exhibits are interspersed with the static displays. In the Diversity of Life section of the Toledo museum, for example, live animals ranged from naked mole rats to fruit bats to koalas, while in the main hall, we regularly developed temporary displays of insects, robotic dinosaurs and other subjects. It was because of this unique museum, along with the aquarium and greenhouses, that Toledo called itself “America’s most complete zoo”.

One of my first projects as the zoo’s deputy director was the $3 million Kingdom of the Apes that opened in 1993. Toledo had an impressive collection of great apes that included chimpanzees, orangutans, and two families of gorillas. They lived in a symmetrical, rectangular, 1970’s era facility with each of the four groups housed in a section that consisted of off-exhibit holding cages, a small, indoor, glass-fronted dayroom, and a slightly larger open-air outdoor space with a concrete floor. No animals had access to grass. The renovation would improve the holding cages; add an 18,000 square foot outdoor gorilla meadow; and an indoor, three-story dayroom.  The old outdoor spaces would have a tall, cage-structure added to increase the vertical space, and grass would be planted to replace the concrete floor. It was a remarkable transformation, both visually and from the standpoint of the animals’ quality of life.

Another memorable project for which quality of life for the animals would be key was the Arctic Encounter, my last project in Toledo. The goal of this exhibit, according to my notes, was “to set a new standard in the captive management of Polar Bears and other Arctic animals”. We also decided that the overall interpretive message was to be that “the exhibit is designed for the animals”.

The planning process was extensive, beginning in December 1996 and continuing until construction began in early 1998, and included visits to similar facilities at zoos in Indianapolis, North Carolina, and San Diego. I was also fortunate to visit Churchill, Manitoba in July 1997, where I observed polar bears, Arctic fox, beluga whales, ptarmigan, yellow legs, and swarms of mosquitos.

After all the research, a plan began to develop. We had concerns over stereotypic animal behavior. We talked about the sizes of both pool and land space. We debated fences, water quality, and animal holding areas. We knew we wanted the bears and the seals visually linked. And we knew we had to stick to our original purpose of promoting the well-being of the animals while providing a quality viewing experience for our guests and, by the time it opened in early 2000, I believe we achieved that. The polar bears had nearly four thousand square feet of quality land space and a 90,000 gallon chilled, salt-water pool. They had an air conditioned cave they could retreat to in hot weather and a “blow-hole” area that had small holes in the floor of their exhibit allowing them to smell the seals from next door that swam underneath. 

The First 100 Years

The Toledo Zoo was founded in July 1900 with an unlikely first animal – a woodchuck. That meant the year 2000 was the zoo’s Centennial. A look back at the history of the zoo for our Centennial was both fascinating and sobering. Many of the conditions for the animals in those early years were appalling. Cages were small and animals were treated as objects of amusement. As zoos became more popular, significant buildings were built. In the 1920’s, for example, the Toledo carnivore and elephant buildings were constructed. But it was the 1930’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) era really put the Toledo Zoo on the map. It was one of the most remarkable transformations of any zoo in the country, and it was the result of good timing, good planning, and good luck.

After the stock market crash of 1929 and the massive unemployment that followed, the federal government was offering relief in the form of monetary support to projects that could put people back to work. The Toledo Zoo, as it happened, had a building plan that was already underway, or shovel-ready in modern parlance. Once the federal funds began to flow into the zoo, the projects took off. The list was impressive and many of the facilities are still in use today. 

Carnivore Cafe

The reptile house, the bird house, the museum, the amphitheater, and the aquarium all had special architecture, including priceless sculptures. It would have been impossible to think of moving the zoo to open spaces outside of town as other zoos were doing. Instead, the zoo would remain where it was and the buildings would be renovated to modern standards.  The bird house, for example, was gutted and reopened in January 1998 as an award winning facility that was still suitable for its original purpose as a bird house. If buildings could not be renovated for the animals, they were repurposed. The old carnivore building (or lion house) became the Carnivore Café in 1993 and the old elephant building was turned into a meeting and rental facility known as the Lodge.

Training, Enrichment, and Animal Welfare

It was during my time in Toledo that we began to focus on a program of animal training, enrichment, and welfare. Zoo managers around the word were taking an interest in something we had long-known but done little about – the psychological well-being of our animals.

When zoos began to take animals out of cages twenty years earlier and place them in naturalistic areas, the illusion was for the benefit of the public, not necessarily the animals. In fact, if we looked at some of these large, glass-topped jungle-type exhibits with all of the plants stripped out, the space for the animals was appallingly small. At Toledo, we tried to rectify that with facilities like the Arctic Encounter, but how do you replicate hundreds of square miles of Arctic tundra? One way is to focus on other ways of enriching the lives of the animals. At the same time we wanted to encourage the animals to submit to certain activities voluntarily by training them to do so. To accomplish that, we turned to marine mammal trainers who had been using positive reinforcement techniques for decades. 

The Toledo Zoo began its training and enrichment program in the early 1990’s with the development of the Kingdom of the Apes. We wanted to train the animals to come and go on cue and we were hopeful that they might voluntarily submit to certain routine medical procedures. We hired a team of consultants to come in and work with our zookeepers, and they soon had gorillas trained to lean against the front of the cage, submitting to injections in exchange for a food reward, and they were fanning out into other areas of the zoo. Everything from rhinos to crocodiles, it seemed, could be trained at some level. The program was so successful and transformative, the zoo decided to hire a full-time animal behavior coordinator in 1999.

Today, animal training, animal enrichment, and animal welfare are stated requirements in accreditation standards for zoos worldwide. But what does animal welfare mean? Can we provide an enriched and humane captive environment for all non-human animals? Or do we need to devise a different ethical standard for some animals, standards that may mean we should not keep them in captivity at all? I wish I knew all the answers.