The Stationary Ark Read online

  The two most prevalent criticisms of zoo cages are that they are too small and that they have bars. Well, as we have seen, the size is not the most important aspect of the cage. Now we come to the bars. This is a very thorny subject. In spite of the fact that, in most modern zoos, the bars that used to make the Victorian menageries so unattractive have been replaced by less obtrusive and oppressive materials, to a great many people the word zoo is still synonymous with bars and bars with prison. It is almost impossible to persuade these people that bars mean imprisonment only to them.

  Well-placed bars in a primate cage, for example, are a delight to the animal, for they provide something to climb and hang on. In many ape cages, designed by decree of public opinion, the cement shell is so devoid of suitable climbing areas that a good Victorian barred front would be greeted with delight by the inmate. In the case of such active and arboreal creatures as orangutans or gibbons, it is almost impossible to have too many bars for their pleasure and profit. One of the most heart-rending sights I have ever seen was in a continental zoo. A beautiful, fully grown orangutan was confined in an indoor cage, some fifteen feet by ten, with no outside area. The cage was lit by a tiny and very dirty skylight, high up in the roof. Outside, there was brilliant summer sunshine, but the interior of this cage was so gloomy that you had to peer to see the animal. In the cage there was not a single piece of furniture, no bar, no rope, no swing, no shelf. It was a glass-fronted cement box. The orang sat in the middle of the floor, carefully putting a tiny piece of sacking on its head and taking it off, over and over again. It was the only thing it had to occupy its highly intelligent and inquisitive mind. Bars, in a cage like that, would have been a blessing. When we were designing our outside ape cages, we had this and many other problems to bear in mind.

  The size of our outdoor cages was dictated by the length and height of the existing building (an old granite ciderpress) but within those limits, we were free to try anything. The two most important considerations were that the apes should be able to see each other without touching and that they should be able to take as much exercise as possible within the cage. The reason why apes should be allowed to see each other is the simple one of keeping them occupied. In any zoo, one of the biggest problems is the boredom of an animal and in the case of the great apes and other primates, this can become acute. Apes are highly inquisitive and long to know what is going on in the next-door cage, with a fervour similar to that of a spinster in a row of lace-curtained houses.

  When you have a series of cages in a row, it is impossible to allow the inmates to see into the next-door cage without making the division with bars or wire. This would have been unsuitable from two points of view; bars or wires, we knew to our cost, allowed fingers or toes to be bitten and secondly, the stress factor created by the constant presence at his elbow of a potential rival was enough to undermine the good nature of any ape or, indeed, of any other animal. Finally, our architect came up with a brilliant arrangement. The cages were built almost diamond shaped, so that they touched but did not have a common frontier. In this way each ape could see at least a part of the cage next door and the one beyond it.

  Then we had to think about the fronts. At that point in our career our finances were pretty low, so we could not think in terms of armour-plated glass, which we used later on for the gorilla complex. We had to use bars since they were the only things strong enough to keep a fully grown gorilla, orangutan or chimpanzee confined. I did not want the straight up-and-down bars that made the Victorian menagerie such a ghastly thing to look at, so eventually, after much experiment and argument, we settled on a trellis-work, somewhat similar to those used in reinforcing concrete. Each gap was some five inches high and eight inches long, so that they were brick-like in shape. We found that these did not fuss the eye or intrude upon the visitor’s view of the animal and they also provided a maximum area of climbing for the adult apes. The areas of brick-like gaps formed very elegant ladders for the baby apes when they were born. We found, indeed, that baby apes appreciate them enormously, for when they are teething there is nothing like a cold iron bar for them to chew on.

  Zoos should, by now, have become much more responsible in the design of cages. Cages should be designed with great care to ensure that, from the animal’s point of view, they are biologically sound; that they allow the animal to behave in as natural a way as possible yet so that it can still be easily controlled and serviced by those who look after it. In this way, each cage should become a sort of experimental laboratory, instead of being what it is at present, simply an ill-designed box for showing the animal to the public.

  I am afraid that most zoo cages are biologically unsuitable for their inhabitants. This, in many cases, is not the zoo’s fault, for it has to use cages which were designed and built years ago, before anyone knew as much as we do now about the animal’s needs, when such things as territory, flight distance, stress factors and so on were only just being observed. But even today some fairly hideous edifices are still being constructed, mostly at colossal cost. They are virtually useless and there is no excuse for them. Antelope houses, for example, like rather inferior gentlemen’s lavatories; free flight cages in which not even a Pterodactyl would feel at home; giant exoteriums where three times the space devoted to the animal is given over to the sophisticated machinery that runs the whole thing, houses for various groups of animals where, in a desperate effort to show as many species as possible, the amount of space allotted to each creature is minimal.

  I have seen some fairly terrifying things in zoos all over the world. I have seen a gibbon cage where, for many months, the only means of brachiating that the apes had was by clinging to the wire or jumping on to a series of huge concrete slabs with holes in them – a monstrosity which led one to believe that the designer of the cage was emulating (not very successfully) some of Mr Henry Moore’s more obscure sculptures. The holes in these upright grey stones were also meant to provide shelter from inclement weather. I have seen elephant houses with a service passage which was too narrow to take a wheelbarrow, and it is scarcely necessary to point out that a group of elephants, charming though they are, produce enough excreta per capita each day to make the presence of a wheelbarrow essential. I have seen a house for small mammals with a service passage behind the cages which was eighteen inches wide, thus precluding the employment of corpulent staff and creating an interesting problem in discrimination for the unions.

  I have recently seen a bird house, built at a cost which makes the mind boggle, which provides a most elegant and ingenious display. When I asked how sick birds were caught in these enormous cages, I was told that this did present a bit of a problem. The only way they had found was to shoot the bird down with a warm hose. If one had to employ such shock tactics, I would have thought one might as well have used a shotgun; the end results would have been more or less the same. This bird house was a perfect piece of anthropomorphic architecture; the very last word so far as the display of birds was concerned and, from the public’s point of view, superb. I am not so convinced that it was equally satisfactory from the birds’ point of view, yet presumably it was for them that it was built.

  I have seen a newly laid-out paddock for Bactrian camels, where the only thing preventing the animals from mixing with the public and biting and kicking them in the charming way that camels have, was an eighteen-inch step. I was assured that this was sufficient, as camels did not like to step down. I look forward to hearing whether the camels knew about this when they were eventually moved into their new paddock.

  It is inevitable, since it is one of the cheaper forms of construction, that concrete should figure largely in zoo designs. However, it appears to be a little known fact that concrete can be disguised and it is not necessary to have every zoo building looking as if it had been designed to repel the entire Russian army. Concrete is a wholesome and useful building material in the right hands, but with this humble substance more monstrositi
es have been built in the zoos of the world than any other building material. I feel it must have been Lubetkin who started the rot in the 1930s with a series of zoo designs that were frightening in their uselessness and ugliness. After that, it seems, the words concrete and zoo became synonymous. In Australia, one zoo director became so enamoured of the magic material that he used it for everything. In a very short space of time, his zoo looked like one of the more overcrowded and less attractive Italian cemeteries. It was said of this man by a charming French ornithologist friend of mine: ‘The problem is not so much that “X” ‘as bad taste, it is that ‘e ‘as no taste at all.’

  On the west coast of America, a city (which should have known better) handed the design of its zoo over to an architect (who should have known better). Having fallen deeply in love with cement and its sister, reinforced concrete, and having all the artistic attributes of Attila the Hun, this man has produced a zoo which is more than a shock to the system. So much concrete has been used to construct so much totally useless caging that the mind boggles. One’s impulse is to clear it all away and start again, but what does one do with all that concrete? It’s like being asked to eliminate the Pyramids. In this zoo, I was forcibly struck by a cage which consisted of a deep cement-lined hole in the ground, with a sort of island affair (also concrete) in the middle. On top of this island was a deformed igloo made out of concrete. The whole thing looked like one of the less attractive sections of the Khyber Pass. The architect had not let his decorative instincts in any way diminish his masterly design, and one saw the concrete in its full glory, unsullied by any disguise of colour, bas-relief, incisions or modelling. I was asked to guess what this monstrous hole in the ground had been designed for and hopefully ran through a list of such things as baboons, Barbary sheep and other creatures which, being stoical by nature, might have tolerated such a precipitous and forbidding terrain. I was wrong. This monstrous, treeless, concrete bidet had been constructed, at God knows what cost, to house orangutans, the most arboreal of the apes. Sing-Sing would have been preferable in as much as it would at least have provided barred climbing areas.

  As if the poor animals and staff had not enough to contend with from the architect, we now have, sprouting up like some unpleasant fungi, what are called ‘zoo consultants’. These rosy-faced cherubs, who hunt in groups, tell you that they can plan you a city zoo, providing you with everything you need, from an elephant house to a dolphinarium. It is instant zoo – just add cash. They do not, of course, claim to supply a purpose for your zoo, but then zoos are not supposed to have purposes; they are status symbols. If your city has not got a zoo, you are not keeping up with the city next door. Worse still, if your country has not got a zoo, people might think that you were only a partly emerged nation.

  These curious bands are, in the main, made up of architects. They do, of course (to show their integrity), occasionally have a couple of people on the board who, without too much difficulty, can distinguish between a giraffe and a deer; possibly even a rhino and a hippo, but I wonder gloomily whether this is enough. Are these people going to be responsible for yet another rash of architectural abortions and to drive yet another nail into the coffin of the zoos, as scientific institutions?

  The whole concept of keeping animals is now changing and has, indeed, changed radically over the last twenty years, but zoo caging is only just catching up. Good zoos are now thinking in terms of groups of animals and not solitary specimens or pairs. More thought is going into curing that major drawback to captivity of which people so seldom think, boredom. Relieved of predator pressures, supplied with food and water and a mate, the animal has precious little left to do except to die of boredom like any other poor little rich girl. Zoos of the future should concentrate on a greater number of individual animals and fewer species. This would mean that zoos would create self-perpetuating groups of animals and thus lessen, or eliminate altogether, the necessity for a drain on the wild populations. The first step towards this is correct cage design.

  Once again I must stress that what is good for you is not necessarily good for the animal, and what the animal likes is not necessarily what you like. A fair example of this rule is provided by the case of our colony of African civets. I originally brought back a fine male specimen of this handsome grey and black spotted species from the Cameroons in 1965 and we managed to obtain a mate for him from Uganda. Owing to our poverty-stricken state at that period, the den area of the civet cage had to be constructed out of a large wooden crate that had once cosseted an aeroplane engine. This crate, when it was new, formed a very adequate den area and, in any case, we assured ourselves, it was only a temporary measure until we had funds to create better and more permanent quarters. But, as always happens when the funds became available, they had to be ear-marked for more important developments and for more important creatures. The civet dens remained untouched, except for a few minor additions and ordinary repairs.

  Now, as far as we were concerned, the crate had been just adequate when new, but as it grew older and older we came to view it with loathing and walked past it with our heads averted in embarrassment, like Church of England commissioners passing the slum property that they own. However, unlike a slum property, the inhabitants had no complaints and settled down (with the aid of some specimens I had had obtained in Siena Leone as fresh blood) to a breeding programme which soon made us the most successful breeders of African civets in the world. To date, we have bred 49 specimens. Pairs of our home-grown civets have been sent to other zoos all over the world and from this group of animals has emerged a host of interesting material on behaviour, oestrus, copulation, longevity, number of young, gestation periods and so on. So, although the African civet is, at the time of writing, a fairly common animal and therefore not in need of a captive breeding programme, nevertheless, the experience we have had will prove invaluable should we, at some future date, find ourselves in the position of doing a rescue operation for some other member of the Viverridae (the Indian civet for example) or, indeed, any small carnivores, such as the interesting Madagascan ones.

  We have, as I say, produced a fund of interesting material from our breeding programme of the civets. The interesting point about the operation is, however, that we have successfully bred all of them in a most unhygienic, and now elderly, aero-engine crate. We hate it, but apparently the civets love it.

  Nevertheless, one has to be constantly on the look-out to see how one can improve on what one is giving the creatures. This is one of the beauties of being able to build a series of cages or enclosures specifically for one group of animals. In the old days, a monkey house would contain anything from a marmoset, the size of a rat, to a gorilla weighing 25 stone. Worse, the small mammal house would contain everything from an anteater to a rat, from an armadillo to a wallaby. Obviously, it was impossible to provide ideal accommodation for everything between these two extremes, while if one built a gorilla house and a marmoset house, one was much more likely to get nearer perfection. Of course, the habits of marmosets and tamarins, for example, vary from species to species and, indeed, from group to group and from individual to individual as well. But in building a place which is going to house only these tiny primates, all one has to do is to concentrate on their needs and not on the needs of a couple of hundred totally unlike species as well.

  In the case of our marmoset and tamarin complex, we hope we have solved some, if not all, of the problems. Back in 1939 I had acquired a Black-pencilled marmoset as a pet and this endearing creature lived with me for eight years, at that time a longevity record for these small primates. He had been given the run of the house and garden in all weathers, the only concession to his delicacy being that there was a standard lamp in the drawing-room always kept alight, on which he could warm himself, near the bulb, in cold weather. He also had a piece of old fur coat as a bed, which was warmed by a hot-water bottle at night. Yet he thrived in these unpromising conditions and I have seen him out playing in
the snow for an hour at a time, until he was driven in to his lamp to defrost his feet.

  Now this was a delicate creature. In the fragility of their metabolism one could say that marmosets were more like birds than mammals. They are found in the humid and hot conditions of tropical rain forests. Yet this particular specimen happily accepted an excess of cold fresh air and what little sunlight the vagaries of the English climate permitted. He was robust in health, with a thick glossy coat. However, if I may misquote a Spanish proverb, ‘one marmoset does not make a summer’. I felt he might have been a very Spartan member of his species. So in Jersey, when we had two young Red-handed tamarins with which to experiment, we gave them a heated shelter, to which they had access at all times, and a large aviary to live in. The effect was the same as it had been with my Black-pencilled marmoset. They grew and prospered, turning into a most magnificent pair of animals, whose coats were as thick as astrakhan.

  In 1970, when a kind donation made possible the construction of a special marmoset and tamarin complex, this information, together with many other observations amassed over the years, was incorporated into the design. Jeremy Mallinson, our Zoological Director, has always had a deep and abiding love for the Hapalidae, so to him fell what he described as the nicest job he had ever been offered, the design of the new building.

  Firstly, we were determined that each marmoset group should have an outdoor aviary-type cage, facing south, so that they would have the maximum exposure to fine weather. Again, we had much the same problem as with the apes, how to provide cages which would enable them to see each other, thus allowing them to bicker and feel as if they were defending a territory, and yet not be in such close proximity as to create stress or allow fingers or tails to be bitten. The problem was solved in much the same way as it had been for the apes, by making the cages roughly shoe-box shaped, with a ‘V’ shaped end. This made the fronts of the cages stick out alongside each other like several ‘V’s; through these the animals could see each other, but without contact. By retreating into the box part of the aviary, they could have privacy from their neighbours. Inside, the whole structure was much more sophisticated and it was here that Jeremy had let his imagination have full rein.