The Happy Prisoners

People who feel sorry for animals in zoos are wasting their sympathies; zoo-bound animals seldom regret their lost life in the wild. If properly housed, fed and entertained, they often lead happier, fuller lives than the humans who come to watch them.

This is the considered conclusion of Dr. H. Hediger in a book, published in London, called Wild Animals in Captivity (Butterworth; 35 shillings). Dr. Hediger is director of the Zoological Gardens at Basle, Switzerland, but he is no mere animal-keeper. He is an ecologist,*who appreciates the psychological as well as the material needs of animals.

Wild animals in "freedom," says Dr. Hediger, are not really free. They follow restricted routines punctuated by terror. Each has a "territory" or a social rank from which it cannot budge without a battle. Each has enemies, including man, from which it must constantly flee. Wild animals are often hungry, sexually frustrated, diseased. Few of them reach maturity. The lucky ones, thinks Dr. Hediger, land in well-run zoos.

A Safe Feeling. The first step toward making a captive animal happy, says Dr. Hediger, is to study its natural life in the wild. In many species the strongest psychological need is for a "home": a place of concealment and privacy where it can feel safe. The home must be surrounded by a "territory" which the animal can treat as its private property. In nature the animal may range over a large area, but it does so only to seek food, not for love of ranging. In a zoo, where food is provided, it is often content with only a small territory. It judges this area by its food-yield rather than by its acreage.

Sentimentalists often mourn for captive eagles, prevented by cruel man from soaring into the sky. But eagles, says Dr. Hediger, do not really like to fly long distances, and never do so except when forced by hunger. If grounded in a cage and fed regularly, they live to a ripe old age, producing regular crops of eaglets.

Other species are not so easy to please. Some demand deep privacy, or trees to climb, or earth to dig in, before they feel "at home." Some have peculiar demands. For instance, the slow loris (a primitive primate) marks out its territory, as many animals do, by the scent of its urine. So every time its cage is cleaned, the loris feels dispossessed. It "has to drink incredible quantities of water straight away," says Dr. Hediger, "and sprinkle the nice clean floor systematically just like a watering cart."

Higher Needs. "The animal, "Dr. Hediger says, "does not live by bread alone." Some species need entertainment, excitement or companions. But in filling these higher needs, the special psychology and social customs of each species must be considered.

When handled properly, many animals develop close relationships with their keeper, accepting him as a "friend" of their own species. They take refuge with him when danger threatens, or protect him against the attacks of other animals.

One detail about a human friend sometimes puzzles animals: whether he is male or female. Often males decide the keeper is female, and try to fight over him or mate with him. "A tame emu in the Basle zoo," says Dr. Hediger solemnly, "reguiarly tries to mate with its keeper. If it happens with a moose . . . the man concerned is in some danger."

Once the restricted animal has become adjusted, it hardly ever tries to escape. If it does jump a fence or burst out of a cage, it is nearly always fleeing from some frightening object such as a rival or an enemy, never toward "freedom."

Unwelcome Visitors. The escapes of wild animals, says Dr. Hediger, are much less troublesome to a zoo than the attempts of wild animals to break in. Zoos are besieged by foxes, polecats, weasels, squirrels, rats, mice, hawks and crows. They kill the inmates and steal their food.

But the worst intruders are humans. "No zoo in the world," says Dr. Hediger, "is safe from regrettable incidents." The human invaders stab the animals, hit them with hammers, poke out their eyes, cut pieces off them. They poison them deliberately. They feed them razor blades, fishhooks, broken glass.

A zoo "seems to act like a magnet" for all sorts of psychopaths. Some people like to play music to the animals. Religious maniacs toss tracts against sin into the snakes' terrarium. Of all the odd zoo visitors, says Dr. Hediger, "the most harmless ones, from the management's point of view, are the 'voyeurs' that specialize in . . . watching the sexual activities of the animals . . . Representatives of another group, related in some ways, are those in the habit of standing by the cages and . . . insulting spectators of this type."

The best days at the zoo, says Dr. Hediger, are those when the public is excluded. The animals, really happy then, have fewer digestive disturbances. Once the Basle zoo was closed because of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Freed from their two-legged tormentors, the inmates were never in better health.

*Expert on the relationships of living organisms with their environments and with one another.

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