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.

In Search of Eden – Chapter 8. The Memoir of a Zoo Career

 The Great Plains Zoo and Delbridge Museum of Natural History

When I arrived as the new executive director at the Great Plains Zoo in the spring of 1988, the first animal I encountered was the most impressive bull elephant I had ever seen. He had long curved tusks, his ears were fanned out in alarm, and his trunk reached out to smell whatever came his way. He was almost life-like -- almost. Unfortunately, this elephant was a mounted specimen in the zoo’s Delbridge Museum of Natural History, a facet of the zoo that I initially found distasteful. The museum had over a hundred animals that had been shot by a local big game hunter and placed in his hardware store in the 1960’s and 70’s. Upon the hunter's death, the collection was purchased by philanthropist, C. J. Delbridge and donated to the citizens of Sioux Falls on the condition that a museum be built to house them. The City decided to build the museum at the zoo. Fortunately, the specimens had been mounted by some of the best taxidermists in the nation, and were in lifelike poses of museum quality.

Delbridge Museum of Natural History

Managing the museum was the most memorable aspect of my time in Sioux Falls. When I arrive there, the specimens were randomly arranged as individual artifacts in a large, open indoor space. There was great potential to turn it into an educational facility if we could place them in naturalistic, diorama groupings. I enlisted the aid of a local exhibit specialist and, we traveled to Los Angeles in October of 1990 to consult with the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. There we learned how to make molds out of silicon, latex, and plaster. We found out where to purchase artificial rocks and plants and we observed the latest advances in animatronic exhibits and robotics. The first exhibit we developed in our own museum was an African waterhole, complete with artificial water, simulated animal footprints, and, of course, our own mounted animals. In the process of developing dioramas, my research uncovered one of the most fascinating characters I have ever come across.

Carl Akeley

 

Carl Akeley had been part of a zoological collecting expedition to British Somaliland (Somalia) in 1896 for the Field Museum in Chicago. It was there that he became somewhat of a legend in Africa when he killed a leopard – with his bare hands! According to his account, he was walking through the bush when “I wheeled to face the leopard in midair. The rifle was knocked flying and in its place was eighty pounds of frantic cat. Her intention was to sink her teeth into my throat and, with this grip and with her forepaws, to hang on to me while with her hind claws she dug out my abdomen; for this pleasant practice is the way of leopards”.

Fortunately for Akeley, she missed his throat and struck him high in the chest, catching his upper arm in her mouth. He managed to grab her by the throat, stuff the other hand in her mouth, and fall on top of her. After an epic struggle, Akeley succeeded in strangling the leopard.

Akeley’s real claim to fame, however, was in the world of taxidermy. His museum dioramas (which can still be seen today) were astonishingly realistic. When he entered the profession and observed the techniques of the time, he saw a better way to mount animals than those commonly in use at the time. He was put off by the “upholsterer’s” method in which a skin was sewn up, like a pillow, and stuffed with straw or excelsior until it would hold no more, then “artistically” pulled in with thread here and there to create contour. 

His method was to take extensive measurements of the animal, often making plaster casts of the animal’s face and other parts of the body. Akeley then used modeling clay to sculpt the anatomically perfect, skinless body of the animal. The model was covered with plaster to make a two-sided, removable mold which was used as a cast for the paper mâche mannequin. Akeley would stretch the skin over the mannequin, working wrinkles and veins into the skin. When the process was completed, he would touch up the skin with paint and brush it. Akeley’s animal mounts were, and still are, uncannily lifelike. His method, with only slight variations (the use of fiberglass instead of paper mâche) is still in use today.

Akeley’s artistic eye also extended to the rest of the diorama. He photographed scenes in nature and gathered samples of bushes, plants, and other natural materials. He used these back in the studio, where he made plaster casts and reproduced some of the artifacts in wax.

Museums and Zoos

 

One of Akeley’s pioneering achievements is still a prominent exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in the heart of New York City. At the center of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals is a freestanding group of eight elephants surrounded by twenty eight habitat dioramas. One of these dioramas depicts a family group of mountain gorillas in a scene that Akeley so meticulously created that a member of the museum’s exhibits department was able to find the location 90 years later, in 2011. Akeley had visited the Virunga Mountains of central Africa in 1921, collecting animals and plants while taking photographs and painting background studies. Though construction of the hall was completed in 1936, the dioramas would gradually open between the mid-1920s and early 1940s. Sixty years later in 1999 and thirty minutes up the highway, the Wildlife Conservation Society opened its own version of a “hall of African Mammals”. The Bronx Zoo’s six and a half acre Congo Gorilla Forest also seeks to transport visitors to the heart of Africa. The zoo uses live animals and takes visitors on a simulated Congo wildlife safari beneath a canopy of leaves, through sprays of mist, and up to treetop lookouts.

American Museum of Natural History

 The gorilla diorama at the museum is beautiful, and carefully crafted, like a piece of exquisite artwork, but it is static and never changes. The zoo gorilla exhibit is also carefully crafted but it is dynamic and constantly changing. The museum viewers stand in hushed reverence while zoogoers are raucous, like the jungle.  And like the two sides of the same coin, both museums and zoos have similar purposes – to communicate a message to a variety of audiences. The Bronx Zoo’s tagline is “connecting people to wild nature” while the American Museum of Natural History seeks to “discover, interpret, and disseminate … knowledge about … the natural world”. In short, they are both committed to education.

Bronx Zoo

It took some time, but eventually I came to appreciate the educational value of our museum in Sioux Falls. We had a number of rare animals that our local citizens would otherwise never have an opportunity to see. It is difficult to appreciate the height of a giraffe or the mass of an elephant until you are directly underneath one. The collection even had a Giant Panda. It was not part of the original “hunted” collection, but had been donated later. If we could link the zoo collection with the museum collection there was, I felt, an opportunity to provide a uniquely complete animal experience. This is one of the reasons that, when the Toledo Zoo came calling with a job opportunity, I had to take it. They also had a museum, although one with no mounted animals, and on August 8^th, 1991 I departed Sioux Falls for the next chapter of my life in Toledo, Ohio.