Manuel Mollinedo

In his previous jobs, Manuel A. Mollinedo talked mostly about sports. That’s when he ran park programs in Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin, Texas. But walk with him now around the Los Angeles Zoo, where he is director, and Mollinedo will tell you, in detail, about the birth-control regimen for giraffes or the diet of a spider monkey baby.

At the helm of the zoo since 1995, Mollinedo still talks about his job with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of a preschooler face to face with an elephant. The 54-year-old Los Feliz resident is a quick study, a onetime athletic director who has mastered the arcana of the zoo’s 1,200 animals. At the same time, his outsider status and gentle management style have enabled him to steady an institution that was listing toward chaos.

When Mollinedo took over, the Griffith Park landmark had become an embarrassment: Wild coyotes preyed upon flamingos, prairie dogs drowned in their holes and an elephant died in a preventable accident. Staff morale was in the tank, and the zoo risked the humiliation of losing its national accreditation.

To underscore its desire for improvement, the City Council cut the zoo loose from the Department of Recreation and Parks, where it had languished, and gave Mollinedo additional operating funds.

The result has been a remarkable turnaround for the zoo and plaudits to its director. Animal care has improved, notwithstanding last Wednesday’s hourlong romp through the zoo by Evelyn, a 300-pound gorilla. Zoo attendance and private fund-raising are up, and Mollinedo has made headway on an ambitious renovation plan, opening new habitats for the chimpanzees and orangutans since 1998.

All this leaves Mollinedo little time to stroll through the park. But when he can steal a few moments, look for him by the wart hogs. “They’re rather homely,” he concedes, “but they’re probably my favorites. I keep telling people, ‘Somebody has to love them.’ ”

With the zoo on firmer footing, the East Los Angeles native, who is married, is planning a new challenge. An avid skier and runner, Mollinedo leaves next month to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Mollinedo was interviewed at the zoo.

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Question: Some animal-rights groups reject the very idea of zoos, believing that animals should not be kept in cages and put on display. Obviously, you don’t agree. Why not?

Answer: I would love to see all these animals out in the wild . . . but when you’ve actually had the opportunity to see what’s happening with the wholesale destruction of rhinoceroses in Africa, I would be surprised if within the next 100 years [there will be] any rhinos out in the wild. If you want to preserve these animals, you’re going to have zoos partnering with people willing to set significant portions of property aside to maintain these animals. We have 31 California condors at the zoo. If we had the philosophy of leave those animals in the wild, they would now be extinct.

Q: How do zoos, in general, and the Los Angeles Zoo, in particular, compete with flashier entertainment options like amusement parks, television, video games and the like?

A: I don’t really see us as being a recreational venue. I see us as being an educational venue. I would hope that when people visit our zoo, it’s not to be entertained by the animals, but to learn more about the lives of these animals and the ecosystems they come from.

Q: The San Diego Zoo is the long shadow that casts itself over the zoo here. How do you define your mission, with San Diego just two hours away?

A: The major difference between the San Diego Zoo and the Los Angeles Zoo is really marketing and promotion. My marketing and promotion budget is $800,000 a year. The San Diego Zoo spends $5.9 million. San Diego spends over $1.5 million promoting itself in L.A. and Orange counties because these markets are very important to it. I don’t see us competing with San Diego, statewide or nationally. I see our institution competing with San Diego in L.A. County. If I can convince the residents of L.A. County that our zoo is just as good as the San Diego Zoo, I’ve got 11 million people here. San Diego doesn’t have that.

Q: How do you do that?

A: I’ve changed the focus of our educational programs. When I first got here, we were working primarily with Westside youngsters. We’re still working with that segment of the community, but I really attempted to expand our programs to reach into the inner city. We presently have over 400,000 school kids come through this zoo a year. . . . We’re taking our programs out to the schools and teaching children about conservation, about the animals that we have here, trying to develop a respect for the animals at the school level prior to them coming to the zoo so they can have a more meaningful experience. This last year, we visited probably about 80 schools.

Q: Cities of a certain size used to have an art museum, a concert hall and maybe a zoo. That isn’t always so anymore. Why has that changed?

A: You go to New York, people still comment about the Bronx Zoo. . . . It’s considered the zoological leader in the country. They have incredible exhibitry [and] the strongest conservation program in the nation. . . . St. Louis has an amazing zoo. . . . Cincinnati is another place. San Diego has really been defined because of the zoo. San Diego was able to build tourism based on its zoo. . . . Quality zoos still stand out. From an attendance perspective, nationally, more people visit zoos in one year than attend all the major professional sports venues. We’re talking professional football, professional basketball, baseball, all these venues. . . . I think the city of Los Angeles needs to realize what a resource it has here. . . . If we could establish a stronger reputation for the zoo, we could be very, very competitive with San Diego as far as international visitors.

Q: To do that, does the zoo need to keep building new exhibits?

A: I hate to compare us to amusement parks, but I guess I have to, because amusement parks like Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, you notice every year to year and a half, they’re opening up a new major ride--zoos are the same way. That’s why it’s very important for us to be able to build new exhibits. Opening the new chimpanzee exhibit [in 1998] really helped to reestablish our credibility in the community, and then having that followed a year and a half later by the new orangutan exhibit [the Red Ape Rain Forest, which opened in July], really sent the message that the Los Angeles Zoo is on the move.

Q: How are you funding these improvements?

A: We’re starting to receive more private funding. The majority of the money that we have right now has come to us through bonds. We’ve used Proposition 1A to build the chimp exhibit, the orangutan exhibit and we’re presently building a new veterinary health center. One of the major turning points for us was passage of Proposition CC two years ago. It was the first time that a Los Angeles Zoo bond went before the voters. As you know, you have to have a 66.6% vote to pass. If it didn’t pass, I thought it would be devastating for our reputation. I was shocked when it passed by 79.1%.

Q: There were plans for the Children’s Museum to move adjacent to the zoo. You didn’t want that to happen. Why?

A: I encouraged the Children’s Museum to come here. The problem is that they wanted to build in the zoo parking lot. Now, if you come out here on the weekend, and we have a 10,000-visitor day, that parking lot is totally filled. Parking is a major asset for the zoo. It’s free. If you put the Children’s Museum out there, in the long run it would have a damaging effect on our visitorship.

Q: What are your long-term goals?

A: I want to get to the point where we’re bringing in a significant amount of money from corporations and foundations, like the Bronx Zoo [which brings in $90 million annually], so I don’t have to rely as heavily on city funding. Councilman [John] Ferraro and Mayor [Richard] Riordan have been very supportive of the zoo, but, eventually, they’re not going to be here, and politicians, as a group, tend to be mercurial. . . . Once we [develop a stronger non-city funding base], it’s going to really help us establish ourselves as a major player here in Los Angeles so we can compete with opera, the philharmonic and all these other institutions. . . . The new gorilla exhibit will be a $7-million project. The Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association has already raised $5 million. We only need $2 million more to afford that project, and that will be the first major, privately funded project since I’ve been here. It’s going to be the third leg of the Great Ape Forest.

Q: What about nearer-term challenges?

A: I would like to see us increase our zoo membership. . . . We’re at 43,000 people; I would like to see that number dramatically increase, because zoo memberships fund many of our conservation programs. The city of Los Angeles provides me with about 50% of my operating funds. We’ve got about a $13-million budget: $6.5 million comes from a city subsidy, and $6.5 million comes from gate receipts, but that money goes to pay for the maintenance and operation of the zoo. I’ve got more flexibility [with membership money], because I can use that for conservation efforts. It would be difficult for our City Council to justify my spending $4,000 supporting the Visayan warty pig project in the Philippines.

Q: Conservation means activities in another place?

A: Well, some other place or here at the zoo. Like I said, we have 31 California condors here. They’re not on exhibit, but that’s our major conservation effort. I spend over $300,000 a year on that effort. Internationally, we’re involved with the golden lion tamarin release program, where we actually raise golden lion tamarins here at the zoo. We get their offspring, and we release them in the zoo so they can learn how to be wild animals. Once we feel comfortable with that, we send them down to Brazil, where they’re released in a preserve near Rio De Janeiro. So, they’re reintroduced into the wild again, [and] we’re helping to reestablish that population again.

Q: What do you enjoy most about this job?

A: The conservation side [is] something I didn’t realize that I would appreciate as much as I do. Right now, we’re trying to buy some mountain tapirs, which are extremely endangered. The Los Angeles Zoo has seven mountain tapirs. We’re the only zoo in the world that even has mountain tapirs. But our problem is that they’re very inbred, so I’m probably going to Colombia sometime next year to see if we can get some mountain tapirs. . . . The other thing that makes my job enjoyable is the look of wonderment on the faces of schoolkids when they see some of the magnificent animals that we have here. Sure, you can see exotic animals on television, but it’s nothing like seeing these animals face to face when they’re alive. *