Zoo Story Page 3

  “We had run out of time,” Mick says.

  It was right about then that the two American zoos—first San Diego, then Tampa—suggested another possibility. Officials from both zoos flew to Swaziland to describe the new homes they could offer the elephants. San Diego already had a three-acre elephant exhibit. Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo was willing to build one of similar size. The zoos invited the Reillys to see the facilities for themselves. Mick flew to the United States, toured both zoos, and was impressed—not just with the exhibits but with the expertise of the staffs and the care they offered. The animal clinic at San Diego, Mick said, was more sophisticated than any hospital inside Swaziland. At Lowry Park, he was struck by the zoo’s manatee hospital, where over the years dozens of injured or ailing manatees had been rehabilitated and then released back into the wild.

  That was it. If there was no more room in the game parks, then San Diego and Lowry Park made sense.

  “There are zoos,” says Ted, “and there are zoos.”

  With the blessing of King Mswati III, the Reillys and the zoos began the long process of applying for the necessary permits. The zoos agreed to pay the game parks $12,000 for each elephant. The money, the Reillys said, would go to management of Mkhaya and Hlane, protection of the animals within, and the purchase of more park land. In their permit applications, Lowry Park and San Diego pointed out that the arrival of eleven wild elephants would benefit zoos around the United States. It had been more than fifteen years since any African elephants had been brought into the United States, and now the captive elephant population was aging and having trouble reproducing. Bringing in the wild elephants—all designated for breeding—would rejuvenate the genetic pool.

  Mountains of paperwork awaited the lawyers and the bureaucrats. But even more was required of the zoos and the game parks. They had to figure out how to transport eleven elephants across an ocean and prepare for their care once they arrived. San Diego already had an African elephant exhibit, but still needed to ship some of its current occupants to other institutions to make room for the new arrivals. Lowry Park had not exhibited elephants in ten years, ever since 1993, when an Asian elephant killed one of the zoo’s keepers. After the young woman’s death, the zoo closed the exhibit and sent its two elephants to new homes. Now Lowry Park had to build new facilities, hire new elephant keepers, and adopt updated protocols to protect the staff.

  In Swaziland, the Reillys had to figure out which elephants would be chosen, then move them temporarily into the boma and ready them for their journey. Working with the zoos, the Reillys designated thirteen elephants from two herds at Mkhaya and Hlane—the eleven elephants intended for the trip, plus two more in case any became unfit for the flight or died during the stress of the preparations. They didn’t want any females with young calves or any that were in the third trimester of a pregnancy and at risk for a miscarriage from the stress of the long journey ahead. Elephant pregnancies, however, are difficult to judge without an internal exam. To be certain they weren’t choosing any cows late in a pregnancy, the parks decided to bring in two veterinary specialists from Berlin, widely considered among the world’s authorities on elephant reproduction.

  There was another challenge. The Reillys worried that the elephants who were not chosen might be traumatized if they saw members of their group being tranquilized and taken away by ground crews. To their eyes, the mass removal to the boma could easily look like another cull. To avoid that shock and any resulting hostility toward the park’s rangers and visitors, the Reillys decided on a different plan. In March 2003, when the thirteen were to be gathered, a helicopter crew darted every elephant in the two parks, knocking them all out so none would be awake to see the removal. The two German vets, flown in to assist, moved among the unconscious elephants and performed field sonograms on the selected females. Two of the females were pregnant, but neither had entered her third trimester. The elephants were loaded onto trucks and taken to the boma in Mkhaya. The Reilly family assumed the elephants would only have to stay there for a few weeks. But by then, a coalition of animal-rights groups, including Born Free and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), was protesting and organizing letter-writing campaigns and filing a lawsuit in federal court to block the importation of the elephants. “The Swazi Eleven,” the activists were now calling them.

  “If the elephants are euthanized,” Katherine Meyer, a lawyer for the animal-rights groups, told a judge, “that would be a better outcome than to have these elephants put in crates, put on an airplane, brought over here, trained with bull hooks, put in cages, and live the rest of their lives in captivity.”

  In Swaziland, the Reilly family was denounced by members of parliament, the local newspapers, even other elephant experts. Nine researchers studying wild elephants in Kenya, including Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole, renowned for their studies on elephant behavior and communication, released an open letter protesting the move, citing the intricacy of the emotional lives of the species and the damage to those lives in captivity. The researchers wrote:

  (W)e believe the time has come to consider them as sentient beings and not as so much money on the hoof to be captured and sold and displayed for our own use. We should be beyond the exploitation of animals as complex and magnificent as elephants.

  PETA offered to pay for moving them to other parks in Africa. One politician accused the Reillys of attempting to smuggle the elephants out of Swaziland. Others suggested that the Reillys’ talk of a cull was an empty threat, designed to pressure officials in the United States to approve the permits.

  Mick and Ted were unprepared for the vitriol. They knew the reputation of Dr. Moss and the other researchers who had signed the letter of protest. But Kenya was not Swaziland. As for PETA’s offer to bankroll another alternative to the culling, the Reillys were skeptical. They were sure the offer would come with too many strings. Besides, just because another park was willing to take their elephants didn’t mean that the permits would be granted. The Reillys noted that there was no international outcry when they culled impalas or warthogs. Why didn’t PETA or Born Free issue press releases and launch petition drives for them? In court and in the media, the coalition hammered away at how San Diego and Lowry Park were angling to buy the elephants because they were a so-called “flagship species,” an animal so beloved that their presence in a zoo’s collection was sure to increase profits. But the Reillys argued that it was the animal-rights groups who were guilty of exploitation, whipping up the outrage for their own gain, capitalizing on elephants as their own flagship species guaranteed to draw a flood of donations from horrified animal lovers around the world. If the coalition truly believed the crisis in Mkhaya and Hlane was a convenient fiction, why didn’t they send someone to see the parks and all their dead trees? The smuggling charge made the Reillys laugh. How exactly, they asked, did one smuggle eleven elephants past customs?

  By now it was August 2003, and the elephants had been in the boma for five months. The staff did what it could to keep them comfortable; sometimes their caretakers hand-fed them marula fruit, one of their favorites. Even so, the animals chafed at having their movements restricted. One day, several tried to break through the electrified fence, using another elephant as a battering ram. They chose Mbali—the small female named after Mick’s daughter—and thronged together to push her through the fence, apparently so they wouldn’t have to touch it themselves. When the current traveled through Mbali and shocked them, too, it put a quick end to their plan.

  In Washington, the legal arguments went back and forth in federal court. The government permits had been approved, but now memoranda were being filed, injunctions requested, motions granted and denied and appealed. Finally, on August 15, two circuit judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington denied one last emergency motion from the animal-rights groups.

  The Reillys heard the news and began the final preparations in the boma. It was time to get the elephants into the air.

  The 747’s engines dr
oned on and on. Mick, still standing, had lost track of time. All he knew was that the sun had finally left the sky and that they were flying in darkness again. A little while ago, they had stopped in Barbados for refueling. Now they were headed for Florida.

  The elephants appeared to be holding up well in their crates. Extra doses of Azaperone had calmed the bulls and soothed Mick’s fears of disaster. Still, he knew the trip could not be easy for them. After all this time in the air, they had to be hungry.

  “Kunekudla lukunengi,” he told them. There’s lots of food where you’re going.

  Mbali, the little one, was quiet again. She had been sleeping, off and on. Was she dreaming? Did she still feel the jolt in the boma, when the other elephants pushed her into the electric fence? Did she see herself back in the park, wandering through the leopard grass and umbrella thorns?

  Inside the hold, among the crates, there was a shift in equilibrium. The plane was descending through the clouds, toward a grid of shimmering light.

  Tampa.

  Chapter 2

  The Audacity of Creation

  Dawn, and already the highway was overrun. A chorus of muttered curses rose from the great steel and chrome herd jammed, snout to tail, in the middle of another morning migration along Interstate 275 toward the towers of downtown Tampa.

  Trapped inside their climate-controlled cars, alone with their cell phones and their iPods and their satellite mapping systems, the drivers fought back the urge to swerve onto the shoulder and break free. Instead they inched forward, thumping fists on steering wheels, snarling at other cars that drifted into their lane, allowing themselves a few controlled bursts of aggression even as they stayed in line.

  Just off the Sligh Avenue exit, another chorus was sounding. The drivers couldn’t hear it. But it was there.

  At Lowry Park Zoo, the beasts were waking.

  The Malayan tapirs whistled, calling to one another in the early morning light. The orangutans lounged in the rope netting of their exhibit and sighed their philosophical sighs. Through serrated teeth dripping with toxic saliva, the Komodo dragons hissed. From their hiding places under the rocks and logs, the clouded leopards—secretive and mysterious and nearly invisible in the shadows—panted and meowed. A raven cawed and flapped its black wings; a leopard gecko yowled, sounding almost like a cat. The hammerkops cackled; the New Guinea singing dogs barked; and the sloth bears snuffled and sniffed, their long, curved claws clicking on the rocks as they padded out into the sun. A fever of Southern stingrays, flying in slow-motion circles around their shallow pool, were silent except for the tiny splashes of their wingtips cresting the surface.

  High above them all, Cyrus and Nadir serenaded each other with another duet in the sky. The male and female siamangs—Asian gibbons, with long arms and thick black fur and big bulging throat sacs—swung from poles thirty feet in the air as they traded the exact same sequence of hoots and wails that they performed every day. Mated for life, the siamangs sang to seal their bond, to declare their shared history, to warn away intruders. Their duets carried to every corner of the zoo, cutting through the recorded jungle drums beating incessantly from the P.A. system.

  Other songs joined the soundtrack. Cries of desire and hunger, protest and exultation. A multiplicity of voices from nearly every continent, at nearly every frequency, of almost infinite variation. Hearing them together on a bright, clear morning was to contemplate the audacity of creation. Not just God’s audacity, but man’s.

  From the argus pheasants to the goliath bird-eating spiders, each of Lowry Park’s sixteen hundred animals offered living proof of nature’s endless gift for invention. In the curves of their skulls, in the muscles of their wings, in their blood and bones and the twisting nucleotides of their DNA, each carried millions of years of the planet’s biological history. But their presence inside these walls also testified to the epic self-regard of the species that had seen fit to build the zoo and so many others like it around the world.

  Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to becoming the property of this particular zoo—could have filled an encyclopedia with insights into human behavior and psychology, human geopolitics and history and commerce. Lowry Park’s very existence declared our presumption of supremacy, the ancient belief that we have been granted dominion over other creatures and have the right to do with them as we please. The zoo was a living catalogue of our fears and obsessions, the ways we see animals and see ourselves, all the things we prefer not to see at all. Every corner of the grounds revealed our appetite for amusement and diversion, no matter what the cost. Our longing for the wildness we have lost inside ourselves. Our instinct to both exalt nature and control it. Our deepest wish to love and protect other species even as we scorch their forests and poison their rivers and shove them toward oblivion.

  All of it was on display in the garden of captives.

  By now the sun was climbing in the sky. The front gates weren’t open yet, but the staff was busy feeding the animals and raking the empty exhibits and searching for any trash that might have blown or been tossed into the enclosures. When they were done, they shifted the animals into the open air of their exhibits, ready for public viewing.

  An Indian rhino, seeing his keeper, ran over and pressed against the thick gate that separated them. Begging for attention, he whimpered like a puppy.

  “Hi, Naboo,” said the keeper, scratching his snout through the bars.

  The rhino’s official name, the name shared with the public, was Arjun. But in private the staff called him Naboo, after a planet in Star Wars. They loved bestowing the animals with Star Wars names. There was an otter named Chewbacca and a camel who answered (or didn’t) to Leia. One of the young howler monkeys had been christened Anakin, as in Anakin Skywalker, which was Darth Vader’s name before he grew up and went to the dark side. The name made sense, because howler monkeys are born with tan fur and then turn black as they mature. It was an inside joke. A keeper thing.

  In the herps department, the section of the zoo reserved for snakes and turtles and other cold-blooded creatures, the blue poison-dart frogs were peeping, very softly, inside a small warm closet clouded with manmade mist. The room was designed to replicate, as much as possible, the atmosphere of a rain forest. The males planted their legs on the rocks beneath them, the heart-shaped pads at the ends of their toes gripping like tiny suction cups. Their bodies were so bright blue, they seemed radioactive. Their calls to the females were so quiet, they were almost drowned out by the hum of the ventilation system.

  Poison-dart frogs were vanishing from the wild. All over the globe, from the forests of Panama to the spray zones of waterfalls in Tanzania, frogs and toads were dying off. So many species were disappearing so quickly—disappearing much faster than the mass extinctions that had wiped out the dinosaurs—that there was no time to save even a sampling of them all for posterity. Many of these species would simply fade away. Others, selected for survival, would live out the rest of their time on Earth in aquariums and zoos, in small rooms like this one at Lowry Park.

  At the zoo, every day was another lesson on living in a world where there were no more pure choices.

  Inside the birds-of-prey building, the cement block walls echoed with screeches and caws and chittering mating calls. A parade of raptors—a bald eagle, a merlin falcon, a Eurasian eagle owl, and a pair of Harris hawks—stood at their perches, talons clasping tightly. In the wild they would have been swooping down on voles and rabbits and salmon. Bald eagles have been known to grab dogs and to attempt to lift small children into the air. Harris hawks are famed for hunting above the desert in coordinated teams. Now their dark eyes shined as they waited for someone to bring them another offering from a nearby freezer full of rodents. “Ratsic
les,” the staff called them.

  A trainer extended her arm toward a black vulture named Smedley. Time for his daily weighing.

  “What do you say, bubba?”

  Smedley shuffled from foot to foot, considering the invitation. Then the trainer offered him a tidbit of dead quail and cued him with a little sound.

  “Doop!” she said, and the vulture flew onto her arm to claim his treat.

  The department worked with almost any bird brought to their door. They nursed baby screech owls that had tumbled from nests, peregrine falcons that had crashed into power lines, hawks and eagles with birth defects that would have led them to starve in the wild. Some of the birds had been born into captivity and were too dependent on humans to ever make it on their own. Others eventually recovered and were given a chance to fly away for good. The staff found it deeply satisfying to help the birds heal and then set them loose, watching them power toward the trees. But the transition was rarely simple, especially after the birds grew accustomed to the zoo’s routine and to the presence of the humans and the steady diet of ratsicles. The keepers tried to ease their way back into the wild with a protocol known as “a soft release.” Instead of simply abandoning the birds, they would let them go at the end of the day, but leave a supply of food for them in case they weren’t ready to strike out on their own. Sometimes, after a few nights of experimenting with freedom, the birds would not be seen again. Sometimes they would find it too hard to break away and never leave.