Animal Escapism at the Zoo

Lionel, a 15-year-old, slightly arthritic male lion, ambles across his savanna-like exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo, headed for an open cardboard box. He burrows into the box and emerges with a prize -- a burlap bag of straw bedding soaked with the leftover food and urine of the zoo’s bongos, African antelopes which are the natural prey of lions.

With the bag in his teeth, Lionel trots around, breathing in its intoxicating scents. Then he drops the bag to the ground, rubs his head over it and rolls around in the dirt like an oversized house cat giddy on catnip.

Cookie, a 14-year-old female lion, sees an opportunity. She snatches the bag and darts behind a palm tree, pawing at her cache.

“She always wants to steal,” says zoo staffer Karin Merit, watching the two lions make sport with the cardboard box, the bag and each other.

That’s fine with Merit. When the animals cavort and play, she knows she’s done her job well.

For two decades, zoos around the world have dedicated themselves to saving species from extinction, providing better veterinary care and improving zoo habitats with state-of-the-art exhibits. But the assurance of long life, food and million-dollar shelters only aggravates a long-standing problem in zoo populations: boredom.

That has given rise to the zoo inventor, people such as Merit, who spend hours dreaming up ways to amuse, puzzle and challenge captive animals.

Great apes and bears at the Los Angeles Zoo fiddle with bamboo puzzles that dispense food. Primates explore their reflections in mirrors. River otters nose plastic balls filled with fish; tamarins and marmosets wrestle with toilet paper rolls stuffed with cereal and worms. Big cats swat at dangling balls of fur perfumed with wild scents.

“Whenever anyone molts, I get fur, feathers, snakeskins,” says Merit, who fashions the materials into animal playthings with the craftiness of Martha Stewart.

Figuring out ways to stimulate and engage the L.A. Zoo’s animals -- “behavior enrichment” in zoo parlance -- is the job of Merit, her small staff and a platoon of volunteers.

Live goldfish are a popular tool. After the zoo’s three sea lions figure out how to empty a five-gallon water bottle filled with fish, each proceeds differently. Bea sucks them up like a vacuum cleaner. Mona only chases them. Rocky, a 500-pound male, lets two or three flop around in his mouth before swallowing them.

“A large challenge is putting things out they don’t destroy in 60 seconds,” Merit says.

The zoo puts out whole pumpkins for rhinos and other large animals to kick around like soccer balls, or hollows them out so that small animals like meerkats can climb inside.

Staff members and volunteers make more than 100 frozen treats every week -- animal Popsicles variously filled with horse blood, mice, chicks and, for the zoo’s herbivores, a mixture of leaves and twigs known as browse.

On this particular morning, after Cookie the lioness tires of playing with the cardboard box, she gets a thick frozen disk of horse blood to occupy her for a while.

Relieved of the need to hunt for food or evade prey, zoo animals with little to do sometimes resort to excessive grooming or repetitive behavior, such as pacing. No animal is too big or small for some version of enrichment -- from spiders to elephants.

Merit says that hooved animals are the most difficult to occupy or amuse. “They just stand there,” she says. Happily, the zoo staff has discovered that one of the African antelopes, an eland, likes to play ball.

Mindful of overfeeding, zookeepers restrict snacks. The idea is to make the food more difficult to find or unwrap. For instance, “browse balls” are placed in hanging wire baskets that force giraffes to root around with their 18-inch-long tongues.

“We’re trying to get them to forage,” says Merit. “In the wild, they search all day for food. Here, it’s all served up.”

The introspective orangutans are given books and magazines donated to the zoo.

“They’ll actually sit there and turn the pages and look at the pictures,” says Megan Fox, an animal keeper who works with the great apes. She watches as Bruno, a shaggy male, holds a banana flower in one hand and a book in the other.

As with many other animals in the zoo, orangs love interacting with their trainers. At one point, the 420-pound Bruno comes over to the wire mesh that encloses his exhibit and presses his broad face against it.

“He wants his lips rubbed,” says Fox as Bruno juts out his lower lip and she strokes it. The ape grasps the mesh with his big fingers and Fox affectionately rubs them.

“It’s hard to find things that will keep them stimulated throughout the day,” she says. “We have enrichment volunteers scheduled five or six days a week.”

This enrichment business has become an increasingly important concept for zoos in the last 10 years. Once threatened with the loss of accreditation by the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn., the L.A. Zoo has had to focus in recent years on renovating its reputation and its aging, cramped facilities and dealing with issues like the genetic management of animals. But the zoo, like other facilities, still grapples with the phenomenon of listless, unchallenged animals.

“It’s probably one of the most crucial problems we face,” says Ed Maruska, interim zoo director. The concept of enrichment grew -- literally -- out of the zoo’s gorilla garden, where banana trees and other plants not readily available were started in 1987, part of a research project to increase gorilla foraging. Today the zoo has four gardens where special plantings provide treats and recreation.

Initially, enrichment involved little more than refurbishing an animal’s exhibit -- putting in plants and materials from their natural habitats. Over the years, it has come to encompass ways to encourage foraging behavior, mental stimulation, cognitive ability and socializing.

But recognizing that an animal is bored is a complicated issue. Lions naturally sleep a lot -- no surprise to owners of house cats -- and they pace when they want to eat.

“A visitor comes at 3 p.m. and says, ‘Oh, look at that poor animal. He’s unhappy cooped up,’ ” says Maruska. “In fact, he’s hungry.”

Animal behaviorist David Shepherdson doesn’t like the word “bored” to describe animal behavior. “The topic of how you assess animal welfare in any individual is a tough nut to crack,” says Shepherdson, conservation program scientist at the Oregon Zoo. “The consensus is, there’s no one way of measuring it.”

Polar bears, for example, which walk great distances in the wild, are known for faring poorly in zoos and exhibiting the classic behavior of a bored animal -- they pace back and forth.

But Shepherdson, who is studying polar bear hormone levels as a measure of stress, says maybe it’s the well-adjusted polar bears that pace -- like athletes running on treadmills when they can’t run outside.

“It could be the bears that are doing this are coping better than the bears who are not doing it,” he said.

Shepherdson believes zoos should adopt a more standardized approach to enrichment.

“You consider the animal’s behavior in the wild and compare their behavior in captivity,” he says. “If this is an animal that spends 80% of its time foraging in the undergrowth for insects, one of the goals may be to provide that kind of foraging opportunity. With an ape, your goal might be to challenge them cognitively.”

The L.A. Zoo’s rambunctious chimpanzees do a pretty good job of amusing themselves. Among them are a clever escape artist who quickly found the weak point in the canyon-like chimp exhibit when it opened in 1998, and a supposedly sterile male chimp who managed to impregnate several females four years ago.

But keepers work hard to provide more sanctioned diversions. One recent morning, the chimps walked out to find their exhibit strewn with treats and toys: persimmons and onions, stuffed pine cones, bright green bamboo cylinders, toilet paper rolls and flowering palm branches. Fragrant rose petals were scattered across the ground.

The chimps roamed noisily around the exhibit, picking up items as they went. One, a marvel of dexterity, clutched three persimmons, one in each hand and one in a foot.

Another chimp dragged a palm frond stuck with stuffed toilet paper rolls across the grassy exhibit.

Still another, looking like a yoga practitioner, stretched to reach a bamboo cylinder from its rocky perch.

A morning of enrichment activities can leave an animal’s exhibit area looking like a teenager’s messy bedroom.

“We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the environment look wild,” says Maruska, “and here come the keepers throwing in plastic balls, newspapers, phone books, those orange traffic cones. Our challenge is to use more natural-looking materials.”

Better exhibits -- offering more space and more features to explore -- are inherently more invigorating, as some of the apes discovered.

“The chimps immediately lost weight,” said Lora LaMarca, the zoo’s director of marketing.

Many activists who oppose keeping animals in zoos resign themselves to the exhibits and support efforts to enrich the animals’ lives.

“We owe them the psychological enrichment they deserve -- we put them there,” says Nicole Paquette, general counsel for the Animal Protection Institute, a national organization based in Sacramento.

Prominent Los Angeles activist Gretchen Wyler, who sits on a zoo animal welfare advisory committee, lobbied for the more sophisticated chimpanzee exhibit.

But she sees most behavior enrichment as superficial.

“It’s a nice thing, but it’s a minimalist thing,” she said. “You’re going to hide some food in some hats? It’s a little too precious for me. But I’m glad they do it.”

Wyler, founder of the Ark Trust, which recently merged into the Humane Society of the United States, contends the L.A. Zoo is breaking a longtime bond between Gita, a 44-year-old female Asian elephant, and Ruby, a 41-year-old female African elephant, by sending Ruby to the zoo in Knoxville, Tenn.

“Those two girls have been together since 1987,” Wyler says.

Female elephants are highly social and roam together in the wild.

Maruska points out that the zoo is planning a new multimillion-dollar exhibit for elephants with more enrichment features. And he defends transferring Ruby, saying she would join other African elephants in Knoxville and, having given birth herself, show younger breeding females how to nurture their offspring.

Besides, Maruska says, Gita and Ruby have had their share of friction.

“It’s not the perfect relationship,” he says.

Although the zoo director says he wants the same thing animal rights activists want -- “the humane treatment of animals” -- he believes the purpose of a zoo is not just as sanctuary.

“It’s urban man’s only contact with the world he once shared,” Maruska says. Conservation of species and education are also key. “I want to publish a list of species that owe their existence to zoos,” he says, and names a few: “California condor, black-footed ferret, Arabian oryx, peregrine falcon.”

Maruska, former director of the Cincinnati Zoo, was hired on a short-term basis after L.A. Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo was promoted by Mayor James K. Hahn to head the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks. He says bluntly that L.A.’s is not a world-class zoo.

“Does it have the potential to be a world-class zoo? Yes,” he says, pointing out that $100 million will be spent on zoo improvements over the next two years.

For now, enrichment at the zoo is a labor of love -- or enthusiasm.

It’s not done in any particularly scientific way. Notebooks in the administration office to record observations of animals with their toys and games are erratically kept by volunteers. Merit’s position is part-time -- even though she works more hours than she is paid. Maruska still needs to hire about five keepers.

“This continues to present us with challenges to make our animals more balanced,” Maruska said. “Doing something is wonderful. Is it enough? Probably not.”