Creature Comforts

Joanna, a 12-year-old chimpanzee, yawns and lies back on a thick stump of a fake log. She pulls her feet toward her chest, and because she is barely half a foot from her viewers--thick glass is the only barrier--everything about her is in close-up. Her hands are long, her fingers dark and leathery, her nails just as dark. Her teeth are spotless. She glances over at the people staring at her.

“If it bothered her, she would not be here,” says her keeper, Vicki Bingaman. Instead, she might be frolicking in the grass, tumbling over a rock, sitting in the misty shade or playing in her “penthouse.”

At the Los Angeles Zoo, the chimpanzee digs have gone from Dickensian to de rigueur natural.

After years of living quarters that consisted of a concrete slab and a moat and raised the ire of animal rights activists and other zoo officials, the 13 chimpanzees at the L.A. Zoo now have a state-of-the-art, $5-million, one-acre exhibit designed to evoke an area in Tanzania that is one of the chimpanzee’s natural habitats.

“Chimpanzees of Mahale Mountains,” which opens today, is not only the zoo’s first new exhibit in nine years but the inaugural step in the zoo’s ambitious master plan to rejuvenate itself after years of woeful conditions and sharp criticism.

“Those chimps deserve it. They’ve had totally horrendous conditions for so long,” said Jane Goodall, the famed conservationist and expert on chimpanzees in a phone conversation from her home in England. “They’ve got a state-of-the-world exhibit.”

The new chimp exhibit is an expanse of sloping grass with towering faux rock formations, rock overhangs with little waterfalls and mists. At one end of the exhibit, the chimps can play on the logs and use little twigs (they are provided with shrubbery) to dig into fake termite mounds filled with honey or mustard.

The exhibit is even on different levels for the human viewers.

“Every vantage point gives you a different perspective,” said zoo Director Manuel Mollinedo.

You can stand outside surveying the grassy area or walk under a roofed, open-sided shed where the only thing that separates you from the chimps is that thick wall of glass.

Behind the scenes, the changes have been equally dramatic. The 13 chimps have gone from sleeping in two appallingly small rooms to having an intricate multilevel array of four connecting rooms, a playroom and stairs for climbing.

As chimpanzee keeper Bingaman conducted a special afternoon tour this week, the playroom was already set up for the dinner hour. Kale, onions and cucumbers, pears and strawberries and hard-boiled eggs were strewn across the hay-covered floor. Unhusked cobs of corn were jabbed into openings in the wire-mesh wall, ready for grabbing.

But the piece de resistance of the off-exhibit complex is a rooftop 1,500-square-foot playground featuring a jungle gym of logs and fire hoses, swathed in an airy framework of steel mesh.

“Their stress level went down, they’re clean, they’re healthier,” said Bingaman.

Of course, it’s still a zoo--as one chimp, Gracie, found out when she scaled a sheer face of rock and essentially ended up outside the exhibit. (“She’s such a little thinker,” said an admiring Bingaman.) The zoo staffers got her back inside and temporarily installed a hot wire along the perimeter to discourage any more escapes.

Some past critics of the zoo are now unequivocally cheering the new exhibit.

“I’m against animals in captivity, but if they’ve got to be in captivity, they must think they’ve found paradise,” said Gretchen Wyler, head of the animal-rights group Ark Trust Inc.

Goodall, who viewed the new exhibit under construction and also observed the new sleeping and playing quarters, declares it all “lovely.”

“That bleak stone mountain” of prior years “was more suitable to goats than chimps,” she said. “The chimps want to be able to climb, have a social group and plenty of things to occupy their time and their minds.”

The chimpanzee habitat is the most spectacular change the Los Angeles Zoo has made since 1995, when the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. found the zoo so troubled it postponed renewing accreditation. An outside group of zoo officials criticized the exhibits as well as the organization of the zoo management. The zoo even fell prey to coyotes who broke in and killed several flamingos that year. By 1996, the zoo had gotten its full accreditation, installed a better perimeter fence and set out to refashion many of its exhibits.

Zoo observers credit Mollinedo with spearheading much of the change since he took over in 1995.

The chimp home is the first of three exhibits that will constitute the $15-million Great Ape Forest, a planned five-acre swath of ape exhibits. (Chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys. They have no tails.) The Red Ape Rainforest for orangutans is planned for spring 2000. Gorilla Forest is scheduled to be built by 2001.

But as critics and supporters alike admit, the greatest challenge for the city-run zoo is finding enough public and private funds to pull off its $300-million master plan. A 1992 city bond measure, Proposition A, gave the zoo $23 million. In November, voters will decide on another bond measure that includes $47 million for the zoo.

According to Susan Redfield, president of the zoo’s nonprofit fund-raising arm, the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn., the Great Ape Forest will be funded with $10 million of the Proposition A money and $5 million in private donations.

The $300 million of the entire master plan, whose next step calls for new facilities for the elephants, is daunting. Redfield says she believes bond funding and private fund-raising will total $100 million, enough to make the 110-acre zoo “outstanding.”

“We’re trying to tap into the philanthropic community of L.A. to show them the value of this zoo as an educational resource, as a conservation resource, and as a visitor destination,” she said. “Because the zoo had this bad reputation for not being able to get the job done, the support was really limited. . . . This exhibit will hopefully show the philanthropic community that this zoo means business.”