The Wild Bunch : A Visit With Seven Animal Experts at the L.A. Zoo

WE KNOW ALL ABOUT THE animals at the Los Angeles Zoo. But how much do we know about that species called homo sapiens , who take care of the zoo creatures? They love animals, of course, but that’s not the only requirement for the job. “The heart and soul and backbone of any zoo is its keeper force,” says zoo director Dr. Warren Thomas, explaining why he’s very picky in selecting keepers. Every two years, 800 to 1,200 applicants are pared down to about 20 who are likely to land jobs--when there’s an opening, which is rare. New keepers quickly discover much of their labor is janitorial--and backbreaking, if you draw an assignment in the hilly hooved-stock area and spend your days lugging hay bales and raking. Stress, paper work, bureaucracy and danger also lurk. For all this, a keeper won’t get rich: They make between $19,756 and $24,552. Senior keepers make $26,476, tops. Other zoos may pay more, but Thomas believes that the L.A. crew “is probably the best keeper force you’ll run into in any zoo.” Veterinarians, trainers, curators and many dedicated others also watch over the animals in the city zoo. Here are a few of them.

LARRY JOYNER set out to be a printer, not an elephant trainer. But when he couldn’t find work in his field some years back, he got a job sweeping up after the animals in a traveling circus. “I found I had a knack for training animals,” says Joyner, who was once married to a trapeze artist. Joyner was hired to straighten out the behavior problems of the three African and two Asian elephants he handles. These behemoths are considered among the zoo’s most dangerous because of their size and unpredictable nature. Despite his risky business, Joyner says he stopped having problems with his animals after he shed the macho attitude held by some trainers. “But I’ve seen elephants go after people,” he says. “They get spooked. The ones that hit you with their trunk, you don’t worry about. But the ones who pull you in and (fall) down on you, these you worry about.” If an elephant doesn’t obey him, Joyner whacks it mightily on its thick-skinned side with a bull hook. Good behavior is rewarded with an apple and a pat. “One trouble with these animals is that they don’t mix that well. Tara (a skittish 26-year-old African) has pushed three or four elephants in the moat.” One reason zoo elephants must be trained, Joyner says, is so keepers can groom them: For example, they must raise their huge feet when they need a pedicure.

MIKE DEE, one of two curators of mammals, is the zoo’s resident rhinoceros fanatic. Once a reptile freak, Dee initially hoped to work in the Reptile House when he was hired as a keeper in 1967. But after his career was interrupted by an Army stint in Vietnam, he returned to the zoo to find himself in charge of the Indian rhinos. Why the immediate attraction? “It was like a favorite pair of shoes,” he explains. “They look neat and they’re comfortable (and) they’re so different. Their armor-plated body conformation makes them look like prehistoric animals. They’re very friendly; you can touch them.” Dee became intensely involved in breeding rhinos; he cites the 1982 birth of his first Indian calf as a career high point. “I was almost in tears. I have it on video tape.” He supervises 40 keepers, the commissary (where animal meals are prepared) and storerooms. He is also responsible for buying and selling large mammals. Because of toughened laws to protect endangered species, few zoo animals are caught wild and purchased from dealers; most are born in captivity and traded among zoos. In his free time, Dee takes busman’s holidays: He recently returned from an African safari. “The greatest thing I went for, but didn’t hold any hope of seeing, were black rhinos,” he says excitedly. “Our first day in Amboseli (National Park in Kenya), we saw three, which is half (the park’s) population!” He can see eight black rhinos every day at the zoo, but, he says, “to see an animal in its natural habitat, in the terrain it actually lives in, that is real exciting.”

LAURIE MIDDLETON works in the zoo’s nursery, where she hand-raises baby animals whose parents either refuse or are unable to rear their offspring. (A zoo-born, first-time ape mother, for example, might not have learned parenting by observing other apes.) Middleton worked as a cocktail waitress at night and was a volunteer by day at the zoo when she started nine years ago. Taking care of babies, she says, is not the sought-after position one might think. “A lot of it is public relations work. And you have to like to work with kids (the human kind) in the children’s zoo. There’s a lot of paper work: Every animal is on a daily chart, its weight and temperature are taken, there are medication and feeding records. It’s meticulous work, and it can be very stressful.” Her most enjoyable charges are gorillas: “They’re more mellow than high-strung chimps and orangs.” The hardest part, she says, is “probably losing animals (to disease or injury) when they’re older” and out of her care or discovering that a hand-raised animal has been rejected and cannot be reintroduced into its group. But overall, it’s rewarding. “I can’t imagine myself not working with animals,” she says.

DON RICHARDSON might seem to have an easygoing assignment as chief keeper of koalas, but the marsupials’ cuddly demeanor is misleading. For example, Maxwell, one of eight koalas, is the only one Richardson handles, and it took two years of conditioning to accustom him to human contact. “We try to minimize handling them because they are such a high-stress animal,” he says. “They’re not really affectionate.” Richardson has always worked around animals: At 15 he got a job in a pet hospital; after graduating with a college degree in biology he worked in animal shelters. When he signed on with the zoo in 1981, he was stationed in the Eurasian section with the orangutans, tigers and tapirs. “That was very different (from koalas). They were mostly large, aggressive animals.” Koalas are small and enigmatic. “The thing about koalas is, we don’t know very much about them. They spend 19 hours a day resting or chewing leaves, so they don’t show many signs of problems. The worst part is that their diet (100% eucalyptus leaves) has no fat, so they have no reserves of it if they stop eating. They can die very fast.” Consequently, Richardson and his crew weigh each animal daily for clues to sickness. Constant worrying about his fragile charges is the down side of his occupation. “It is very stressful sometimes,” he says. At first, “I wasn’t sure whether I would like working with them. Now they’d have to take a crowbar to pry me away. They’re about like a second family to me.”

DR. BEN GONZALES,one of the zoo’s two full-time veterinarians, planned to be a marine biologist before he discovered the challenge of treating exotic animals. “Small-animal veterinarians wouldn’t touch this field; they like their animals to get well,” he says. “Here, it’s guesswork, and you don’t have (as high a) success rate. It takes more than just knowing medicine. You’ve got to know preventive medicine, nutrition, husbandry. . . .” And he must be knowledgeable about a wide range of species and diseases: elephants with arthritis, rhinos with disintegrating blood cells, koalas that mysteriously stop eating. “I try to keep up on everything possible, which is really hard. You just see many new problems that nobody’s ever seen.” Diagnosis is often the biggest obstacle. “One of the things about wild animals is that if (in its natural habitat) it feels sick and shows it, that (animal) is going to be the one the predator picks out,” Gonzales explains. “So they do not show disease until they’re so sick they are practically dead. (But) a real astute animal keeper will know when an animal is just a little off.” Does he get emotionally attached to his patients? He smiles. “I’m not in this field to be cuddly with animals. And they certainly don’t want to be cuddly with me.”

KATHY NEVINS’job as reptile keeper is decidedly one of the zoo’s most dangerous. “Elephants and reptiles are the areas where they can’t make you work. You have to volunteer,” she says. In the 5 1/2 years since she asked to work in the Reptile House, Nevins has been bitten only once, when a baby rattlesnake struck her finger during feeding. She was rushed to a hospital with tingling lips and tongue and blurred vision, but as is sometimes the case, she had a worse reaction to the anti-venom serum than she did to the snake bite. So why this attachment to cold-blooded types? “I like animals that are secretive and unusual. I was always fascinated by reptiles. As kids, my sister and I rated jungle movies by how many snakes were in them.” Nevins, a college zoology major who started as a docent and worked her way up to keeper, has been assigned to the marmoset colony, the aviary and “the hillside,” a steep-terrained area where goats, tule elk, dromedaries and other hooved stock are kept. Nevins recently returned from Australia, where she explored the outback. “(Until the trip) I never realized how much of a ‘herp’ (herpetologist) I really am. Nothing thrilled me like the lizards I saw. Did you know Australia has 56 species of termites? I guess I like weird animals.”

BIRDIE FOSTER joined the zoo staff 19 years ago, at a time when women were allowed to work only as “zoo attendants” in the children’s zoo and were paid much less than male keepers. Now the keeper staff is more than 50% women. For the past six years her “string” (the animals she is assigned to tend) has consisted mostly of exotic cats. Now she looks after two tigers, three caracals, one serval and two snow leopards and their three cubs. The 5-foot, 110-pound Foster stopped watching over the African lions when a neck injury made it impossible to lift a big gate in their exhibit. The tigers are her favorites. “I helped to raise them. Snow leopards are more aloof, (but) tigers are like puppy dogs. Their eyesight isn’t that good, and their paws are too big. They act klutzy, so they’re real endearing.” The snow leopard cubs’ mother is on loan to Los Angeles as part of a nationally monitored captive-breeding program among U.S. zoos. Foster says it can be difficult saying goodby to animals she’s become fond of. “There was a tiger, Narangi, who went back to Cincinnati. He used to greet me in the morning. The babies you don’t mind. But when you see an animal day in and day out, and it’s an animal that’s not trying to kill you. . . . I burst into tears.”