Zoo or theme park?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoos

As the sign clearly shows, the Lowry Park Zoo has taken the elephant as their mascot. This was done as part of a major makeover of the zoo by former director Lex Salisbury, beginning seven or eight years ago when the zoo began negotiating the permits to import four elephants from Swaziland to Tampa.

As chronicled in Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, by Thomas French, this marked the beginning of a period of great prosperity for the zoo, but also a period of peril that eventually risked the zoo's existence. While there were perils enough from the competing constituencies of multiple levels of government in both countries, plus organizations like PETA that demanded the elephants be either returned to the "freedom" of their game park or killed, the greatest danger to the integrity of Lowry Park was the huge ambition of the director himself, a "my way or the highway" kind of manager, called by many employees "El Diablo Blanco".

The book starts with the transport of the elephants by 747, along with seven others bound for San Diego as part of the same deal. They were removed from the game park because the herd there was outstripping the resources of the park, destroying the vegetation faster than it could grow back. Unwilling to "cull" (kill) any of the elephants, the owners of the preserve had sold these elephants to the two zoos to buy time. At the close of the book we learn that the herd has continued to increase, and the owners are now trying vasectomies and other "reproductive limitation" methods to buy more time.

Over the years, the elephants became the centerpiece of a new exhibit space at the zoo, and the former "king" and "queen", an alpha chimp named Herman and a cantankerous tigress named Enshalla, were gradually being set aside. Tragically, both Herman and Enshalla died in recent years, Herman to an alpha-battle with another chimp, and Enshalla to shotgun blasts when she escaped her cage and rushed to attack the veterinarian who attempted to tranquilize her.

The author makes it clear he does not blame all the zoo's troubles on Lex Salisbury, but the director bears the bulk of it. He simply begged for trouble by opening a for-profit wild animal park north of Tampa, quite cavalierly muddling the relations between it and the non-profit zoo: trading animals back and forth, one entity charging the other for animal upkeep, and paying for a "this is more of a vacation than a business trip" jaunt using zoo funds. While he had played a great political game for years, he displayed a horrendous amount of ethical tone-deafness. His best friends finally could not bear to support his case, and he was ousted early in 2010.

This is a story of one of the better small zoos, and the troubles it faced from overworked, underpaid staff led by predatory management. It makes a fellow wonder about the operation of zoos of lower quality. Yet in the end, it is a story of people who love animals, averting disaster heroically in spite of mismanagement going on all around them. If the human race had fewer people who are, to use E. O. Wilson's term, biophiliacs, one shudders to consider how much more dismal zoos would be, or if they could exist at all. Conservation is the natural impulse of large numbers of us. It is what has so far saved us from extincting everything else on the planet, though the rest of the human race seems to be proceeding with just that program anyway.

Lowry Park Zoo's story is a cautionary tale that mirrors our care—or the lack thereof—for all of Earth. The very richness of the biosphere isn't sufficient proof against human depredation. As the one species that has so far denied all responsibility to limit its impact on the planet, we may indeed find ourselves making such an impact that many fewer of us will be able to survive on Earth in the future. Do you want to see both the best and the worst of human nature? Volunteer at your local zoo and learn what really goes on behind the scenes.