In Search of Eden – Chapter 5

Opening Day

I have long been puzzled about why I have no recollection of the August 15^th, 1974 opening day at the new Metro Toronto Zoo. It was the day we had all been working toward and yet, it is as though I was never there. Then, as I looked back on my diary and notes, it hit me. I was too busy working.

I was, at the time, a senior keeper working in the Americas section of the zoo. My area included an indoor pavilion, a large polar bear complex, and a South America paddock. The pavilion was largely underground and it held the most diverse collection of animals a senior zookeeper could be expected to care for, including mammals (beavers, otters, cacomistle), birds (band-tailed pigeons, native song birds, waterfowl), reptiles (alligators, rattlesnakes), and fishes. In the days and weeks leading up to opening, and especially on opening day itself, we were frantically preparing exhibits and receiving animals. 
Toronto’s grand idea for a zoo was a product of the times. During the 1960’s, we were learning about animals in their natural habitats from field biologists like Jane Goodall while Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was bringing nature programming into our living rooms for the first time. This was also a time that governments were passing legislation to conserve and protect wildlife and wild places. Canada created the Department of the Environment in 1971 and signed on to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1973, the same year the United States passed its Endangered Species Act.  
Zoos, in the 1970’s, were coming under fire and, in many cases, being forced to change. A few months before I started in the zoo business in 1971, an investigator with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) reported on the “repugnant conditions” at more than 70 zoos in 23 states, and recommended that many zoos be closed down unless they underwent major improvements.As a result of this prodding, along with a more enlightened public attitude toward animals, cities all over North America began to spend money on their zoos at an astonishing rate, a trend that continues to this day. Old zoos, like the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, were renovated, and new zoos were built in cities from San Diego to Minneapolis to Miami. The core value of all of these new zoos was a strong emphasis on conservation and education. I count myself fortunate to have begun my career at two zoos that were ahead of the times. Busch Gardens was singled out in the HSUS report for praise, and the Toronto Zoo was already committed to change.

A Zoo Ahead of its Time

After the zoo opened, I was assigned to a new area known as the Canadian Domain. The Domain opened in 1976 and occupied several hundred acres of the Rouge River valley section of the property. Animals were in large, naturalistic areas and were viewed by monorail train. We developed areas for bison and pronghorn, moose and elk, white-tailed and mule deer, grizzly bears, and wolves. We even fenced-in a rocky cliff for a herd of white, big-horns known as Dahl’s sheep. Keeper access to the remote Canadian Domain was challenging. We used four-wheel drive trucks and, when heavy snow built up, we even had snow mobiles. 
The memories of those years are like faded images from an old album, but I do recall:

The white-tailed deer named “Patricia” that had been hand raised and remained tame enough to pet like a dog, but the babies she had every spring remained as wild as march-hares. The pronghorn that were captured in Alberta as infants and hand raised, but were barely tame enough to approach. An entire herd of plains bison that had to be captured out of a five acre pen and shipped out to make room for a new herd of wood bison from western Canada. The two zookeepers that I had to write-up because they cracked the windshield of their truck playfully tossing frozen bison turds at each other.

When the Metro Toronto Zoo opened its 710 acre “zoogeographic” zoo, organized around groups of animals from the same parts of the world, it may have appeared to be in line with world-wide trends but it was, in fact, ahead of its time. No other zoo took the zoogeographic theme to the level of the Toronto Zoo, with its huge continental areas of Indomalaya, Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia. Each area had an indoor pavilion that was a combination zoo, aquarium, museum, and botanical garden. It would be another ten years before other zoos began to catch up with the opening of large indoor facilities like the Bronx Zoo’s Jungle World.

As great as it was, my Canadian adventure came to an end in April of 1979 when I became the General Curator of the Louisville Zoo and began the next chapter of my career.