Zoo Seeks New Homes for Animals : Shutdown: About 200 creatures are up for adoption because of budget cuts. An elderly pair of orangutans will be separated.

Major, a 1,200-pound polar bear, will lose his home this month. So will elderly orangutans Stanley and Betty, and a skinny Siberian tiger named Sasha. The 85-year-old Stone Zoo is closing because of state budget cuts.

“You can’t help (but) develop attachments to the animals,” said Mark Goldstein, the zoo’s director. “You think of them as individuals.”

The zoo in this Boston suburb was already running on a shoestring when its budget was slashed 30% because of the state’s financial problems. Officials decided to close the zoo Nov. 12 rather than keep the animals in shoddy conditions.

“There are things worse than no zoo, like a bad zoo,” Goldstein said.

About half the 200 or so animals will go to Franklin Park Zoo, the larger of the two facilities run by MetroParks Zoos. Others will be taken in by menageries around the country.

But some are just too old or too big for easy relocation.

“For some, it will take months to find them a good home,” Goldstein said, “but we won’t let them end up in private collections and we hope none will have to be euthanized.”

Large carnivores are expensive to feed and maintain, said John Linehan, curator of mammals for the MetroParks Zoos. Major, for example, eats about 14 pounds of meat and biscuits daily--when he’s on a diet.

Sasha has an enzyme problem that keeps her a little skinny. And, though lions and tigers are increasingly scarce in the wild, they are fairly abundant in U.S. zoos.

Orangutans Stanley, 31, and Betty, 30, resemble sad-eyed, red-haired Buddhas as they sit quietly in their separate glass enclosures. But they are more mischievous than tranquil.

“Betty steals tools and you have to trade them back,” Linehan said. “She gets a brush and starts scrubbing the walls, like we do. She won’t go through doors she wants you to go through. She demands a lot of attention.”

The two orangutans have been together 20 years and produced four offspring, but they’ll probably be separated when the zoo closes.

Stanley may go back to Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, his first home. Betty’s future is less clear, since she is old, fat and has an abdominal cyst that has left her unable to reproduce.

But don’t think their separation will leave either ape heartbroken, keepers said.

“Betty steals Stanley’s toys,” Linehan said. “Stanley is nice, except when he wants to have his way with Betty. They won’t miss each other.”

Wherever he ends up, Stanley will be “happy to have females around,” said Linehan. “He’s pretty feisty for his age.”

Goldstein hopes that Stone Zoo can be reopened someday. A bill in the Legislature would take the zoo out of state control and make it a public, nonprofit corporation similar to most other successful zoos nationwide.

But for now, the outlook isn’t bright for the zoo’s animals or its patrons.

Thelma Dennis, 69, has been a volunteer zoo tour guide for children for the past 11 years.

“Of course I’m awfully sad,” she said. “This is the real thing, or next to the real thing. Kids can’t get the same feeling for an animal on TV that they can seeing them here.”

“We’re trying to get kids off the streets and we’re taking away the zoos, the museums,” said Goldstein.

“You can be 75 years old and want to take a 3-year-old out for the day,” he added. “I challenge you to find something else you’d both enjoy.”