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.

In Search of Eden – Chapter 4

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.