Please Don’t Feed the Animals : There’s No Place for Peanuts at the Los Angeles Zoo

The girl at the zoo’s concession stand was confused. She had bought a soft drink and the thought of having to drink it without the customary straw and plastic lid was disconcerting.

“You mean you don’t have any straws or tops?” she asked in disbelief.

Straws and plastic lids have not been available at the Los Angeles Zoo for at least two years and peanuts have been banned since 1974. Balloons also are not sold on the zoo grounds.

All of these innocent items can be deadly to the exotic creatures in the zoo’s exhibits.

Not far from the concession stand, a man in his 20s leaned over a concrete barrier to toss an ice-filled paper cup to a gorilla. The ape promptly devoured the cup to the gleeful cries of a crowd that had grown bored staring at the animal.

“That’s no problem, it just passes through” the digestive system, said Michael Crotty, curator of mammals at the zoo.

“The majority of things people throw in are not so harmful; it’s the volume and potential for a dangerous thing they can throw in,” he said.

In 1983, a small rubber ball was tossed into the tapir exhibit and swallowed by the hoglike mammal.

“We knew the animal was ailing, but we couldn’t pick it (the ball) up on a radiograph and it ultimately killed the animal,” Crotty said.

Coins, which can cause metal poisoning if ingested, are frequently tossed into exhibits and a number of zoos across the country have lost seals and sea lions who swallowed them. Although the sea lion exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo sparkles with coins, Crotty said no animals there have died from ingesting them.

All animals at the zoo are fed carefully formulated, balanced meals that are disrupted by people who throw bits of hamburger, hot dogs and ice cream to them.

“Sometimes they get large amounts of a food substance that they’re not used to handling,” Crotty said. “Sunday is the busiest day of the week. Often, if there’s a large crowd on Sunday, many animals have diarrhea Monday.”

Animals also are susceptible to diseases, particularly the primates, which include monkeys.

“Say you have a cold and sneezed on a hand that had a piece of food in it and you throw it to an animal. He may catch it,” Crotty said.

Another effect of throwing items into cages is the deviant behavior it produces in animals, he said. They begin begging, something they would not do in the wild, and that defeats one of the aims of the zoo--to display animals as they behave in their natural habitats.

Crotty said the zoo has considered putting up more signs to discourage people from throwing items into cages.

“Most of the time it’s a minor annoyance,” he said. “We’ve batted this around for years. Some suggest putting up fines, citing a statute in the Municipal Code, but we don’t want too many signs or the zoo won’t be enjoyable to visit.”

Beginning in November, the zoo will install some participatory graphics that will allow visitors to turn levers on instructional signs to learn about the animals inside.

Crotty said he hopes making the zoo less passive to visitors will discourage the throwing of objects to animals.