Encounters With Animals Read online

  Keeping wild animals as pets, whether on an expedition or in your own home, can be a tedious, irritating and frustrating business, but it can also give you a great deal of pleasure. Many people have asked me why I like animals, and I have always found it a difficult question to answer. You might just as well ask me why I like eating. But, apart from the obvious interest and pleasure that animals give me, there is another aspect as well. I think that their chief charm lies in the fact that they have all the basic qualities of a human being but with none of the hypocrisy which is now apparently such an essential in the world of man. With an animal you do know more or less where you are: if it does not like you it tells you so in no uncertain manner; if it likes you, again it leaves you in no doubt. But an animal who likes you is sometimes a mixed blessing. Recently I had a pied crow from West Africa who, after six months’ deliberation, during which time he ignored me, suddenly decided that I was the only person in the world for him. If I went near the cage he would crouch on the floor trembling in ecstasy, or bring me an offering (a bit of newspaper or a feather) and hold it out for me to take, all the while talking hoarsely to himself in a series of hiccuping cries and ejaculations. This was all right, but as soon as I let him out of his cage he would fly on to my head and perch there, first digging his claws firmly into my scalp, then decorating the back of my jacket with a nice moist dropping and finally proceeding to give me a series of love pecks on the head. As his beak was three inches long and extremely sharp, this was, to say the least, painful.

  Of course, you have to know where to draw the line with animals. You can let pet-keeping develop into eccentricity if you are not careful. I drew the line last Christmas. For a present I decided to buy my wife a North American flying-squirrel, a creature which I had always wanted to possess myself, and which I was sure she would like. The animal duly arrived, and we were both captivated by it. As it seemed extremely nervous, we thought it would be a good idea to keep it in our bedroom for a week or two, so that we could talk to it at night when it came out, and let it grow used to us. This plan would have worked quite well but for one thing. The squirrel cunningly gnawed its way out of the cage and took up residence behind the wardrobe. At first this did not seem too bad. We could sit in bed at night and watch it doing acrobatics on the wardrobe, scuttling up and down the dressing-table, carrying off the nuts and apple we had left there for it. Then came New Year’s Eve when we had been invited to a party for which I had to don my dinner-jacket. All was well until I opened a drawer in my dressing-table, when I discovered the answer to the question that had puzzled us for some time: where did the flying-squirrel store all the nuts, apple, bread and other bits of food? My brand-new cummerbund, which I had never even worn, looked like a piece of delicate Madeira lacework. The bits that had been chewed out of it had been very economically saved and used to build little nests, one on the front of each of my dress shirts. In these nests had been collected seventy-two hazelnuts, five walnuts, fourteen pieces of bread, six mealworms, fifty-two bits of apple and twenty grapes. The grapes and the apple had, of course, disintegrated somewhat with the passage of time and had left most interesting Picasso designs in juice across the front of my shirts.

  I had to go to the party in a suit. The squirrel is now in Paignton Zoo.

  The other day my wife said that she thought a baby otter would make a delightful pet, but I changed the subject hurriedly.

  Animal Parents

  I have the greatest respect for animal parents. When I was young I tried my hand at rearing a number of different creatures, and since then, on my animal-collecting trips for zoos to various parts of the world, I have had to mother quite a number of baby animals, and I have always found it a most nerve-racking task.

  The first real attempt I made at being a foster-mother was to four baby hedgehogs. The female hedgehog is a very good mother. She constructs an underground nursery for the reception of her young; a circular chamber about a foot below ground-level, lined with a thick layer of dry leaves. Here she gives birth to her babies, which are blind and helpless. They are covered with a thick coating of spikes, but these are white and soft, as though made of rubber. They gradually harden and turn brown when the babies are a few weeks old. When they are old enough to leave the nursery the mother leads them out and shows them how to hunt for food; they walk in line, rather like a school crocodile, the tail of one held in the mouth of the baby behind. The baby at the head of the column holds tight to mother’s tail with grim determination, and they wend their way through the twilit hedgerows like a strange prickly centipede.

  To a mother hedgehog the rearing of her babies seems to present no problems. But when I was suddenly presented with four blind, white, rubbery-spiked babies to rear, I was not so sure. We were living in Greece at the time, and the nest, which was about the size of a football and made of oak leaves, had been dug up by a peasant working in his fields. The first job was to feed the babies, for the ordinary baby’s feeding-bottle only took a teat far too large for their tiny mouths. Luckily the young daughter of a friend of mine had a doll’s feeding-bottle, and after much bribery I got her to part with it. After a time the hedgehogs took to this and thrived on a diet of diluted cow’s milk.

  I kept them at first in a shallow cardboard box where I had put the nest. But in record time the original nest was so unhygienic that I found myself having to change the leaves ten or twelve times a day. I began to wonder if the mother hedgehog spent her day rushing to and fro with piles of fresh leaves to keep her nest clean, and, if she did, how on earth she found time to satisfy the appetites of her babies. Mine were always ready for food at any hour of the day or night. You had only to touch the box and a chorus of shrill screams arose from four little pointed faces poking out the leaves, each head decorated with a crew-cut of white spikes; and the little black noses would whiffle desperately from side to side in an effort to locate the bottle.

  Most baby animals know when they have had enough, but in my experience this does not apply to baby hedgehogs. Like four survivors from a raft, they flung themselves on to the bottle and sucked and sucked and sucked as though they had not had a decent meal in weeks. If I had allowed it they would have drunk twice as much as was good for them. As it was, I think I tended to overfeed them, for their tiny legs could not support the weight of their fat bodies, and they would advance across the carpet with a curious swimming motion, their tummies dragging on the ground. However, they progressed very well: their legs grew stronger, their eyes opened, and they would even make daring excursions as much as six inches away from their box.

  I was very proud of my prickly family, and looked forward to the day when I would be able to take them for walks in the evening and find them delicious titbits like snails or wild strawberries. Unfortunately this dream was never realized. It so happened that I had to leave home for a day, to return the following morning. It was impossible for me to take the babies with me, so I had to leave them in charge of my sister. Before I left, I emphasized the greediness of the hedgehogs and told her that on no account were they to have more than one bottle of milk each, however much they squeaked for it.

  I should have known my sister better.

  When I returned the following day and inquired how my hedgehogs were, she gave me a reproachful look. I had, she said, been slowly starving the poor little things to death. With a dreadful sense of foreboding, I asked her how much she had been giving them at each meal. Four bottles each, she replied, and you should just see how lovely and fat they are getting. There was no denying they were fat. Their little tummies were so bloated their tiny feet could not even touch the ground. They looked like weird, prickly footballs to which someone by mistake had attached four legs and a nose. I did the best I could, but within twenty-four hours all four of them had died of acute enteritis. No one, of course, was more sorry than my sister, but I think she could tell by the frigid way I accepted her apologies that it was the last time she would be left in charge of any of my foster-children.


  Not all animals are as good as the hedgehog at looking after their babies. Some, in fact, treat the whole business with a rather casual and modern attitude. One such is the kangaroo. Baby kangaroos are born in a very unfinished condition. They are actually embryos, for a big red kangaroo squatting on its haunches may measure five feet high and yet give birth to a baby only about half an inch long. This blind and naked blob of life has to find its way up over the mother’s belly and into her pouch. In its primitive condition you would think this would be hard enough, but the whole thing is made doubly difficult by the fact that as yet the baby kangaroo can use only its front legs; the hind legs are neatly crossed over its tail. During this time the mother just squats there and gives her baby no help whatever, though occasionally she has been seen to lick a kind of trail through the fur, which may act as some sort of guide. Thus the tiny, premature offspring is forced to crawl through a jungle of fur until, as much by chance as good management, it reaches the pouch, climbs inside and clamps itself on to the teat. This is a feat that makes the ascent of Everest pale into insignificance.

  I have never had the privilege of trying to hand-rear a baby kangaroo, but I have had some experience with a young wallaby, which is closely related to the species and looks just like a miniature kangaroo. I was working at Whipsnade Zoo as a keeper. The wallabies there are allowed to run free in the park, and one female, carrying a well-formed youngster, was chased by a group of young lads. In her fright she did what all the kangaroo family does in moments of stress: she tossed her youngster out of her pouch. I found it some time afterwards, lying in the long grass, twitching convulsively and making faint sucking squeaks with its mouth. It was, quite frankly, the most unprepossessing baby animal I had ever seen. About a foot long, it was blind, hairless and a bright sugar-pink. It seemed to possess no control over any part of its body except its immense hind feet, which it kicked vigorously at intervals. It had been badly bruised by its fall and I had grave doubts as to whether it would live. None the less I took it back to my lodgings and, after some argument with the landlady, kept it in my bedroom.

  It fed eagerly from a bottle, but the chief difficulty lay in keeping it warm enough. I wrapped it in flannel and surrounded it with hot-water bottles, but these kept growing cold, and I was afraid it would catch a chill. The obvious thing to do was to carry it close to my body, so I put it inside my shirt. It was then that I realized for the first time what a mother wallaby must suffer. Apart from the nuzzling and sucking that went on, at regular intervals the baby would lash out its hind feet, well armed with claws, and kick me accurately in the pit of the stomach. After a few hours I began to feel as though I had been in the ring with Primo Carnera for a practice bout. It was obvious I would have to think of something else, or develop stomach ulcers. I tried putting him round the back of my shirt, but he would very soon scramble his way round to the front with his long claws in a series of convulsive kicks. Sleeping with him at night was purgatory, for apart from the all-in wrestling in which he indulged, he would sometimes kick so strongly that he shot out of bed altogether, and I was constantly forced to lean out of bed and pick him up from the floor. Unfortunately he died in two days, obviously from some sort of internal haemorrhage. I am afraid I viewed his demise with mixed feelings, although it was a pity to be deprived of the opportunity of mothering such an unusual baby.

  If the kangaroo is rather dilatory about her child, the pigmy marmoset is a paragon of virtue, or rather the male is. About the size of a large mouse, clad in neat brindled green fur, and with a tiny face and bright hazel eyes, the pigmy marmoset looks like something out of a fairy tale, a small furry gnome or perhaps a kelpie. As soon as the courtship is over and the female gives birth, her diminutive spouse turns into the ideal husband. The babies, generally twins, he takes over from the moment they are born and carries them slung on his hips like a couple of saddle-bags. He keeps them clean by constant grooming, hugs them to him at night to keep them warm, and only hands them over to his rather disinterested wife at feeding-time. But he is so anxious to get them back that you have the impression he would feed them himself if only he could. The pigmy marmoset is definitely a husband worth having.

  Strangely enough, monkeys are generally the stupidest babies, and it takes them a long time to learn to drink out of a bottle. Having successfully induced them to do this, you have to go through the whole tedious performance again, when they are a little bit older, in an attempt to teach them to drink out of a saucer. They always seem to feel that the only way of drinking out of a saucer is to duck the face beneath the surface of the milk and stay there until you either burst for want of air or drown in your own drink.

  One of the most charming baby monkeys I have ever had was a little moustached guenon. His back and tail were moss-green and his belly and whiskers a beautiful shade of buttercup yellow. Across his upper lip spread a large banana-shaped area of white, like the magnificent moustaches of some retired brigadier. Like all baby monkeys, his head seemed too big for his body, and he had long gangling limbs. He fitted very comfortably into a teacup. When I first had him he refused to drink out of a bottle, plainly convinced that it was some sort of fiendish torture I had invented, but eventually, when he got the hang of it, he would go quite mad when he saw the bottle arrive, fasten his mouth on to the teat, clasp the bottle passionately in his arms and roll on his back. As the bottle was at least three times his size, he made one think of a desperate survivor clinging on to a large white airship.

  When he learnt, after the normal grampus-like splutterings, to drink out of a saucer, the situation became fraught with difficulty. He would be placed on a table and then his saucer of milk produced. As soon as he saw it coming he would utter a piercing scream and start trembling all over, as if he were suffering with ague or St Vitus dance, but it was really a form of excited rage: excitement at the sight of the milk, rage that it was never put on the table quickly enough for him. He screamed and trembled to such an extent that he bounced up in the air like a grasshopper. If you were unwise enough to put the saucer down without hanging on to his tail, he would utter one final shrill scream of triumph and dive headfirst into the centre of it, and when you had mopped the resulting tidal wave of milk from your face, you would find him sitting indignantly in the middle of an empty saucer, chattering with rage because there was nothing for him to drink.

  One of the main problems when you are rearing baby animals is to keep them warm enough at night, and this, strangely enough, applies even in the tropics, where the temperature drops considerably after dark. In the wild state, of course, the babies cling to the dense fur of the mother and obtain warmth and shelter in that way. Hot-water bottles, as a substitute, I have found of very little use. They grow cold so quickly and you have to get up several times during the night to refill them, an exhausting process when you have a lot of baby animals to look after, as well as a whole collection of adult ones. So in most cases the simplest way is to take the babies into bed with you. You soon learn to sleep in one position – half-waking up in the night, should you wish to move, so that you avoid crushing them as you turn over.

  I have at one time or another shared my bed with a great variety of young creatures, and sometimes several different species at once. On one occasion my narrow camp-bed contained three mongooses, two baby monkeys, a squirrel and a young chimpanzee. There was just enough room left over for me. You might think that after taking all this trouble a little gratitude would come your way, but in many cases you get the opposite. One of my most impressive scars was inflicted by a young mongoose because I was five minutes late with his bottle. When people ask me about it now, I am forced to pretend it was given me by a charging jaguar. Nobody would believe me if I told them it was really a baby mongoose under the bedclothes.

  The Bandits

  My first introduction to the extraordinary little animals known as kusimanses took place at the London Zoo. I had gone into the Rodent House to examine at close range some rather lovely squirrels from
West Africa. I was just about to set out on my first animal-collecting expedition, and I felt that the more familiar I was with the creatures I was likely to meet in the great rain-forest, the easier my job would be.

  After watching the squirrels for a time, I walked round the house peering into the other cages. On one of them hung a rather impressive label which informed me that the cage contained a creature known as a kusimanse (Crossarchus obscurus) and that it came from West Africa. All I could see in the cage was a pile of straw that heaved gently and rhythmically, while a faint sound of snoring was wafted out to me. As I felt that this animal was one I was sure to meet, I felt justified in waking it up and forcing it to appear.

  Every zoo has a rule I always observe, and many others should observe it too: not to disturb a sleeping animal by poking it or throwing peanuts. They have precious little privacy as it is. However, I ignored the rule on this occasion and rattled my thumbnail to and fro along the bars. I did not really think this would have any effect. But as I did so a sort of explosion took place in the depths of the straw, and the next moment a long, rubbery, tip-tilted nose appeared, to be followed by a rather rat-like face with small neat ears and bright inquisitive eyes. This little face appraised me for a minute; then, noticing the lump of sugar which I held tactfully near the bars, the animal uttered a faint, spinsterish squeak and struggled madly to release itself from the cocoon of straw wound round it.