Report Assails Zoo; Riordan Vows Overhaul

Conditions at the Los Angeles Zoo are so bad that animal health is often jeopardized and the facility may lose its accreditation, according to a report released Wednesday that mapped out a $50-million revitalization plan.

The report’s findings were quickly embraced as a mandate for dramatic action by Mayor Richard Riordan, City Council President John Ferraro, the zoo’s private support group and animal rights activists who have been instrumental in blowing the whistle on problems at the 220-acre zoo at Griffith Park.

“The beginning of a new zoo starts today,” Riordan and Ferraro said in a joint statement. They called the report a “blueprint that puts the animals first.”

The problems identified include unnatural habitats for some animals, overcrowded conditions for others (10 chimpanzees, for example, are kept in grounds suitable for only two), enclosures with drainage systems that are inadequate to provide sanitary conditions, other enclosures undermined by ground squirrels and areas infested by vermin and termites.

“By and large, there really are very few (animal-keeping) facilities at the L.A. Zoo that are adequate,” said Terry L. Maple, director of the Atlanta zoo, who compiled the report with zoo directors from Cincinnati and Seattle.

Losing accreditation, he said, would demoralize zoo personnel, jeopardize the facility’s ability to acquire and trade animals and knock the zoo out of the running for certain grants.

The report sparked calls for immediate action.

Ferraro said he will ask the City Council on Tuesday to set up a committee to oversee a $1-million emergency program to fix the most glaring animal welfare problems.

Additionally, Ferraro--in whose district the zoo is located--will urge city officials to implement a five-year, $50-million plan to modernize the zoo. He also called for a review of the possibility of stripping the Recreation and Parks Department of responsibility for running the zoo and turning control over to a nonprofit group.

In recent years, the handling of animals at the zoo has been controversial.

In 1992, animal rights activists picketed the zoo after an elephant named Hannibal died in a shipping cage.

More recently, activists such as Gretchen Wyler, president of the Ark Trust, have complained that some of the zoo’s primates are inhumanely kept in crowded concrete enclosures and that the penguin population has been decimated.

Wyler and Robert Flamm, a top official with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, met privately Wednesday with Riordan; Ferraro; Steven Soboroff, president of the city Recreation and Parks Commission; Susan Rice, president of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn., and other officials before the report was released.

“This is very exciting for us in the animal rights movement,” Wyler said.

Maple said that the zoo “is reaching the end of its life-span and the quality of the original design was not right in the first place.”

While the problems are generally not life-threatening for the animals, they must be provided with an acceptable quality of life, said Cincinnati zoo chief Ed Maruska.

The living conditions are so substandard that it will be difficult for the facility to pass a regular, five-year accreditation inspection by the American Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums due in the next few months, Maple warned. “Many of the animals here are living in difficult conditions,” he said.

Accreditation is “the seal of approval that says you operate by certain standards of excellence,” Maple explained.

The zoo directors who prepared the report refused to blame zoo director Mark Goldstein, even though it was Goldstein’s controversial plan to spend $23 million in bond funds to upgrade the zoo’s physical plant that helped set in motion the current critical review.

Goldstein had originally proposed that most of the $23 million be spent on improving visitor facilities, including the remodeling of the front entrance and the educational center. That plan was condemned by animal rights activists and zoo-keeping staff, who said the priority should be placed on improving animal housing facilities.

The feud over how the money should be spent finally prompted Ferraro and Riordan to step in last March and call for a team of experts to review the zoo facilities.

“It was not part of our charge to review (Goldstein’s) performance,” Maruska said. “I don’t know of any zoological leader in this country--including ourselves--who could have extricated this zoo from its problems,” Maple said.

Goldstein said he found the report a “positive step” for the zoo and welcomed the opportunity to work on implementing its findings.

Some city officials, however, privately suggested that Goldstein’s days at the zoo may be numbered.

Goldstein was hired in October, 1991, to replace Warren Thomas, an imperious leader who resigned after the zoo had been repeatedly cited by U.S. Department of Agriculture officials for unsanitary conditions and complaints about his handling of some city funds.

The USDA complaints from the late 1980s were often echoed in Wednesday’s report. Federal inspectors then had found inadequate food storage, sanitation and drainage problems, pest infestations and inadequate housing--the same problems cited in the new report.

The report by the “three wise men”--the phrase frequently used to describe the zoo panel--called for spending $1 million to deal with the most serious conditions at the zoo and $50 million to cope with the next tier of priorities.

Many of the suggestions were first identified in a master plan for the zoo released in January, 1992. They include spending $9.5 million on new habitats for gorillas and chimpanzees; $7 million to expand and improve the habitats for elephants, rhinos and hippos; $9 million to provide improved facilities for the zoo’s Asian primates, including orangutans, and for its koalas and marsupials; and $10.5 million to build new medical facilities for the animals. The master plan was never implemented.

The new plan envisions zoo supporters raising $27 million in private donations. “If Cincinnati can do it, so can Los Angeles,” said Maruska, whose own zoo depends heavily on philanthropy.

Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn. president Rice said her organization has only been able to raise less than $6 million in private donations.

A key to garnering increased private support hinges on having the zoo run by a nonprofit organization, instead of by the city, the authors of the report said.