Jumping the Fence
by Marjorie Rose Hakala
Out of the daily feedings and training and classes and animal-visitor encounters of a zoo, there is little that makes it into the news. The stuff that gets the public’s attention and brings out the journalists tends to fall into three categories: 1) An animal was born. 2) An animal died. 3) The barriers broke down. Something got out of the zoo, or someone got in.
Births and deaths are reliable; they happen to every creature in the zoo and every person on the planet. Check the obituaries in the same newspapers, or the ambulance runs, or the society pages. But the escape stories are something else. These were never guaranteed to happen. They are disruptions of a sort found in few other places. To stage an escape, you need a cage.
A few years ago, my mother was by herself at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington. It was an overcast weekday and there was hardly anyone there, so she was on her own when she got to the musk ox enclosure. She must have caught the eye of one of the musk oxen; when he saw her looking at him, he got onto his hind legs, putting his front legs on the railing that ran around the interior of the enclosure, and with one of his front hooves he smashed the glass wall between them.
Mom backed off in a hurry and wasn’t hurt, and the break wasn’t enough to allow the animals to escape. But she couldn’t find anyone to tell about what had happened, so it was up to whatever staff member happened across it to clean up the glass lying on the ground, showing that the pane had been broken from the inside, and to consider whether something ought to be done about the musk oxen.
The same thing must have happened to other people. At the Ranua Wildlife Park in Finland, I saw a sign that said, “Watch out, the muskox can push the fence. Please, keep your head and hands outside of the enclosure.” I wondered how to interpret this information. Can they push the fence over? Do they like to push their legs through it? Either way, if the musk oxen decide to push on the fence, aren’t we at risk even without sticking our heads and hands into their territory?
I told this story at a social gathering and a woman I know volunteered a story of her own. She was in dental school at the University of Minnesota in the late 1970’s. She belonged, informally, to the dental fraternity on campus (there was no dental sorority). One night she was out with two of her fraternity brothers, both of whom were a little bit drunk, and they rode their bicycles to Saint Paul’s Como Zoo shortly before closing. Inside the zoo, they went up to the ostrich enclosure and saw that there was a nest holding two eggs just inside the fence. The fence was basic, straight-up-and-down, without any inward curve or barbed wire at the top. Hey, said the slightly drunk dental fraternity brothers. We dare you to climb over the fence and steal that egg.
And she did, without stopping to consider. She climbed the fence and dropped down onto the other side, where the eggs, a foot and a half in circumference, were lying out in the open. She picked one of them up and then realized that she had been seen. Not by a person: by the ostrich. Ostriches, it is worth mentioning at this juncture, run faster than any other two-legged animal—over forty miles per hour at a sprint. A nest robbery is probably a good occasion for a sprint. The ostrich took off in the direction of my friend; my friend scrabbled up the fence, dropped the egg to her friends below, and jumped down herself, and all of them took off on their bikes. They weren’t pursued, and the egg theft, as far as she or I can tell, was never reported in the news. This is the sort of thing that can happen in a zoo that is truly open to the public, unwalled and unguarded: sometimes members of the public drop in and help themselves.
According to some sources, dead dogs and cats used to be accepted as admission to the Tower of London menagerie, in place of the fee of three halfpence. If visitors brought an animal, it would be fed to the lions while the people watched. It was a treat to see this happen.
When I worked at the International Wolf Center in northern Minnesota, we had a special program every week called “What’s for Dinner?” where guests could watch as the wolf pack got fed a roadkill deer. Sometimes there was a fetus in the deer’s womb. Sometimes a wolf peed on a portion of food to claim it. Some of our guests found this disgusting. One demanded to know why we didn’t put live deer in the enclosure for the wolves to hunt. My coworker told him there would be an ethical problem with doing that. He said, “Sounds more like a pussy problem.”
On a visit to the Bronx Zoo in 2012, I was just in time to see the penguins get fed. I got a little lost on the way there, distracted by the old stone buildings and the peacocks wandering the grounds freely with their tails dragging behind them, and when I finally passed through the hanging plastic flaps that curtained off the penguin exhibit, I was startled by the quiet I found there. It was an outdoor area, housing Magellanic penguins from South America, not Antarctic penguins that would have needed ice. Only some low fiberglass walls separate the penguins from the spectators. It’s not too hard, I suppose, to pen in a flock of short and flightless birds. A zoo employee was standing on the island among the birds in tall galoshes, carrying a bucket of fish. The skinny and speckled penguins stood around her and craned their necks up toward the fish in her bucket. She distributed the food carefully, fairly. One of the birds got harried away by its fellows, and the keeper went after it, crouched down, and fed it some pieces of fish while keeping the others away. Some of the penguins made a little noise, honking like geese or braying like donkeys, but the keeper ignored them and went about her work, peaceful and long-legged like a heron among the squat penguins. She ignored the people watching her, and we were quiet in return. The whole thing was so simple that I was surprised it had been put on the schedule of programs for the day. It wasn’t a showy intrusion. The zookeeper looked like she belonged in there, like she had crossed a barrier that none of us could cross.
The Bronx Zoo did have an escape in recent years. In a story reminiscent of Harry Potter, an Egyptian cobra got out of its case and went missing. The story alternately delighted and unsettled the public nationwide. Someone started a “@BronxZoosCobra” Twitter feed detailing the snake’s adventures in New York City: attending a Yankees game, ordering bagels, and riding the ferry to Ellis Island. After all the hoopla, it turned out the snake had barely even escaped: it was eventually found in the World of Reptiles building where it had always lived, “coiled in a secluded dark corner” according to the New York Times. A peahen escaped the same zoo less than a month later and got off the zoo property entirely. But this was a less remarkable escape: peafowl wander the grounds of the Bronx Zoo freely, usually staying close to where they are fed, and this one chose to leave. She was apprehended inside a garage in the Bronx.
We trust in impermeable boundaries in zoos, but the entire experience depends on permeability. We go to the zoo in the hope that something meaningful is passing through the glass, between the bars, or over the moat. We want to see the animals and for them to see us back. But we don’t want them to respond to us the way most animals instinctively would, by running away or (if they’re musk oxen who don’t like eye contact) by breaking the glass. The International Wolf Center has microphones inside the wolf enclosure connected to speakers in the building, so that visitors can hear the wolves despite the walls and soundproof glass between them. The guests inside the building sometimes howl at the wolves in hope that they’ll respond. Usually the wolves can’t hear and don’t howl back, but they can see the guests and respond to their presence. Toward the end of the tourist season when I worked there, I often saw the wolves come out of hiding two minutes after the last visitors had left the building. The visitors who howled imagined a dialogue with the wolves, but if they could really make themselves heard, the result would be a wolf pack under constant stress, taking out aggression on each other because they couldn’t take it out on whoever was making those assertive noises, impinging on their territory.
Harmless animals might escape the most often, but bigger ones can get out too. Casey the gorilla escaped from Como Zoo in May of 1994. He didn’t hurt anybody in his brief time outdoors, and he was soon shot with a tranquilizer dart and coaxed back to the gorilla enclosure. A gorilla that escaped from the Dallas Zoo in 2004 injured four people and was shot to death by police officers.
What fascinates me about my mother’s musk ox story is that it represents a breakdown in the basic relationship between a spectator and a zoo animal. If the musk ox was angry because my mother was looking at it, well: looking at animals is the entire purpose of a zoo. A zoo animal you can’t look at is failing the most basic element of its job. There are other reasons wild animals are kept in captivity: for breeding and species conservation, or for behavioral research. But zoo animals are there to be seen. This is the one deciding characteristic that sets a zoo aside from a wildlife preserve, a research center, or a national park.
I have noticed that thinkers about zoos often bring other senses than sight into their analysis, in an attempt to explain how what happens there is more than what happens when we watch TV. Nature writer Diane Ackerman, in an op/ed contribution to the New York Times, suggested that zoos are, among other things, a treasury of smells, “from the sweet drops that male elephants dribble from glands near their eyes in mating season to the scent signposts of lions, hyenas and other animals.” Personally, I am skeptical that more than one in a million zoo visitors notices the smell of male elephants’ glandular expressions. Humans are not very appreciative of animal smells in general: witness the wrinkling of noses where a male lion has been marking his territory. A connection is being made here, but it is tempered with disgust—a dodgy basis for building bridges between species. Touch is incorporated occasionally, carefully, with domestic species or safe, small animals like chinchillas and non-biting snakes. I don’t yet know of any zoo that usefully incorporates the sense of taste into its educational programming. Out of the traditionally defined five senses, sight and hearing are the two we use to experience a zoo, and these are the same senses we can apply to a nature program on TV.
But stories of rupture and escape suggest the application of other senses than the traditional five. Jumping back from a musk ox’s foot—or from an animal that looks like it is attacking but can’t—we engage our flight reflexes, our sense of our limbs, our haptic sense of the space around us. We enter into a different relationship with the animals from the one we would have if we were more separated from them.
On the night of April 24, 1979, a group of young men broke into Como Zoo and raised some hell, throwing rocks at the polar bears, breaking a goose’s neck, and stealing one of the ducks that lived in the bird pond. One of the polar bears, a female named Kuma who had lived at the zoo for twenty-three years, died after being struck in the head by a concrete block.
The public reaction was swift and condemnatory. A $2,600 reward was offered, with money donated by the Como Zoo Society, Humane Society, City Council, and a local millionaire. A local beer company with a bear mascot offered to pay for a replacement polar bear. About a hundred citizens called the zoo to say how upset they were, some of them breaking down in tears on the phone, and hundreds more called the police with leads. Within twenty-four hours of the break-in, the police followed one of the tips and apprehended seven suspects. One of them was still carrying around a live duck from the zoo in the trunk of his car.
“I’m surprised people are so concerned about an animal,” a police captain said to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. “We have an old lady knocked down, her purse snatched and her arm broken, and you don’t hear from the public about that. But the people calling today are really incensed about this thing.”
After that, letters poured in to the local papers making excuses for the outrage. Everyone was eager to explain why the public was so concerned about the attack. These letters said by turns that humans needed to acquire “a basic and needed awareness for all living things,” or that “we should be glad that people can still feel outrage over such a thing.” Someone said the public mourning for Kuma offered “a ray of hope for a return to decency.”
These comments suggest that animals are a natural locus of moral concern for humans, one of the most basic things we are expected to care about. But this has generally not been the case at all. One letter to the editor claimed, “Everyone knows killing bears is wrong,” but this statement posits a version of “everyone” that leaves out the hundreds of hunters to whom the state would issue bear permits that fall. “Other animals don’t senselessly murder members of their own species,” one letter-writer claimed. This is true mostly because the idea of “murder” is based on the assumption of a human actor. Predators fight over food and territory; rabbits are rather famous for eating their young; nature as a whole produces life upon life upon life, and over and over those lives end in being consumed, or else they escape to die of starvation or disease. But the zoo is supposed to be safe from brutality. People look into the zoo as if they are looking back toward childhood, or toward Eden. “We should be glad that people can still feel outrage over such a thing”: still, when adulthood has hardened us; still, in a fallen, carnivorous world.
Of course predation and death persist in zoos—how could they not? When I was eleven years old and a frequent visitor at the Minnesota Zoo, I learned that a flamingo there had grown back its clipped feathers sooner than expected, escaped from its enclosure, and flew to the cage next door to visit the Komodo dragons. One of the dragons promptly ate it. Zookeepers seemed sanguine about the incident when they spoke to the press. “This was a gourmet meal for her,” one spokeswoman said. The dragon, a female named Maureen, had been eating poorly since her arrival at the zoo, so the flamingo was her first good meal in months.
If the flamingo hadn’t flown the coop, the dragons would have been fed rats instead. Carnivory is more or less inevitable; it can be schooled but not eliminated. And animals that transgress their own borders are not cause for outrage or even, in many cases, concern. The devoured flamingo did not have a name or any distinguishing personal characteristics. But the stories do make an impression. I still remember that one, twenty years later. It was a startling dose of real violence in a peaceful place.
When the preferred zoo designs involved barred cages and concrete walls, a zoo was a spectacle of mastery. The King of England’s lions were not put on display out of interest in natural history; they were a symbol of the king and his kingdom. Their violence was part of the appeal.
In modern zoos, animal violence is minimized where possible; where unavoidable it is explained as part of the food chain; and humans avoid becoming complicit in it. A dragon may eat a flamingo, but it will never be fed one. And while humans exert more influence over the natural world than we ever have before, we no longer go to the zoo to witness human mastery. We are in control of so much, now, that taking charge is no longer as interesting as it was. We’d rather pretend we are witnessing a wilderness that has nothing to do with us. Staff aren’t bound by the rules, and animals are innocent of them, but dare to harm a zoo animal and you’ll learn what kind of crime you have committed: not only a violent act but a violation of a sanctum.
It’s possible to create the illusion of a zoo without barriers, using moats and ditches and camouflage fencing to make it look as if all the animals are living in one habitat together, and we’re together with them too. The lion lies down with the lamb, or at least, the lion lives near a herd of gnu and doesn’t kill them. It’s a vision of a world where everyone is free of cages and cells and also completely safe. Building a fence and tearing one down are both acts of violence against the ideal of peaceful freedom, an ideal that could never be realized unless we redesigned the whole menagerie of earth. We build an illusion of that world instead and gaze in, our hands against the glass, hoping the barrier will hold, wondering if today is the day when it will break.
MARJORIE ROSE HAKALA has an MFA from Hamline University and has published nonfiction and criticism in Water~Stone Review, Rain Taxi, The Review Review, and The Millions. She lives with her cat in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where between day jobs, teaching gigs, and bike rides she is at work on a nonfiction manuscript about zoos.