A Day at the Zoo

April 23, 2009

According to Tamara Vodovoz, a trained veterinarian I know here who volunteers at a local zoo, most African zoos offer animals the worst imaginable conditions. Though the management willingly takes your money, there is hardly any subsequent investment in the zoo; there are neither clear objectives nor a plan to improve the park in order to reach international captive wildlife wellbeing standards.

There are few tools available to conduct any meaningful work. Though
there is a veterinary technician on staff, he has spent far too much
of his time reading the newspaper because there are neither medicines
nor resources for him to carry out de-worming or vaccination for the
animals. Any zoo should have basic equipment such as a blow dart and
anesthesia and a staff that knows how to use them, yet here they do
not. In one disheartening example, five little jackals that were kept
in far too small a cage escaped, but not for long: one of them ended
up with neurological damage because a keeper hit him on the head with
a shovel in order to return him to his cage.

Having established that there are gaps in both training and resources,
it is further sad but true to say that the animals do not even enjoy a
regular and balanced diet. The food the animals get is often
completely inappropriate, as for example dry, stale baguette.
Occasionally there will be seasonal fruit or vegetables like raw
cabbage, sweet potato or watermelon. Sometimes, however, the animals
will go without food for two or three days when the food runs out.

Tamara had struck an agreement with a fruit vendor near the zoo to buy
all the fruit that was on the verge of going bad. The vendor would set
cartons aside for her and she would buy in bulk for the animals,
paying perhaps 2000 CFA (four US dollars) for two big cartons. She let
everyone at the zoo know about her idea, from keepers to the
management, hoping that it would catch on, but no one really responded
or was willing to do this in her absence, so this initiative, like
many others, did not prove to be sustainable.

Carnivores fare the best of all the animals here in terms of diet, for
they are given meat about three times a week. There is an agreement
with an organization that supplies the zoo with old, sick or unwanted
donkeys that are often kept with no food or water; they are then
either left to die or ultimately slaughtered at the zoo. Vultures
ominously circle the dumping ground for the carcasses, where you will
often see body parts strewn about – the workers do not trouble to bury
them, they are out there in full view, which understandably makes the
park somewhat less than attractive for family outings!

Sanitation generally is a huge problem because there is no drainage
system. This means that it is extremely difficult to clean the moats
for certain animals such as the lions and the warthog. The zoo did not
buy cleaning materials, not even bleach, in the 4 months my friend
volunteered there. As Tamara remarked with a sigh, ”They do not even
pay for food, so why should they pay for disinfectant?”

When the water in the moat areas becomes absolutely disgusting, water
pumps are brought and the noxious water is pumped out to the swampy
area containing the donkey bones: “You don’t wanna go there,” as we
used to say metaphorically back in NY, except in this case it is meant
most literally.

Whereas in developed countries, water is treated biologically before
it gets evacuated – it goes through filtering plants, etc. - all that
does not exist here. Waste water is pumped directly into the Atlantic,
which is why the workers are not shocked in the least at the thought
of simply dumping the water from the animal moats into the wetlands
area, which must be chock full of salmonella and all sorts of other
pathogens. Further, there is no composting area or even holes dug for
carnivore leftovers, so this area bears a nightmarish resemblance to
something out of a Stephen King movie.

Even the cages pose a problem. Cages are often divided in two so that
the animal can be moved safely and easily from one side to another to
enable proper cleaning. If the pulley systems or locking mechanisms
are broken, however (as they frequently are here), the animal can be
moved neither safely nor easily. Its cage is then left as is, full of
growing piles of food waste and excrement, until it becomes too
appalling to bear and a pressure hose is finally brought in to provide
at least a cosmetic solution.

Further, the animals are often confined into spaces that are too
small, leading to all kinds of psychological and behavioral problems.
Even those things that could be done cheaply and easily to improve the
wellbeing of these animals are not done. My friend recommended some
simple and inexpensive things that can be done to make an animal’s
enclosure more interesting and attractive: knotted ropes can be used
as swings, or wooden structures can be built for the critters to climb
on. In the absence of these, you can see a lot of what is termed
stereotypical behavior: captive animals that have no stimulation
perform repetitive movements to stimulate their brains and release
endorphins for a natural high. During our visit, needless to say, I
saw a great deal of such behavior.

As if all this were not bad enough, the zoo is so poorly equipped and
managed that if no one remembers to give the animals drinking water
(and don’t forget that we are in sub-Saharan Africa, where it gets
HOT!), the poor creatures will simply not get any, for there is no
device mounted in their cages that allows them to have independent
access to fresh, clean water at all times. As the keepers are poorly
paid, there is some resentment and not necessarily a pressing sense of
responsibility. Worst of all, there is no incentive to do well or go
the extra mile because there are no consequences even if the animal in
one’s charge dies – there is simply a collective shrug of shoulders.

An animal can get sick and not eat for days, or it may be visibly
completely dehydrated, yet no one will do anything. Occasionally, if
an animal is very valuable, a vet might be called in – this was the
case when the scimitar oryx was sick, because, as an endangered
species, it enjoys a special status in the zoo’s hierarchy.

Other animals are not so lucky. In one heartbreaking incident, one of
three surviving orphaned baby hyenas was growing very weak. When he
was half dead due to dehydration and lack of feeding, his only keeper
went on vacation and did not delegate the task of taking care of this
baby. As no one else took responsibility for the animal, the hyena
simply died. In another instance, there was a sickly female baboon
living with an aggressive male who would not let her eat. Tamara told
the keepers and management about it every day for a month and
encouraged them to separate the two baboons and rehabilitate the
female. Typically, no action was taken and the female baboon died.

When an ostrich died, Tamara asked permission to perform a necropsy,
an autopsy for an animal. With only a knife, mask and gloves at her
disposal, she examined the contents of the bird’s stomach only to find
bottle caps, straws, snack bags and a slew of other trash the bird had
ingested. Employees who had laughed at her Herculean efforts to pick
up the piles of garbage littering the ground each morning now saw the
evidence of their neglect with their own eyes, yet continued to shrug
helplessly, as if there were nothing they could do. In the face of
such indifference, and the frustration of making no headway
whatsoever, ultimately you harden your heart as best you can and give
up, Tamara explained.

Epilogue: After the predicted death of a female chimpanzee, Tamara was
so frustrated that she stopped volunteering at the zoo. Concerned, one
of the only keepers at the zoo who really cared about the animals
called her to ask about her absence. He encouraged her to return, and
shortly thereafter, Tamara joined forces with Cecile Bloch, a French
equestrian trainer who also became involved and committed to improve
the zoo. Together, they have moved their way up the management ladder
and have made their voices heard. Much progress has been made in
recent months: they received private donations of medicines from
veterinarians in France and were able to de-worm all the animals; they
wrote a working plan to improve and repair basics such as the water
basins and pulley systems; they have placed hammocks and hanging
buckets in the primate cages and are currently making recommendations
to improve animal diets at the zoo.

In a country where people have little money for food themselves it is
perhaps not unexpected that the care and feeding of animals should be
low on the scale of priorities, but witnessing the caged misery all
around me, I felt compelled to write about it, as
a captive wild animal is in a cage due to the will of man and is
therefore under his responsibility.

I am therefore all the more thankful to be able to write about the
inspiring leadership of the two women who have brought about concrete
improvements at the zoo. So many of us aspire to be forces of change
in the world; Tamara and Cecile truly are. For more details on their
work, visit Cecile’s blog at:
http://www.nundafoto.net/fr/forum/topic/720-chimpanzes-compagnie-maj-petit-lulu

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com