Queen of the Jungle Prepares to Leave

Like the elephant and the ant, the queen of the jungle knows when it’s time to move on.

So Lynne Doria is retiring this academic year. A banquet for her this weekend will honor her three decades with Moorpark College’s Exotic Animal Training and Management program, which has funneled some 500 students into jobs at wildlife parks, aquariums, zoos and movie studios.

In 1971, Doria became the program’s first graduate. That was before it boasted even a fence, no less a single animal. Now assistant director of the two-year program and its “teaching zoo,” she is also its hardiest creature, exceeding even Bob, the water buffalo, in years served.

At 61, Doria has wanted to retire for some time. She has three grandchildren to dote on. And her husband, television producer Bob Steinhauer, lives in San Diego; migrating might be just ducky for geese, but for six years, Doria has craved one home instead of two.

“I couldn’t quit,” she said. “There were these animals that I was caring for and I just couldn’t leave them.”

Slowly, she detached. She loaded up on administrative duties, leaving day-to-day work with the animals to others. Meanwhile, death took some of the wolves, the coyotes, the spider monkeys she had raised and trained. Her last animal was a badger--a burrowing mammal so testy that even Doria has a hard time rhapsodizing over it.

Otherwise, she has a soft spot for just about everything with fur or feathers--particularly all those animals in her zoo that were found shot, or maimed, or dumped on a roadside when they proved too troublesome for their owners.

In her office, she keeps a plaster paw print from her departed wolf, Katrina. On a stroll through the zoo, she points out the hyena’s eyes--”Have you ever seen anything so pretty?”--and pauses for cheery hellos to Precious the anaconda, Happy the alligator, Taj the tiger, Puppy the turkey vulture.

There was a time when Doria would regularly pack up her brood and hit “The Tonight Show.” On “Romper Room,” she was a weekly feature: “Look, it’s Miss Lynne! What interesting animal did you bring us today, Miss Lynne?”

Over the years she has done hundreds of shows at the college and elsewhere, demonstrating animal behaviors--they’re no longer called “tricks”--to raise awareness of endangered species, threatened habitat and the need for preservation.

And, for all her high-minded intent, some little boy sitting with his family would ask: “Why does the ape have a hairy butt?” pointing out an astonishing resemblance to his dad’s.

Doria never planned to do this kind of work. She was a wannabe actress, an emigre from the Midwest. But before she knew it, she became a mom, worked a series of ho-hum jobs to make ends meet, and, ominously, started taking stray cats into her Thousand Oaks home.

Before she knew it, she was a full-fledged EATM instructor and fascinating mammals would occasionally sink their marvelously adapted teeth into her arms.

“Yes, I’ve been bitten by a lion,” she says. “Just a puncture wound. Barely even knew it was there.”

Doria has a reputation as a no-nonsense administrator. Sometimes she calls first-year students not by their names but by their functions at the moment: “Daywatch! We need that Pepsi machine filled!”

That can be jarring to the romantics sometimes drawn to the program.

“They’re free spirits,” she says. “They want to run with the animals. They want to go to Africa. They want to be Jane Goodall.”

Doria will detach slowly from the program, cutting back to part-time before joining her husband in San Diego.

“I have no idea what I’ll do next,” she says. “Animals are just so much responsibility. I think I might want to work with something that doesn’t breathe.”

*

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.