Dear Mr Durrell,
You are the most evil man I know. All God’s creatures should have their freedom, and for you to lock them up is against His Will. Are you a man or a devil? You would be locked up in prison for the rest of your life if I had my way…
Whether you run a pig farm, a poultry farm, a mink farm, or a zoo, it is inevitable that occasionally your animals will damage themselves or become diseased, and that eventually they will die. In the case of death, however, the pig, mink, or poultry farmer is in a very different position from the person who owns a zoo. Someone who visits a pig farm and inquires where the white pig with the black ears has gone is told that it has been sent to market. The inquirer accepts this explanation with demur, as a sort of porcine kismet. This same person will go to a zoo, become attracted to some creature, visit it off and on for some time, and then, one day, will come and find it missing. On being told that it has died, he is immediately filled with the gravest suspicion. Was it being looked after properly? Was it having enough to eat? Was the vet called in? And so on. He continues in this vein, rather like a Scotland Yard official questioning a murder suspect. The more attractive the animal, of course, the more searching do the inquiries become. The visitor seems to be under the impression that, while pig, poultry, or mink die or are killed as a matter of course, wild creatures should be endowed with a sort of perpetual life, and only some gross inefficiency on your part has removed them to a happier hunting-ground. This makes life very difficult, because every zoo, no matter how well fed and cared for its animals are, has its dismal list of casualties.
In dealing with the diseases of wild animals one is venturing into a realm about which few people know anything, even qualified veterinary surgeons, so a lot of the time one is working, if not in the dark, in the twilight. Sometimes the creature contracts the disease in the zoo, and at other times it arrives with the disease already well-established, and it may be a particularly unpleasant tropical complaint. The case of Louie, our gibbon, was typical.
Louie was a large black gibbon with white hands, and she had been sent to us by a friend in Singapore. She had been the star attraction in a small RAF zoo, where—to judge by her dislike of humans, and men in particular—she must have received some pretty rough handling. We put her in a spacious cage in the mammal house and hoped that, by kind treatment, we would eventually gain her confidence. For a month all went well. Louie ate prodigiously, actually allowed us to stroke her hand through the wire, and would wake us very morning with her joyous war cries, a series of ringing whoops rising to a rapid crescendo and then tailing off into what sounded like a maniacal giggle.
One morning, Jeremy came to me and said that Louie was not well. We went down to have a look at her, and found her hunched up in the corner of her cage, looking thoroughly miserable, her long arms wrapped protectively round her body. She gazed at me with the most woebegone expression, while I wracked my brains to try and discover what was wrong with her. There seemed to be no signs of a cold, and her motions were normal, though I noticed her urine was very strong and had an unpleasant pungent smell. This indicated some internal disorder, and I decided to give her an antibiotic. We always use Terramycin, for this is made up in a thick, sweet, bright red mixture which, we have found, few animals can resist. Some monkeys would, if allowed, drink it by the gallon.
At first, Louie was clearly so poorly that she would not even come to try the medicine. At last, after considerable effort, we managed to attract her to the wire, and I tipped a teaspoonful of the mixture over one of her hands. Hands, of course, are of tremendous importance to such an agile, arboreal creature as a gibbon, and Louie was always very particular about keeping hers clean. To have a sticky pink substance poured over her fur was more than she could endure, and she set to work and licked it off, pausing after each lick to savour the taste. After she had cleaned up her hand to her satisfaction, I pushed another teaspoonful of Terramycin through the wire, and to my delight she drank it greedily.
I continued this treatment for three days, but it appeared to be having no effect, for Louie refused to eat and grew progressively weaker. On the fourth day I caught a glimpse of the inside of her mouth and saw that it was bright yellow. It seemed obvious that she had jaundice, and I was most surprised, for I did not know that apes or monkeys could contract this disease. On the fifth day Louie died quietly, and I sent her pathetic corpse away to have a post-mortem done, to make sure my diagnosis was correct. The result of the post-mortem was most interesting. Louie had indeed died of jaundice, but this had been caused by the fact that her liver was diseased by an infestation of filaria, a very unpleasant tropical sickness that can cause, among other things, blindness and elephantiasis. We realized, therefore, that, whatever we had tried to do, Louie had been doomed from the moment she arrived. It was typical that Louie, on arrival, had displayed no symptoms of disease, and had, indeed, appeared to be in quite good condition.
This is one of the great drawbacks of trying to doctor wild animals. A great many creatures cuddle their illnesses to themselves, as it were, and show no signs of anything being wrong until it is too late—or almost too late—to do anything effective. I have seen a small bird eat heavily just after dawn, sing lustily throughout the morning, and at three o’clock in the afternoon be dead, without having given the slightest sign that anything was amiss. Some animals, even when suffering from the most frightful internal complaints, look perfectly healthy, eat well, and display high spirits that delude you into believing they are flourishing. Then, one morning, one of them looks off colour for the first time, and before you can do anything sensible, it is dead. And, of course even when a creature is showing obvious symptoms of illness, you have to make up your mind as to the cause. A glance at any veterinary dictionary will show a choice of several hundred diseases, each of which has to be treated in a different manner. It is all extremely frustrating.
Generally, you have to experiment to find a cure. Sometimes these experiments pay off in a spectacular way. Take the case of the creeping paralysis, a terrible complaint that attacks principally the New World monkeys. At one time there was no remedy for this, and the disease was a scourge that could wipe out an entire monkey collection. The first symptoms are very slight: the animal appears to have a certain stiffness in its hips. Within a few days, however, the creature shows a marked disinclination to climb about, and sits in one spot. At this stage both hind limbs have become paralysed, but still retain a certain feeling. Gradually the paralysis spreads until the whole of the body is affected. At one time, when the disease reached this stage, the only thing to do was to destroy the animal.
We have had several cases of this paralysis, and lost some beautiful and valuable monkeys as a result. I had tried everything I could think of to effect a cure. We massaged them, we changed their diet, we gave them vitamin injections, but all to no purpose. It worried me that I could not find a cure for this unpleasant disease, since watching a monkey slowly becoming more paralysed each day is not a pretty sight. I happened to mention this to a veterinary surgeon friend, and said that I was convinced the cause of the disease was dietary, but that I had tried everything I could think of without result. After giving the matter some thought, my friend suggested that the monkeys might be suffering from a phosphorus deficiency in their diet, or rather that, although, the phosphorus was present, their bodies were unable, for some reason, to assimilate it. Injections of D3 were the answer to this, if it was the trouble. So the next monkey that displayed the first signs of the paralysis was hauled unceremoniously out of its cage (protesting loudly at the indignity) and given an injection of D3 .
I watched the monkey carefully for a week, and, to my delight, it showed distinct evidence of improvement. At the end of the week it was given another injection, and within a fortnight it was completely cured. I then turned my attention to a beautiful red West African patas monkey, who had had the paralysis for some considerable time. This poor creature had become completely immobile, so that we had to lift up her head when she fed. I decided that if D3 worked with her it would prove beyond all doubt that this was the cure. I doubled the normal dose and injected the patas; three days later I gave her another massive dose. Within a week she could lift her head to eat, and within a month was completely cured. This was a really spectacular cure, and convinced me that D3 was the answer to the paralysis. When a monkey now starts to shuffle, we no longer have that sinking feeling, knowing that it is the first step towards death; we simply inject them, and within a short time they are fit and well again.
Another injection that we use a lot with conspicuous success is vitamin B12 . This acts as a general pick-me-up and, more valuable still, as a stimulant to the appetite. If any animal looks a bit off colour, or starts to lack interest in its food, a shot of B12 soon pulls it round. I had used this product only on mammals and birds, never on reptiles. Reptiles are so differently constructed from birds and mammals that one has to be a bit circumspect in the remedies one employs for them, as what may suit a squirrel or a monkey might well kill a snake or a tortoise. However, there was in the reptile house a young boa constrictor which we had obtained from a dealer some six months previously. From the day it arrived it had shown remarkable tameness, but what worried me was that it steadfastly declined to eat. So, once a week, we had to haul the boa out of its cage, force open its mouth, and push dead rats or mice down its throat, a process which he did not care for but which he accepted with his usual meekness.
Force-feeding a snake like this is always a risky business, for, however carefully you do it, there is always the chance that you might damage the delicate membranes in the mouth, and thus set up an infection which would quickly turn to mouth canker, a disease to which snakes are very prone, and which is difficult to cure. So, with a certain amount of trepidation, I decided to give the boa a shot of B12 and see what happened. I injected halfway down his body, in the thick, muscular layer that covers the backbone. He did not appear even to notice it, lying quietly coiled round my hand. I put him back into his cage and left him. Later on that day he did not seem to be any the worse for his experience, and I suggested to Shep that he put some food in the cage that night. Shep placed two rats inside, and in the morning reported to me delightedly that the boa not only had eaten the rats but had actually struck at his hand when he had opened the cage. From that moment on, the boa never looked back. As it had obviously done only good to the snake, I experimented with B12 on other reptiles. Lizards and tortoises I found benefited greatly from periodic shots, especially in the colder weather, and on several occasions the reptiles concerned would certainly have died but for the injections.
Wild animals, of course, make the worst possible patients in the world. Any nurse who thinks her lot is a hard one, handling human beings, should try her hand at a bit of wild-animal nursing. They are rarely grateful for your ministrations, but you do not expect that. What you do hope for (and never, or hardly ever, receive) is a little cooperation in the matter of taking medicines, keeping on bandages, and so forth. After the first few hundred bitter experiences you reconcile yourself to the fact that every administration of a medicine is a sort of all-in wrestling match, in which you are likely to apply more of the healing balm to your own external anatomy than to the interior of your patient. You soon give up all hope of keeping a wound covered, for nothing short of encasing your patient entirely in plaster of Paris is going to prevent it from removing the dressings within thirty seconds of their application. Monkeys are, of course, some of the worst patients. To begin with, they have, as it were, four hands with which to fight you off, or remove bandages. They are very intelligent and high-strung, on the whole, and look upon any medical treatment as a form of refined torture, even when you know it is completely painless. Being high-strung means that they are apt to behave rather like hypochondriacs, and quite simple and curable disease may kill them because they just work themselves into a state of acute melancholy and fade away. You have to develop a gay, hearty bedside manner when dealing with a mournful monkey which thinks he is no longer for this world.
Among the apes, with their far superior intelligence, you are on less shaky ground, and can even expect some sort of cooperation occasionally. During the first two years of the zoo’s existence we had both the chimps, Chumley and Lulu, down with sickness. Both cases were different, and both were interesting.
One morning I was informed that Lulu’s ear was sticking out at a peculiar angle, but that, apart from this, she looked all right. Now Lulu’s ears stuck out at the best of times, so I felt it must be something out of the ordinary for it to be so noticeable. I went and had a look at her and found her squatting on the floor of the cage, munching an apple with every sign of appetite, while she gazed at the world, her sad, wrinkled face screwed up in intense concentration. She was carefully chewing the flesh of the apple, sucking at it noisily, and then, when it was devoid of juice, spitting it into her hand daintily, placing it on her knee, and gazing at it with the air of an ancient scientist who has, when he is too old to appreciate it, discovered the elixir of life. I called to her and she came over to the wire, uttering little breathless grunts of greeting. Sure enough, her ear looked most peculiar, sticking out at right angles to her head. I tried to coax her to turn round so that I could see the back of the ear, but she was too intent in putting her fingers through the wire and trying to pull the buttons off my coat.
There was nothing to do but get her out, and this was a complicated procedure, for Chumley became jealous if Lulu went out of the cage without him. However, I did not feel like having Chumley as my partner during a medical examination. So, after some bribery, I managed to lure him into their bedroom and lock him in, much to his vocal indignation. Then I went into the outer cage, where Lulu immediately came and sat on my lap and put her arms round me. She was an immensely affectionate ape, and had the most endearing character. I gave her a lump of sugar to keep her happy, and examined her ear. To my horror, I found that behind the ear on the mastoid bone there was an immense swelling, the size of half an orange, and the skin was discoloured a deep purplish black. The reason this had not been noticed in the early stages was that Lulu had very thick hair on her head, and particularly behind her ears, so that, until the swelling became so large that it pushed the ear out of position, nothing was noticeable. Also, Lulu had displayed no signs of distress, which was amazing when one considered the size of the lump. She allowed me gently to explore the exact extent of the swelling, without doing anything more than carefully and politely removing my fingers if their pressure became too painful. I decided, after investigation, that I would have to lance it, as it was obviously full of matter, so I picked Lulu up in my arms and carried her into the house, where I put her down on the sofa and gave her a banana to keep her occupied until I had everything ready.
Up till now, the chimps had been allowed in the house only on very special occasions, and Lulu was, therefore, charmed with the idea that she was getting an extra treat without Chumley’s knowledge. She sat on the sofa, her mouth full of banana, giving a regal handshake and a muffled hoot of greeting to whoever came into the room, rather as though she owned the place and you were attending one of her ‘at homes’. Presently, when everything was ready, I sat down beside her on the sofa and gently cut away the long hairs behind the ear that was affected. When it was fully exposed, the swelling looked even worse than before, a rich plum colour, and the skin had a leathery appearance. I carefully swabbed the whole area with disinfected warm water, searching to see if I could find a head or an opening to the swelling, for I was now convinced that it was a boil or ulcer that had become infected, but I could find no opening at all. Meanwhile, Lulu, having thoroughly scrutinized all the medical paraphernalia, had devoted her time to consuming another banana. I took a hypodermic needle and gently pricked the discoloured skin all over the swelling without causing her to deviate from the paths of gluttony, so it was obvious that the whole of the discoloured area was dead skin.
I was now faced with something of a problem. Although I felt fairly sure that I cold make an incision across the dead skin, and thus let out the pus, without causing Lulu any pain, I was not absolutely certain about it. She was, as I have remarked, of a lovable and charming disposition, but she was also a large, well-built ape, with a fine set of teeth, and I had no desire to enter into a trial of strength with her. The thing to do was to keep her mind occupied elsewhere while I tackled the job, for Lulu, like most chimps, was incapable of thinking of more than one thing at a time. I enlisted the aid of my mother and Jacquie, to whom I handed a large tin of chocolate cookies, with instructions that they were to feed them to Lulu at intervals throughout the ensuing operation. I had no fears for their safety, as I knew that if Lulu was provoked into biting anyone it would be me. Uttering a brief prayer, I sterilized a scalpel, prepared cottonwool swabs, disinfected my hands, and went to work. I drew the scalpel blade across the swelling, but to my dismay I found that the skin was as tough as shoe-leather, and the blade merely skidded off. I tried a second time, using greater pressure, but with the same result. Mother and Jacquie kept up a nervous barrage of chocolate cookies, each of which was greeted with delighted and slightly sticky grunts from Lulu.
“Can’t you hurry up?” inquired Jacquie. “These won’t last forever.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said, irascibly, “and a nurse doesn’t tell a doctor to hurry up in the middle of an operation.”
“I think I’ve got some chocolates in my room, dear,” said my mother helpfully. “Shall I fetch them?”
“Yes, I should, just in case.”
While Mother went off to fetch the chocolates, I decided that the only way to break into the swelling was to jab the point of the scalpel in and then drag it downwards, and this I did. It was successful; a stream of thick putrid matter gushed out from the incision, covering both me and the sofa. The smell from it was ghastly, and Jacquie and Mother retreated across the room hastily. Lulu sat there, quite unpeturbed, eating chocolate cookies. Endeavouring not to breathe more than was necessary, I put pressure on the swelling, and eventually, when it was empty, I must have relieved it of about half a cupful of putrefying blood and pus. With a pair of scissors I carefully clipped away the dead skin and disinfected the raw area that was left. It was useless trying to put a dressing on, for I knew that Lulu would remove it as soon as she was put back in her cage.
When I had cleaned it to my satisfaction, I picked Lulu up in my arms and carried her back to her cage. Here she greeted Chumley with true wifely devotion, but Chumley was deeply suspicious. He examined her ear carefully, but decided that it was of no interest. Then, during one of Lulu’s hoots of pleasure, he leaned forward and smelled her breath. Obviously she had been eating chocolate, so Lulu, instead of receiving a husbandly embrace, got a swift clout over the back of the head. In the end, I had to go and fetch the rest of the cookies to placate Chumley. Lulu’s ear healed up, and within six months you had to look closely to see the scar.
About a year later Chumley decided that it was his turn to fall ill, and of course he did it—as he did all things—in the grand manner. Chumley, I was told, had toothache. This rather surprised me, as he had lost his baby teeth and acquired his adult ones not long before, and I thought it was a bit soon for any of them to have decayed. Still, there he was, squatting forlornly in the cage, clasping his jaw and ear with his hand and looking thoroughly miserable. He was obviously in pain, but I was not sure whether it was his ear or his jaw that was the cause of it. The pain must have been considerable, for he would not let me take his hand away to examine the side of his face, and when I persisted in trying he became so upset that it was clear I was doing more harm than good, so I had to give up. I stood for a long time by the cage, trying to deduce from his actions what was the matter with him. He kept lying down, with the bad side of his head cuddled by his hand, and whimpering gently to himself; once, when he had climbed up the wire to relieve himself, he lowered himself to the ground again rather awkwardly, and as his feet thumped on to the floor of the cage he screamed, as though the jar had caused him considerable pain. He refused all food, and, what was worse, he refused all liquids as well, so I could not give him antibiotics. We had to remove Lulu, as, instead of showing wifely concern, she bounded round the cage, occasionally bumping into Chumley, or leaping onto him and making him cry out with pain.
I became so worried about his condition by the afternoon that I called into consultation a local veterinary surgeon and our local doctor. The latter, I think, was somewhat surprised, that he should be asked to take a chimpanzee onto his panel, but he agreed. It was plain that Chumley’s jaw and ear would have to be examined carefully, and I knew that in his present state he would not allow that, so it was agreed that we would have to anaesthetize him. This is what had to be done, but how to do it was another matter. Eventually, it was decided that I should try to give Chumley an injection of a tranquilizer which would, we hoped, have him in an agreeable frame of mind by the evening to accept an anaesthetic. The problem was whether Chumley was going to let me give him the injection. He was lying huddled up in his bed of straw, his back towards me, and I could see he was in great pain, for he never even looked round to see who had opened the door of his cage. I talked to him, in my best bedside manner, for a quarter of an hour or so, and at the end of that time he was allowing me to stroke his back and legs. This was a great advance, for up till now he had not let me come within stroking distance. Then, plucking up my courage, and still talking feverishly, I picked up the hypodermic and swiftly slipped the needle into the flesh of his thigh. To my relief, he gave no sign of having noticed it. As gently and as slowly as I could, I pressed the plunger and injected the tranquilizer. He must have felt this, for he gave a tiny, rather plaintive hoot, but he was too apathetic to worry about it. Still talking cheerful nonsense, I closed the door of his bedroom and left the drug to take effect.
That evening Dr Taylor and Mr Blampied, the veterinary, arrived, and I reported that the tranquilizer had taken effect: Chumley was in a semi-doped condition, but even so, he would not let me examine his ear. So we repaired to his boudoir, outside of which I had rigged up some strong lights and a trestle-table on which to lay our patient. Dr Taylor poured ether onto a mask, and I opened Chumley’s bedroom door, leaned in, and placed the mask gently over his face. He made one or two half-hearted attempts to push it away with his hand, but the ether combined with the tranquilizer was too much for him, and he slipped into unconsciousness rapidly. As soon as he was completely under, we hauled him out of the cage and laid him on the trestle-table, still keeping the mask over his face. Then the experts went to work. First his ear was examined, and found to be perfectly healthy; just for good measure, we examined his other ear as well, and that, too, was all right. We then opened his mouth and carefully checked his teeth: they were an array of perfect, glistening white dentures without a speck of decay on any of them. We examined his cheeks, his jaw, and the whole of his head, and could not find a single thing wrong. We looked at his neck and shoulders, with the same result. As far as we could ascertain, there was nothing the matter with Chumley whatsoever, and yet something had been causing him considerable pain. Dr Taylor and Mr Blampied departed, much mystified, and I carried Chumley into the house, wrapped in a blanket, and put him on a camp-bed in front of the drawing-room fire. Then Jacquie brought more blankets, which we piled on top of him, and we sat down to wait for the anaesthetic to wear off.
Lying there, his eyes closed, breathing out ether fumes stertorously, he looked like a slightly satanic cherub who, tired out after a day’s mischief-making, was taking a well-earned rest. The amount of ether he was expelling from his lungs made the whole room reek, so that we were forced to open a window. It was about half an hour before he began to sigh deeply and twitch, as a preliminary to regaining consciousness, and I went over and sat by the bedside with a cup of water ready, since I knew from experience the dreadful thirst that assails one on coming out from under an anaesthetic. In a few minutes Chumley opened his eyes, and as soon as he saw me he gave a feeble hoot of greeting and held out his hand, in spite of the fact that he was still half asleep. I held up his head and put the cup to his lips and he sucked at the water greedily before the ether overcame him again and he sank back into sleep. I decided that an ordinary cup was too unwieldy to give him drinks, as a considerable quantity of liquid was spilled. I managed, by ringing up my friends, to procure an invalid’s cup, one of those articles that resemble deformed teapots, and the next time Chumley woke up this proved a great success, as he could suck water out of the spout without having to sit up.
Although he recognized us, he was still in a very drugged and stupid state, and so I decided that I would spend the night sleeping on the sofa near him, in case he awakened and wanted anything. Having given him another drink, I made up my bed on the sofa, turned out the light, and dozed off. About two o’clock in the morning I was awakened by a crash in the far corner of the room. I hastily put on the light to find that Chumley was awake and wandering round the room, like a drunken man, barging into all the furniture. As soon as the light came on and he saw me, he uttered a scream of joy, staggered across the room, and insisted on embracing and kissing me before gulping down a vast drink of water. I then helped him back on to his bed and covered him with his blankets, and he slept peacefully until daylight.
He spent the day lying quietly on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. He ate a few grapes and drank great quantities of glucose and water, which was encouraging. The most encouraging thing, however, was that he no longer held the side of his face and did not appear to be suffering any pain. In some extraordinary way we seemed to have cured him without doing anything. When Dr Taylor telephoned later that day to find out how Chumley was faring I explained this to him, and he was as puzzled as I. Then, later on, he rang up to say that he had thought of a possible explanation: Chumley may have been suffering from a slipped disc. This could have caused intense pain in the nerves of jaw and ear, without there being anything external to show what caused it. When we had Chumley limp and relaxed under the anaesthetic we pulled his head around quite a lot during our examination, and probably pushed the disc back into place, without realizing it. Mr Blampied agreed with this diagnosis. We had no proof, of course, but certainly Chumley was completely cured, and there was no recurrence of the pain. He had naturally lost a lot of weight during his illness, and so for two or three weeks he was kept in a specially heated cage and fed on every delicacy. Within a very short time he had put on weight and was his old self, so that anyone who went near his cage was showered with handfuls of sawdust. This, I presume, was Chumley’s way of thanking us.
Sometimes animals injure themselves in the most ridiculous way imaginable. Hawks and pheasants, for example, are the most hysterical of birds. If anything unusual happens they get into a terrible state, fly straight up, like rockets, and crash into the roof of their cage, either breaking their necks or neatly scalping themselves. But there are other birds equally stupid. Take the case of Samuel.
Samuel is a South American seriema. Seriemas are not unlike African secretary birds. About the size of a half-grown turkey, they have long, strong legs, and a ridiculous little tuft of feathers perched on top of their beaks. In the wild state seriemas do not fly a great deal, spending most of their time striding about the grasslands in search of snakes, mice, frogs, and other delicacies. I had purchased Samuel from an Indian in northern Argentina, and as he had been hand reared he was, of course, perfectly (and sometimes embarrassingly) tame. When I finally shipped him back to Jersey with the rest of the animals, we took him out of his small travelling crate and released him in a nice, spacious aviary. Samuel was delighted, and to show us his gratitude the first thing he did was fly up onto the perch, fall off it, and break his left leg. There are times when animals do such idiotic things that you are left bereft of words.
Fortunately for Samuel, it was a nice clean break, halfway down what would be the shin in a human being. We made a good job of splinting it, covered the splint with plaster of Paris bandage, and, when it was dry, put him in a small cage so that he could not move around too much. The following day his foot was slightly swollen, so I gave him a penicillin injection—to which he took great exception—and his foot returned to normal size as a result. When we eventually took off the splint we found the bones had knitted perfectly, and today, as he strides importantly around his aviary, you have to look very closely to see which leg it was he broke. Knowing Samuel for the imbecile he is, I would not be surprised if he repeated the performance at some time in the future—probably on a day when I am up to my eyes in other work.
During the course of your Florence Nightingale work you become quite used to being bitten, scratched, kicked, and bruised by your patients, and on many occasions, having performed first aid on them, you have to perform it on yourself. Nor is it always the bigger creatures that are the most dangerous to deal with. A squirrel or a pouched rat can inflict almost as much damage as a flock of Bengal tigers when they put their minds to it. While anointing a fluffy, gooey-eyed bushbaby once for a slight skin infection on the tail, I was bitten so severely in the thumb it went septic, and I had to have it bandaged for ten days. The bushbaby was cured in forty-eight hours.
Human doctors are covered by the Hippocratic Oath. The wild animal doctor employs a variety of oaths, all rich and colourful, but they would, I feel, be frowned upon by the British Medical Council.
6
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Dear Mr Durrell,
I am seven years old and I have just had a baby tortoise…
You can tell if an animal is happy in captivity in a number of ways. Principally, you can tell by its condition and appetite, for a creature which has glossy fur or feathering, and eats well to boot, is obviously not pining. The final test that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the animal has accepted its cage as ‘home’ is when it breeds.
At one time, if an animal did not live very long in captivity, or did not breed, the zoos seemed to be under the impression that there was something wrong with it, rather than with their methods of keeping it. So-and-so was ‘impossible’ to keep in captivity, they would say, and, even if it did manage to survive for a while, it was ‘impossible’ to breed. These sweeping statements were delivered in a wounded tone of voice, as if the wretched creature had entered into some awful conspiracy against you, refusing to live or mate. At one time there was a huge list of animals that, it was said, were impossible to keep or breed in confinement; this list included such things as the great apes, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and so on. Gradually, over the years, one or two more agile brains entered the zoo world, and to everyone’s surprise and chagrin it was discovered that the deaths and lack of babies were due not to stubborness on the part of the creatures but to lack of knowledge and experiment on the part of the people who kept them. I am convinced there are precious few species of animals which you cannot successfully maintain and breed, once you have found the knack. And by knack I mean once you have discovered the right type of caging, the best-liked food, and above all, a suitable mate. On the face of it, this seems simple enough, but it may take several years of experiment before you acquire them all.
Marriages in zoos are, of course, arranged, as they used to be by eighteenth-century mamas. But the eighteenth-century mama had one advantage over the zoo: having married off her daughter, there was an end of it. In a zoo you are never quite sure, since any number of things might happen. Before you can even lead your creatures to the altar, so to speak, it is quite possible that either the male or the female might take an instant dislike to the mate selected, and so, if you are not careful, the bride or groom may turn into a corpse long before the honeymoon has started. A zoo matchmaker has a great number of matters to consider, and a great number of risks to take, before he can sit back with a sigh of relief and feel the marriage is an accomplished fact. Let us take the marriage of Charles as a fairly typical one.
Charles is—rather unzoologically—what is known as a Rock ape from Gibraltar. He is, of course, not an ape at all, but a macaque, one of a large group of monkeys found in the Far East. Their presence in North Africa is puzzling, but obviously they have been imported to the Rock of Gibraltar, and have thus gained the doubtful distinction of being the only European monkey. We were offered Charles when the troupe on the Rock underwent its periodical thinning, and we were very pleased to have him. He was brought over from Gibraltar in style on one of Her Majesty’s ships, and we duly took possession of him. He was about two feet six inches high when squatting on his haunches, and was clad in an immensely long, thick, gingery brown coat. His walk was very dog-like, but with a distinct swagger to it, as befits a member of the famous Rock garrison. He had bright, intelligent brown eyes, and a curious pale pinkish face, thickly covered with freckles. He was undoubtedly ugly, but with an ugliness that was peculiarly appealing. Curiously enough, although he was a powerful monkey, he was excessively timid, and an attempt to keep him with a mixed group of other primates failed, for they bullied him unmercifully. So Charles was moved to a cage of his own, and a carefully worded letter was dispatched to the governor of Gibraltar, explaining in heart-rending terms Charles’ solitary confinement and hinting that he would be more than delighted if a female Rock ape should be forthcoming. In due course we received a signal to say that Charles’ condition of celibacy had been reviewed and it had been decided that, as a special concession, a female Rock ape, named Sue, was going to be sent to us. Thus another of Her Majesty’s ships was pressed into service, and Sue arrived.
By this time, of course, Charles had settled down well in his new cage, and had come to look upon it as his own territory, so we had no idea how he would treat the introduction of a new Rock ape—even a female one—into his bachelor apartments. We carried Sue in her travelling crate and put it on the ground outside Charles’ cage, so that they could see each other. Sue became very excited when she saw him, and chattered away loudly, whereas Charles, after the first astonished glance, sat down and stared at her with an expression of such loathing and contempt on his freckled face that our hearts sank. However, we had to take the plunge, and Sue was let into the cage. She sprang out of her crate with great alacrity, and set off to explore the new cage. Charles, who had been sitting up in the branches disassociating himself from the whole procedure, decided the time had come to assert himself. He leapt down to the ground and sprang on Sue before she realized what was happening and could take evasive action. Within a second she had received a sharp nip on the shoulder, had her hair pulled and her ears boxed, and was sent tumbling into a corner of the cage. Charles was back on his branch, looking around with a self-satisfied air, uttering little grunts to himself.
We fetched two big bowls of fruit and put them into the cage, whereupon Charles came down and started to pick them over with the air of a gourmet, while Sue sat, watching him hungrily. Eventually the sight of the grape juice trickling down Charles’ chin was too much for her, and she crept forward timidly, leaned towards the bowl, and took a grape, which she hastily crammed into her mouth, in case Charles went for her. He completely ignored her, however, after one quick glance from under his eyebrows, and, gaining courage, she again leaned forward and grabbed a whole handful of grapes. Within a few minutes they were both feeding happily out of the same dish, and we sighed with relief. An hour later, when I passed by, Charles was lying on his back, eyes closed, a blissful expression an his face, while Sue, with a look of deep concentration, was searching his fur thoroughly. It seemed that his original attack on Sue was merely to tell her that it was his cage, and that if she wanted to live there she had to respect his authority.
Sometimes one acquires mates for animals in very curious ways. One of the most peculiar was the way in which we found a husband for Flower. Now, Flower was a very handsome North American skunk, and when she first came to us she was slim and sylph-like and very tame. Unfortunately, Flower decided that there were only two things in life worth doing: eating and sleeping. The result of the exhausting life she led was that she became so grossly overweight that she was—quite literally -circular. We tried dieting her, but with no effect. We became somewhat alarmed, for overweight can kill an animal as easily as starvation. It was plain that what Flower needed was exercise, and equally plain that she had no intention of going out of her way to obtain it. We decided that what she needed was a mate, but at that particular time skunks were in short supply and none were obtainable, so Flower continued to eat and sleep undisturbed.
Then, one day, Jacquie and I happened to be in London on business, and, being a bit early for our appointment, we walked to our destination. On rounding a corner, we saw approaching us a little man dressed in a green uniform with brass buttons, carrying in his arms—of all things—a baby chimpanzee. At first, with the incongruous combination of the uniform and the ape, we were rather taken aback, but as he came up to us I recovered my wits and stopped him.
“What on earth are you doing with a chimpanzee?” I asked him, though why he should not have a perfect right to walk through the streets with a chimpanzee I was not quite sure.
“I works for Viscount Churchill,” he explained, “and he keeps a lot of queer pets. We’ve got a skunk, too, but we’ll ’ave to get rid of that, ’cos the chimp don’t like it.”
“A skunk?” I said eagerly. “Are you sure it’s a skunk?”
“Yes,” replied the little man, “positive.”
“Well, you’ve met just the right person,” I said. “Will you give my card to Viscount Churchill and tell him that I would be delighted to have his skunk if he wants to part with it?”
“Sure,” replied the little man. “I should think he’d be pleased to let you ’ave it.”
We returned to Jersey full of hope that we might have found a companion, if not a mate, for Flower. Within a few days I received a courteous letter from Viscount Churchill, saying that he would be very pleased to let his skunk come to us, and that, as soon as he had had a travelling cage constructed, he would send him. The next thing I received was a telegram. Its contents were simple and to the point, but I cannot help feeling that it must have puzzled the postal authorities. It read as follows:
GERALD DURRELL ZOOLOGICAL PARK LES AUGRES JERSEY CI: GLADSTONE LEAVING FLIGHT BEL 12 AT 19 HOURS TODAY THURSDAY CAGE YOUR PROPERTY.
CHURCHILL.
Gladstone, on being unpacked, proved to be a lovely young male, and it was with great excitement that we put him in with Flower and stood back to see what would happen. Flower was, as usual, lying in her bed of straw, looking like a black and white fur-covered football. Gladstone peered at this apparition somewhat short-sightedly and then ambled over to have a closer look. At that moment Flower had one of her brief moments of consciousness. During the day she used to wake up periodically for about thirty seconds at a time, just long enough to have a quick glance round the cage to see if anyone had put a plate of food in while she slept. Gladstone, suddenly perceiving that the football had a head, stopped in astonishment and put up all his fur defensively. I am quite sure that for a moment he was not certain what Flower was, and I can hardly say I blame him, for when she was just awakened from a deep sleep like that she rarely looked her best. Gladstone stood staring at her, his tail erect like an exclamation mark; Flower peered at him Wearily and, because he was standing so still and because she had a one-track mind, Flower obviously thought he was some new and exotic dish which had been put in for her edification. She hauled herself out of her bed and waddled across towards Gladstone. Flower walking looked, if anything, more extraordinary than Flower reclining. You could not see her feet, and so you had the impression of a large ball of black and white fur propelling itself in your direction in some mysterious fashion. Gladstone took one look, and then his nerve broke and he ran and hid in the corner. Flower, having discovered that he was only a skunk, and therefore not something edible, retreated once more to her bed to catch up on her interrupted nap.
Gladstone steered clear of her for the rest of the day, but towards evening he did pluck up sufficient courage to go and sniff her sleeping form and find out what she was, a discovery that seemed to interest him as little as it had Flower. But gradually, over a period of days, they grew very fond of one another, and then came the great night when I passed their cage in bright moonlight, and was struck dumb with astonishment, for there was Gladstone chasing Flower round and round the cage, and Flower (panting and gasping for breath) was actually enjoying it. When he at length caught her, they rolled over and over in mock battle, and when they had finished Flower was so out of breath she had to retire to bed for a short rest. But this was only the beginning, for after a few months of Gladstone’s company Flower regained her girlish figure, and before long she could out-run and out-wrestle Gladstone himself.
So zoo marriages can be successful or unsuccessful, but if they are successful they should generally result in some progeny, and this again presents you with further problems. The most important thing to do, if you can, is to spot that a happy event is likely to take place as far in advance as possible, so that the mother-to-be can be given extra food, vitamins, and so forth. The second most important thing is to make up your mind abut the father-to-be: does he stay with the mother, or not? Fathers, in fact, are sometimes more of a problem than the mothers. If you do not remove them from the cage, they might worry the female, so that she may give birth prematurely; on the other hand, if you do remove them, the female may pine and again give birth prematurely. If the father is left in the cage, he might well become jealous of the babies and eat them; on the other hand, he might give the female great assistance in looking after the young: cleaning them and keeping them amused. So, when you know that a female is pregnant, one of your major problems is what to do with Dad, and at times, if you do not act swiftly, a tragedy might occur.
We had a pair of slender lorises of which we were inordinately proud. These creatures look rather like drug addicts that have seen better days. Clad in light grey fur, they have enormously long and thin limbs and body; strange, almost human, hands; and large, lustrous brown eyes, each surrounded by a circle of dark fur, so that the animal appears as though it is recovering either from some ghastly debauchery or an unsuccessful boxing tournament. They have a reputation for being extremely difficult and delicate to keep in captivity, which, by and large, seems to be true. This is why we were so proud of our pair, as we had kept them for four years, and this was a record. By careful experiment and observation, we had worked out a diet which seemed to suit them perfectly. It was a diet that would not have satisfied any other creature but a slender loris, consisting as it did of banana, meal-worms, and milk, but nevertheless on this monotonous fare they lived and thrived.
As I say, we were very proud that our pair did so well, and you can imagine our excitement when were realized that the female was pregnant: this was indeed going to be an event, the first time a slender loris had been bred in captivity, to the best of my knowledge. But now we were faced with the father problem, as always; and, as always, we teetered. Should we remove him or not? At last, after much deliberation, we decided not to do so, for they were a very devoted couple. The great day came, and a fine, healthy youngster was born. We put up screens round the cage so that the parents would not be disturbed by visitors to the zoo, gave them extra titbits, and watched anxiously to make sure the father behaved himself.
All went well for three days, during which time the parents kept close together as usual, and the baby clung to its mother’s fur with the tenacity and determination of a drowning man clasping a straw. Then, on the fourth morning, all our hopes were shattered. The baby was lying dead at the bottom of the cage, and the mother had been blinded in one eye by a savage bite on the side of her face. To this day we do not know what happened, but I can only presume that the male wanted to mate with the female, and she, with the baby clinging to her, was not willing, and so the father turned on her. It was a bitter blow, but it taught us one thing: should we ever succeed in breeding slender lorises again, the father will be removed from the cage as soon as the baby is born.
In the case of some animals, of course, removing the father would be the worst thing you could do. Take the marmosets, for instance. Here the male takes the babies over the moment they are born, cleans them, has them clinging to the body, and hands them over to the mother only at feeding time. I had wanted to observe this strange process for a long time, and thus I was very pleased when one of our cotton-eared marmosets became pregnant. My only fear was that she would give birth to the baby when I happened to be away, but early one morning Jeremy burst into my bedroom with the news that he thought the marmoset was about to give birth. After hastily flinging on some clothes, I rushed down to the mammal house. There I found the parents to be both unperturbed, clinging to the wire of their cage and chittering hopefully at any human who passed. It was quite obvious from the female’s condition that she would give birth fairly soon, but she seemed infinitely less worried by the imminence of this event than I. I got a chair and sat down to watch. I stared at the female marmoset, and she stared at me, while in the corner of the cage her husband—with typical male callousness—sat staffing himself on grapes with meal-worms, and took not the slightest notice of his wife.
Three hours later there was absolutely no change, except that the male marmoset had finished all the grapes and meal-worms. By then my secretary had arrived and, as I had a lot of letters to answer, I made her bring a chair and sit down beside me in front of the marmoset cage while I dictated. I think the visitors to the zoo that day must have thought it slightly eccentric that a man should be dictating letters while keeping his eyes fixed hypnotically on a cageful of marmosets. Then, about midday, someone arrived whom I had to see. I was away from the cage for approximately ten minutes, and on my return the father marmoset was busy washing two tiny scraps of fur that were clinging to him vigorously. I could quite cheerfully have strangled the female marmoset; after all my patient waiting, she went and gave birth during the short period I happened to be away.
Still, I could watch the father looking after the babies, and I had to be content with that. He handled the twins with great care and devotion, generally carrying them slung one on each hip, like a couple of panniers on a donkey. His fur was so thick and the babies so small that most of the time they were completely hidden; then, suddenly, from the depths of his fur, a tiny face the size of a large hazelnut would appear, and two bright eyes would regard you gravely. At feeding time the father would go and hang on the wire close alongside the mother, and the babies would pass from one to the other. Then, their thirst quenched, they would scramble back onto father again. The father was extremely proud of his babies, and was always working himself up into a state of panic over their welfare. As the twins grew older, they became more venturesome, and would leave the safety of their father’s fur to make excursions along the nearby branches, while their parents eyed them with pride as well as a little anxiety. If you approached too near the cage when the twins were on one of their voyages of exploration, the father would get wildly agitated, convinced that you had evil designs on his precious offspring. His fur would stand on end, like an angry cat’s, and he would chitter loud and shrill instructions to the twins, which were generally ignored as they grew older. This would reduce him to an even worse state of mind and, screaming with rage and fear, he would dive through the branches, grab the twins, and sling them into place, one on each hip; then, muttering dark things to himself -presumably about the disobedience of the modern generation—he would potter off to have a light snack to restore his nerves, casting dark glances at you over his shoulder. Watching the marmoset family was an enchanting experience, more like watching a troupe of strange little fur-covered leprechauns than monkeys.
Naturally, the biggest thrill comes when you succeed in breeding some creature which you know from the start is going to be extremely difficult. During my visit to West Africa 1 had managed to acquire some Fernand’s skinks, probably one of the most beautiful of the lizard family, for their big, heavy bodies were covered with a mosaic work of highly polished scales in lemon yellow, black, white, and vivid cherry red. By the time the zoo in Jersey was established I had only two of these magnificent creatures left, but they were fine, healthy specimens, and they settled down well in the reptile house. Sexing most reptiles is well-nigh impossible, so I did not know if these skinks were a true pair or not, but I did know that, even if by some remote chance they were, the chances of breeding them were a million to one. The reason for this was that reptiles, by and large, lay the most difficult eggs to hatch in captivity. Tortoises, for example, lay hard-shelled eggs which they bury in earth or sand. But, as I have already mentioned, if you do not get the temperature and humidity just right in the cage, the eggs will either become mildewed or dry up. A lot of lizards, on the other hand, lay eggs with a soft, parchment-like shell, which makes matters a bit more difficult, for they are even more sensitive to moisture and temperature.
Knowing all this, I viewed with mixed feelings the clutch of a dozen eggs which the female Fernand’s skink laid one morning in the earth at the bottom of her cage. They were white, oval eggs, each about the size of a sugared almond, and the female (as happens among some of the skinks) stood guard over them and would attack your hand quite fearlessly should you put it near the eggs. Among most lizards the female walks off, having laid her batch, and forgets all about it; in the case of some of the skinks, however, the female guards the nest, and lying on top of the soil in which the eggs are buried, urinates over the nest at intervals to maintain the right moisture content in order to keep the delicate shells from shrivelling up in the heat. Our female skink appeared to know what she was doing, and so all we could do was sit back and await developments, without any great hope that the eggs would hatch. As week after week passed, our hopes sank lower and lower, until, eventually, I dug down to the nest, expecting to find every egg shrivelled up. To my surprise, however, I found that only four eggs had done so; the rest were still plump and soft, though discoloured, of course. I removed the four shriveled ones and carefully opened one with a scalpel. I found a dead but well-developed embryo. This was encouraging, for it proved at least that the eggs were fertile. So we sat back to wait again.
Then, one morning, I was down in the reptile house, seeing about some matter, and as I passed the skinks’ cage I happened to glance inside. As usual, the cage looked empty, as the parent skinks spent a lot of their time buried in the soil at the bottom. I was just about to turn away when a movement among the dry leaves and moss attracted my attention. I peered more closely and suddenly, from around the edge of a large leaf, I saw a minute pink and black head peering at me. I could hardly believe my eyes, and stood stock still and stared as this tiny replica of the parents slowly crept out from behind the leaf. It was about an inch and a half long, with all the rich colouring of the adult, but so slender, fragile, and glossy that it resembled one of those ornamental brooches that women wear on the lapels of their coats.
I decided that, if one had hatched, there might be others, and I wanted to remove them as quickly as possible for, although the female had been an exemplary mother till now, it was quite possible that either she or the male might eat the youngsters. We prepared a small aquarium and very carefully caught the baby skink and put him into it. Then we set to work and stripped the skinks’ cage. This was a prolonged job, for each leaf, each piece of wood, each tuft of grass had to be checked and double-checked, to make sure there was no baby skink curled up in it. When the last leaf had been examined, we had four baby Fernand’s skinks running around in the aquarium. When you consider the chances of any of the eggs hatching at all, to have four out of twelve was, I thought, no mean feat. The only thing that marred our delight at this event was that the baby skinks had decided to hatch at the beginning of the winter, and as they could feed only off minute things the job of finding them enough food was going to be difficult. Tiny meal-worms were, of course, our standby, but all our friends with gardens rallied round, and would come up to the zoo once or twice a week, bearing biscuit tins full of woodlice, earwigs, tiny snails, and other morsels that gave the babies the so necessary variety in diet. Thus the tiny reptiles thrived and grew. At the time of writing, they are about six inches long, and as handsome as their parents. I hope it will not be long before they start laying eggs, so that we can try to rear a second generation in captivity.
There are, of course, some animals which could only with the greatest difficulty be prevented from breeding in captivity, and among these are the coatimundis. These little South American animals are about the size of a small dog, with long, ringed tails which they generally carry pointing straight up in the air. They have short, rather bowed legs, which give them a bear-like rolling gait; and long, rubbery, tip-tilted noses which are forever whiffling to and fro, investigating every nook and cranny in search of food. They come in two colours: a brindled greenish brown, and a rich chestnut. Martha and Mathias, the pair I had brought back from Argentina, were of the brindled kind.
As soon as these two had settled down in their new cage in the zoo they started to breed with great enthusiasm. We noticed some interesting facts about this which are worth recording. Normally, Mathias was the dominant one. It was he who went round the cage periodically ‘marking’ with his scent gland so that everyone would know it was his territory. He led Martha rather a dog’s life, pinching all the best bits of food until we were forced to feed them separately. This Victorian male attitude was apparent only when Martha was not pregnant. As soon as she had conceived, the tables were turned. She was now the dominant one, and made poor Mathias’ life hell, attacking him without provocation, driving him away from the food, and generally behaving in a very shrewish fashion. It was only by watching to see which was the dominant one at the moment that we could tell, in the early stages, whether Martha was expecting a litter or not.
Martha’s first litter consisted of four babies, and she was proud of them, and proved to be a very good mother indeed. We were not sure what Mathias’ reactions to the youngsters were going to be, so we had constructed a special shut-off for him, from which he could see and smell the babies without being able to sink his teeth into them, should he be so inclined. It turned out later that Mathias was just as full of pride in them as Martha, but in the early stages we were not taking any risks. Then the great day came when Martha considered the babies old enough to be shown to the world, so she led them out of her den and into the outside cage for a few hours a day. Baby coatis are, in many ways, the most enchanting of young animals. They appear to be all head and nose—high-domed, intellectual-looking foreheads, and noses that are, if anything, twice as rubbery and inquisitive as the adults’. Also, they are natural clowns, forever tumbling about, or sitting on their bottoms in the most human fashion, their hands on their knees. All this, combined with their ridiculous rolling, flat-footed walk, made them quite irresistible. They would play follow-the-leader up the branches in their cage, and when the leader had reached the highest point he would suddenly go into reverse, barging into the one behind who, in his turn, was forced to back into the one behind him, and so on, until they were all descending the branch backwards, trilling and twittering to each other musically. Then they would climb up into the branches and do daring trapeze acts, hanging by their hind paws, or one forepaw, swinging to and fro, trying their best to knock each other off. Although they often fell from quite considerable heights onto the cement floor, they seemed as resilient as India rubber and never hurt themselves.
When they grew a little older and discovered they could squeeze through the wire mesh of the cage, they would escape and play about just inside the barrier rail. Martha would keep an anxious eye on them during these excursions, and should any real or imaginary danger threaten they would come scampering back at her alarm cry, and, panting excitedly, squeeze their fat bodies through the wire mesh and into the safety of the cage. As they grew bolder, they took to playing further and further afield. If there were only a few visitors about, they would go and have wrestling matches on the main drive that sloped down past their cage. In many ways this was a nuisance, for at least twenty times a day some kindly and well-intentioned visitor would come panting up to us with the news that some of our animals were out, and we would have to explain the whole coati set-up.
It was while the babies were playing on the back drive one day that they received a fright which had a salutary effect on them. They had gradually been going further and further from the safety of their cage, and their mother had been growing increasingly anxious. The babies had just learned how to somersault, and were in no mood to listen to their mother’s warnings. It was when they had reached a point quite far from their cage that Jeremy drove down the back drive in the zoo van. Martha uttered her warning cry, and the babies, stopping their game, suddenly saw they were about to be attacked by an enormous roaring monster that was between them and the safety of their home. Panic-stricken, they turned and ran. They galloped flat-footedly down past the baboon cage, past the chimp cage, past the bear cage, without finding anywhere to hide from the monster that pursued them. Suddenly they saw a haven of safety, and the four of them dived for it. The fact that the ladies’ lavatory happened to be empty at that moment was entirely fortuitous. Jeremy, cursing all coatis, slammed on his brakes and got out. He glanced round surreptitiously to make sure there were no female visitors around, and then dived into the ladies’ in pursuit of the babies. Inside, they were nowhere to be seen, and he was just beginning to wonder where on earth they had got to when muffled squeaks from inside one of the cubicles attracted him. He discovered that all four babies had squeezed under the door of one of these compartments. What annoyed Jeremy most of all, though, was that he had to put a penny in the door to get them out.
Still, whatever tribulations they might give you, the babies in the zoo provide tremendous pleasure and satisfaction. The sight of the peccaries playing wild games of catch-as-catch-can with their tiny piglets; the baby coatis rolling and bouncing like a circus troupe; the baby skinks in their miniature world, carefully stalking an earwig almost as big as themselves; the baby marmosets dancing through the branches like little gnomes, hotly pursued by their harassed father: all these things are awfully exciting. After all, there is no point in having a zoo unless you breed the animals in it, for by breeding them you know that they have come to trust you, and that they are content.
7
A GORILLA IN THE GUEST-ROOM
Dear Mr Durrell,
Could you please have our Rhesus monkey? He is growing so big and jumping on us from trees and doing damage and causing so much trouble. Already my mother has been in bed with the doctor three times…
It was towards the end of the second year that I decided that the zoo, not being well-established, must cease to be a mere show-place of animals and start to contribute something towards the conservation of wildlife. I felt that it would be essential gradually to weed out all the commoner animals in the collection and to replace them with rare and threatened species—that is, species which were threatened with extinction in the wild state. The list of these was long and melancholy; in fact—without reptiles—it filled three fat volumes. I was wondering which of this massive list of endangered species we could start with, when the decision was taken out of my hands. An animal dealer telephoned and asked me if I wanted a baby gorilla.
Gorillas have never been exceptionally numerous as a species, and with the state that Africa was in (politically speaking) at that moment it seemed to me that they might well become extinct within the next twenty years. Newly emergent governments are generally far too busy proving themselves to the world for the first few years to worry much about the fate of the wildlife of their country, and history has proved, time and time again, how rapidly a species can be exterminated, even a numerous one. So the gorilla had been high on my list of priorities. I was not convinced, however, that the dealer in question was really expecting a gorilla. In my experience, the average animal dealer can, with difficulty, distinguish between a bird, a reptile, and a mammal, but this is about the extent of his zoological knowledge. I felt that it was more than likely that the baby gorilla would turn out to be a baby chimpanzee. However, I could not afford to turn the offer down, in case it really was a baby gorilla.
“How much are you asking for it?” I inquired, and took a firm grip on the telephone.
“Twelve hundred pounds,” said the dealer.
A brief vision of my bank manager’s face floated before my eyes, and I repressed it sternly. “All right,” I said, in what I hoped was a confident voice. “I’ll meet it at London Airport, and if it’s in good condition I’ll have it.”
I put down the telephone to find Jacquie regarding me with a basilisk eye. “What are you going to have?” she inquired.
“A baby gorilla,” I said nonchalantly.
“Oh, how lovely,” said Mother enthusiastically. “They’re such dear little things.”
Jacquie was more practical. “How much?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, it’s very reasonable,” I said. “You know how rare gorillas are, and you know that our policy now is to concentrate on the rare things. I feel this is a wonderful opportunity”
“How much?” Jacquie interrupted brutally.
“Twelve hundred pounds,” I replied, and waited for the storm.
“Twelve hundred pounds? Twelve hundred pounds? You must be mad . You’ve got an overdraft the size of the national debt and you go and say you’ll pay twelve hundred pounds for a gorilla? You must be out of your mind. Where d’you think we’re going to find twelve hundred pounds, for heaven’s sake? And what d’you think the bank manager’s going to say when he hears? You must be stark staring mad.”
“I shall get the money from other sources,” I said austerely. “Don’t you realize that this island is infested with rich people who do nothing all day long but revolve from one cocktail party to another, like a set of Japanese waltzing mice? It’s about time they made a contribution towards animal conservation. I shall ask them to contribute the money.”
“That’s an even stupider idea than saying you’ll have the gorilla in the first place,” said Jacquie.
Ignoring my wife’s pessimistic and antisocial outlook, I picked up the telephone and asked for a number. “Hallo. Hope? Gerry here.”
“Hallo,” said Hope resignedly. “What can I do for you?” “Hope, I want you to give me a list of all the richest people on the island.”
“All the richest people?” said Hope in bewilderment. “Now what are you up to?”
“Well, I’ve just been offered a baby gorilla at a very reasonable price…twelve hundred pounds…only I don’t happen to have twelve hundred pounds at the moment… “
The rest of my sentence was drowned by Hope’s rich laughter. “So you hope to get the wealthy of the island to buy it for you?” she said, chortling. “Gerry, really, you’re dotty”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with the idea,” I protested. “They should be glad to contribute towards buying such a rare creature. After all, if breeding colonies of things like gorillas aren’t established in captivity soon, there won’t be any left at all. Surely these people realize this?”
“I’m afraid they don’t,” said Hope. “I realize it and you realize it, but I’m afraid the average person either doesn’t or couldn’t care less.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said gloomily. “Anyway, I think it’s worth a try, don’t you?”
“It’s worth a try, but I wouldn’t pin too much faith on their generosity, if I were you,” said Hope. “Anyway, give me half an hour and I’ll ring you back.”
Half an hour later Hope dictated a list of about fifty people over the telephone, while I wrote them down feverishly. Then I looked up the telephone numbers, took a deep breath, and started.
“Good morning. Mrs Macgurgle? Gerald Durrell from the zoo here. I’m so sorry to worry you, but we’ve just been offered a baby gorilla…at a very reasonable price…twelve hundred pounds… Well, yes, but it’s not expensive for a gorilla… Well, I was wondering if you’d care to purchase a small portion of it…say a leg or something? You would? That’s immensely kind of you. Thank you very much indeed… Goodbye.”
By lunch-time I had collected two hundred pounds. Only another thousand to go and the gorilla was mine. It was at this point that I discovered the next person on the list was Major Domo. I had never met him and I had no idea how he would react to the suggestion that he might buy a bit of gorilla. To my immense relief, the suggestion seemed to amuse him, for he chuckled.
“How much is it?” he asked.
“Twelve hundred pounds,” I said.
“And how much have you collected already?”
“Two hundred pounds.”
“Well,” said Major Domo, “you’d better come along this afternoon and I’ll find you the balance.”
To say I was speechless means nothing. When I had gone to the telephone I thought there might be a chance of getting twenty-five pounds, possibly even fifty. A hundred would have been beyond the dreams of avarice. And here was Major Domo handing me a baby gorilla on a platter, so to speak. I stammered my thanks, slammed down the telephone, and rushed round the zoo, telling everyone of the fact that we were going to have a baby gorilla.
The great day came and I flew over to London Airport to collect the ape. My one fear now was that when I arrived there it would turn out to be a chimpanzee after all. The dealer met me and escorted me to a room in the animal shelter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He threw open the door, and the first thing I saw was a couple of baby chimpanzees sitting on a table meditatively chewing bananas. My heart sank, and I had visions of having to go back to Jersey empty-handed. But the dealer walked over to a crate in the corner and opened the door, and N’Pongo walked into my life.
He stood about eighteen inches high and was quite the most handsome and healthy looking baby gorilla I had ever seen. He strolled stockily across the room towards me and then held up his arms to be lifted up. I was amazed at how heavy he was for his size, and I soon realized that this was all solid bone and muscle; there was not a spare ounce of fat on him. His light-chocolate-coloured fur was thick and soft, and the skin on his hands, feet, and face was soft and glossy as patent leather. His eyes were small and deep-set, twinkling like chips of coal. He lay back in my arms and studied me carefully with an unwinking stare, and then lifted a fat and gentle forefinger and investigated my beard. I tickled his ribs and he wriggled about in my arms, giggling hoarsely, his eyes shining with amusement. I sat him down on a convenient table and handed him a banana, which he accepted with little bear-like growlings of pleasure, and ate very daintily compared to the chimpanzees, who were stuffing their mouths as full as they could. I wrote out the cheque and then we bundled N’Pongo—growling protests—back into the crate, and went off to catch the plane for Jersey.
When we landed at the airport I took N’Pongo out of his crate and we drove to the zoo with him sitting on my lap, taking a great interest in the cows we passed, and occasionally turning round so that he could peer up into my face. When we arrived I carried him up to our flat, for his cage was not quite ready and I had decided that he would have to spend a couple of days in our guest-room. His grave, courteous manner and his rather sad expression immediately won over both Jacquie and my mother, and before long he was lolling back on the sofa while they plied him with delicacies, and the staff came upstairs one by one to pay homage to him as if he were some black potentate. Having previously suffered by keeping Chumley the chimpanzee in the house, I knew from bitter experience that there was nothing like an ape for turning a civilized room into something closely resembling a bomb-site in an incredibly short space of time, so I watched N’Pongo like a hawk. When he became bored with lying on the sofa, he decided to make a circuit of the room to examine anything of interest. So he walked slowly round like a small black professor in a museum, pausing now to look at a picture, now to stroke an ornament, but doing it so gently that there was never any danger that he would break anything. After the attitude I was used to with Chumley, I was captivated by N’Pongo’s beautiful behaviour. You would have thought that he had been brought up in a house, to watch him. Apart from a slight hiatus when he wet the floor (and he could not be expected to know that this was not done in the best circles), his behaviour was exemplary—so much so that, by the time we put him to bed, my mother was doing her best to try to persuade me to keep him in the house permanently. I had, however, learned my lesson with Chumley, and I turned a deaf ear to her pleas.
N’Pongo, of course, did not leave the guest-room in the condition that he found it, but this was only to be expected. Although his manners were exemplary, he was only a baby and could not be expected automatically to assume civilized behaviour because he was living in the house. So the guestroom, when he left it, bore numerous traces of his presence; on one wall, for instance, was something that resembled a map of Japan drawn by one of the more inebriated ancient mariners. This was nicely executed in scarlet and was due to the fact that I had thought N’Pongo might like some tinned raspberries. He had liked them, and his enthusiasm at this new addition to his diet has resulted in the map of Japan. There was also straw. Next to paraffin, I know of no other commodity that manages to worm its way—in a positively parasitic fashion—into every nook and cranny before you are aware of it. For months after N’Pongo’s sojourn in our guest-room we were apologizing to guests for the floor which, in spite of hoovering, looked like a sixteenth-century alehouse. There was also the fact that the handle on the door drooped at rather a depressed angle since N’Pongo, after receiving his meal, had attempted to follow me out of the room. Knowing that the handle by some magical means opened and closed the door, but not knowing exactly how to manipulate it, he had merely pulled it downwards with all his strength. As I tried, unsuccessfully, to bend the handle back into position again, I reflected that N’Pongo was only about two years old and that his strength would increase in proportion to his size.
One of the things which particularly interested me about him was his different approach to a problem or a situation. If, for example, a baby chimpanzee is used to being brought out of its cage, on being reincarcerated it will carry on like one of the more loquacious heroines in a Greek tragedy, tearing its hair, rolling with rage on the floor, screaming at the top of its voice, and drumming its heels on every available bit of woodwork. N’Pongo was quite otherwise. Although deploring it, he would accept the necessity of being locked up again in his cage. He would try his best to divert you from this course of action, but when he realized that it had become inevitable he would submit with good grace. His only protest would be a couple of sharp and faintly peevish screams as he saw you disappear, whereas the average chimpanzee of his age and with his background would have gone on having hysterics for a considerable length of time. Owing to his attractive appearance and disposition, his good manners, and his very well-developed sense of humour, N’Pongo was in a very short space of time the darling of the zoo. Every fine afternoon he was brought out on to the lawn in front of the yew hedge, and there he would show off to his admirers, either lolling in the grass with a bored expression on his face, or, with a wicked gleam in his eye, working out how he could pose for his photograph to be taken by some earnest visitor and then rush forward at the crucial moment, grasp the unfortunate person’s leg, and push it from under him—a task that gave him immense amusement and generally resulted in the visitor sustaining a slipped disc and having an excellent picture of a completely empty section of lawn.
Within twelve months N’Pongo had almost doubled his size, and I felt it was now time to try, by fair means or foul, to obtain a mate for him. Unless they lack finances, I have no use for zoos that acquire animals purely for exhibition and make no effort to provide them with a mate; this applies particularly to apes. The problem does not arise while they are young, for they accept the human beings around them as their adopted, if slightly eccentric, family. Then comes the time when they are so powerful that you do not, if you have any intelligence, treat them in the same intimate way. When a gorilla or chimpanzee or an orang-utan at the age of three or four pulls your legs from under you, or jumps from a considerable height onto the back of your neck, it tests your stamina to the full and is done because you are the only companion with whom he can play. If he is left on his own, and is a nice-natured ape, he will try to play the same games with you when he is eleven or twelve; this means a broken leg or a broken neck. So if this friendly, exuberant animal is kept on his own and deprived of both the company of his own kind and that of human beings, you can hardly be surprised if he turns into a morose and melancholy creature. Not wanting to see N’Pongo degenerate into one of those magnificent but sad and lonely anthropoids that I have seen in many zoos (including some that had ample resources for providing a mate), I thought the time had come to try to procure a wife for N’Pongo, even though I knew that our funds would probably not stretch that far.
I telephoned the dealer from whom we had gotten N’Pongo and asked him about the possibilities of obtaining a female gorilla. He told me he had just been offered one, a year or so younger than N’Pongo, but now, owing to the political situation in Africa, the price had increased and he was asking fifteen hundred pounds. There followed two days of soulsearching. I knew we could not afford that amount of money in a lump sum, but we might be able to do it if it were spread over a period. Once again I telephoned the dealer and asked him whether he would consider letting us have the animal on instalment terms. To his credit and to my relief he agreed and said that his representative would bring her over to Jersey in a week’s time.
The whole zoo waited for that day with bated breath. I, prompted by a slightly acrimonious conversation with my bank manger, spent the week by having a collecting box made, over which hung the notice: ‘We have bought Nandy on the instalment plan. Please help us to keep up the instalments.’ So Nandy arrived, crouched in a crate that I would have considered small for a squirrel. She, like N’Pongo, appeared to be in perfect condition: her fur was glossy, she was fat, and her skin had a sheen like satin, but at first sight of her it was her eyes that impressed me most. N’Pongo’s eyes, as 1 have said, were small and deep set, calculating and full of humour. Nandy’s eyes were large and lustrous, and when she looked sideways she showed the whites of them; but they were frightened eyes that did not look at you squarely. They were the eyes of an animal that had little experience of human beings, but even that limited experience had given her no reason to trust or respect them. When we released her from her cage, I could see the reason; right across the top of her skull was a scar which must have measured six or seven inches in length. Obviously, when she was being caught, some over-enthusiastic and intrepid human being had given her a blow with a machete which had split her scalp like a razor slash. It must have been a glancing blow or her skull would have been split in two. With such an introduction to the human race, you could hardly blame Nandy for being a little antisocial. This great slash was by now completely healed, and there was only the long white scar to be seen through the hair of her head, which reminded me of the curious imitative and quite unnecessary partings that so many Africans carve in their hair with the aid of a razor.
We kept Nandy in a separate cage for twenty-four hours, so that she could settle down. The cage was next to N’Pongo’s, to enable her to see her future husband but she evinced as little interest in him as she evinced in us. If you tried to talk to her and looked directly at her face, her eyes would slide from side to side, meeting yours only for a sufficient length of time to judge what your next action might be. Eventually, deciding that the wire between herself and us rendered us comparatively harmless, and preferring not to look at us, she did turn her back. She had such a woebegone, frightened face that one longed to be able to pick her up and comfort her, but she had been too deeply hurt, and this was the last thing she would have appreciated. It would take us, I reckoned roughly, at least six months to gain her confidence, even with the example of the pro-human N’Pongo.
The morning when we let her into the cage with N’Pongo was a red letter day, but fraught with anxiety. He had by now become so well-established and was such a fearfully extroverted character that he obviously considered he was the only gorilla in the world and all human beings were his friends. We did not know how he would react to Nandy’s sullenness and anti-human attitude. Although for twenty-four hours he could see her in the cage alongside him, he had shown absolutely no interest in her presence. Thus when the great moment of introduction came we stood by with buckets of water, brushes, nets, and long sticks just in case the engagement party did not come off with the same romantic swing that one expects from reading women’s magazines. When all was ready, we opened the shutters and Nandy, looking thoroughly distrustful, sidled her way from the small cage into N’Pongo’s comparatively palatial quarters. There she put her back to the wall and squatted, her eyes darting to and fro with a curiously suspicious yet belligerent expression on her face. Now that she was actually in the cage with N’Pongo, who was sitting up on a branch, watching her with the same expression of uninterested mistrust that he reserved for some new item of diet, we could see that she was very much smaller than he—in fact, only about half his size. They sat steadily contemplating each other for some minutes, while we on the other side of the wire did hasty checks to make sure that all our buckets of water and so on were easily accessible.
This was the critical moment: the two gorillas and ourselves were frozen into immobility. To any spectator who did not know the circumstances we would have appeared like one of the more bizarre of Madame Tussaud’s exhibits. Then N’Pongo stretched out a black hand with fingers like great sausages, clasped the wire, and rolled himself carefully to the ground. There he paused and examined a handful of sawdust, as though it were the first time he had ever come across such a commodity. In a casual, swaggering manner, he sauntered in a semicircle which took him close to Nandy, and then, without looking at her, but with the utmost speed, he reached out a long powerful arm, gripped a handful of her hair and pulled it, then hurried along the perimeter of the cage as though nothing had happened. Nandy by nature has always been—and I fear will always be—a little slow in the uptake, and so N’Pongo was some six feet away before she realized what had happened. By then the baring of her teeth and her grunt of indignation were quite useless.
The first round, therefore, went to N’Pongo, but before he could get exalted views of male superiority I felt that we should bring up our second line of defence. We removed the buckets and nets and produced two large dishes full of a succulent selection of fruits. One was presented to N’Pongo and one to Nandy. There was one slight moment of tension when N’Pongo, having examined his own plate, decided that possibly Nandy’s contained additional delicacies which his lacked, and went off to investigate. Nandy, however, still smarting under the indignity of having had her hair pulled, greeted N’Pongo’s investigation of her plate with such a display of belligerence that N’Pongo, being essentially a good-humoured and cowardly creature, retreated to his own pile of food. For the next half-hour they both fed contentedly at opposite ends of the cage.
That night N’Pongo, as usual, slept on his wooden shelf, while Nandy, looking like a thwarted suffragette, curled up on the floor. All through the following day they had little jousts with each other to see who would occupy what position. They were working out their own protocol: should Nandy be allowed to swing on the rope when N’Pongo was sitting on the cross-beam? Should N’Pongo be allowed to pinch Nandy’s carrots even though they were smaller than his own? It had the childishness of a general election but was three times as interesting. However, by that evening, Nandy had achieved what amounted to Votes for Female Gorillas, and both she and N’Pongo shared the wooden shelf. Judging by the way N’Pongo snuggled up to her, he was not at all averse to this invasion of his bedroom.
It was obvious from the first that the marriage of the gorillas was going to be a success. Although they were so different in character, they quite plainly adored one another. N’Pongo was the great giggling clown of the pair, while Nandy was much quieter, more introspective and watchful. N’Pongo’s bullying and teasing of her was all done without any malice and out of a pure sense of fun, and Nandy seemed to realize this. Occasionally, however, his good-humoured teasing would drive her to distraction: it must have been rather like being married to a professional practical joker. When she reached the limit of her endurance she would lose her temper, and with flashing eyes and open mouth would chase him round the cage while he ran before her, giggling hysterically. If she caught him, she would belabour him with her fists while N’Pongo lay on the ground curled up in a ball. Nandy might as well have tried to hurt a lump of cement—in spite of her strength—for he would just He there, laughing to himself, his eyes shining with good humour. As soon as she tired of trying to make some impression on his muscular body, Nandy would stalk off to the other end of the cage, and N’Pongo would sit up, brush the sawdust from himself, and beat a rapid tattoo of triumph on his breast or stomach. Then he would sit with his arms folded, his eyes glittering, working out some other trick to annoy his wife.
To have acquired such a pair of rare and valuable animals was, I considered, something of an achievement, but now, I discovered, we were to live in a constant state of anxiety over their health and well-being; every time one of them got sawdust up his nose and sneezed, we viewed this with alarm and despondency—was this a prelude to pneumonia or something worse? The functioning of their bowels became a daily topic of conversation. I had had installed a magnificent communication apparatus in the zoo, for, small though it was, it could take a considerable length of time to locate the person required at the moment you wanted him. So at various salient points throughout the grounds, small black boxes were screwed to the walls, through which the staff could speak with the main office and vice versa. One of these boxes was also installed in our flat, so that I could be apprised of what was going on and be warned should any crisis arise. The occasion when I had doubts as to the wisdom of this system was the day when we were entertaining some people we did not know very well. In the middle of one of those erudite and futile conversations one has to indulge in, the black box on the bookcase gave a warning crackle, and before I could leap up to switch it off a sepulchral and disembodied voice said, “Mr Durrell, the gorillas have got diarrhoea again.” I know of no equal to this remark for putting a blight on a party. However, N’Pongo and Nandy grew apace, and to our relief developed none of the diseases that we feared they might contract.
Then came N’Pongo’s first real illness. I had just arranged to spend three weeks in the south of France, which was to be a sort of working holiday, for we were to be accompanied by a BBC producer whom I hoped to convince of the necessity for making a film about life in the Camargue. Hotels had been booked, numbers of people, ranging from bullfighters to ornithologists, had been alerted for our coming, and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Then four days before we were due to depart, N’Pongo started to look off colour. Gone was his giggling exuberance; he lay on the floor or on the shelf, his arms wrapped round himself, staring into space, and taking only enough food and milk to keep himself alive. The only symptom was acute diarrhoea. Tests were hurriedly made and the advice of both the vet and medical profession acted upon, but what he was suffering from remained a mystery. As with all apes, he lost weight with horrifying rapidity. On the second day he stopped eating altogether and even refused to drink his milk, so this meant we could administer no antibiotic. Almost as we watched, his face seemed to shrink and shrivel and his powerful body grow gaunt. What had once been a proudly rotund paunch now became a ghastly declivity where his ribs forked. Now his diarrhoea was quite heavily tinged with blood, and at this symptom I think most of us gave up hope. We felt that if he would only eat something, it might at least give him some stamina to withstand whatever disease he was suffering from, as well as rouse him out of the terrible melancholia into which he was slipping, as most of the anthropoids do when they are ill.
Jacquie and I went down to the market in St Helier and walked among the multicoloured stalls that surround the charming Victoria fountain with its plaster cherubim, its palms and maidenhair fern, and its household cavalry—the plump scarlet goldfish. It was difficult to know what to choose for N’Pongo that would tempt his appetite, for he had such a variety of food in his normal diet. So we brought out of season delicacies that cost us a small fortune. Then, when we were loaded down with exotic fruits and vegetables, I suddenly noticed on a stall that we were passing an immense green and white watermelon. Watermelon is not to everyone’s taste, but I personally prefer it to ordinary melon. It occurred to me that the bright, pink-coloured, scrunchy, watery interior with its glossy black seeds might be something that would appeal to N’Pongo, for, as far as I knew, he had never sampled it before. We added the gigantic melon to our loads and drove back to the zoo.
By now, through lack of food and drink, N’Pongo was in a very bad way. Jeremy had managed to persuade him to drink a little skimmed milk by the subterfuge of rubbing a Disprin on his gums. The Disprin, of course, dissolved rapidly and, the taste not being to his liking, N’Pongo was only too happy to take a couple of gulps of the milk to wash out his mouth. One by one we presented him with the things we had obtained in the market, and one by one he viewed them with an apathetic glance; he refused the hothouse grapes, the avocado pears, and other delicacies. Then we cut him a slice of watermelon, and for the first time he displayed signs of interest. He prodded the slice with his finger and leaned forward to smell it carefully. The next minute he had the slice in his hands, and to our great delight started to eat. But we did not become too jubilant, for we knew that the watermelon contained practically no nutriment, but at least it had aroused his interest in food again. The next thing was to try to administer an antibiotic, as by now the expert consensus was that he was suffering from a form of colitis. Since he still refused to take any quantity of liquid in which we could mix medicines, there was only one way to get the antibiotic into him, and that was by injection.
We enticed N’Pongo out of his cage and kept Nandy shut up; he would be sufficiently difficult to deal with, in spite of his emaciated condition, without having any assistance from his by now extremely powerful wife. He squatted on the floor of the mammal house, staring about with dull, sunken eyes. Jeremy squatted on one side of him, with a supply of watermelon to try to maintain his interest, while I on the other side hastily prepared the syringe for the injection. N’Pongo watched my preparations with a mild interest and once put out his hand gently to try to touch the syringe. When I was ready, Jeremy endeavoured to distract his attention with pieces of melon, and as soon as his head was turned away from me I pushed the needle into his thigh and pressed the plunger home. N’Pongo gave no sign of having even noticed this. He followed us obediently back into his cage and, with a small piece of watermelon, retired to his shelf where he curled up on his side, his arms folded, and stared at the wall. The following morning he showed very slight signs of improvement, and using the same subterfuge we managed to give him another injection. For the rest of the day there seemed no change in him, and although he ate some of the melon and drank a little skimmed milk he did not show any radical signs of progress.
I was now in a quandary: in twenty-four hours I was due to leave for France. There I had organized and stirred up a bees’ nest of helpers and advisers. The BBC were also under the impression that the trip was a foregone conclusion. If I put it off at this juncture, I would have put a tremendous amount of people to a lot of trouble for nothing, and yet I felt I could not leave N’Pongo unless I was satisfied that he was either on the mend or beyond salvation. Then, the day before I was due to leave, he suddenly turned the corner. He started drinking his Complan—a highly concentrated form of dried milk—and eating a variety of fruits. By the evening of that day he showed considerable signs of improvement and had eaten quite a bit of food. The next morning I went down very early to look at him, for I was due to catch my plane to Dinard at eight-thirty. He was sitting up on the shelf, and although he still looked emaciated and unwell his eyes had a sparkle that had been lacking for the past few days. He ate quite well and drank his Complan, and I felt that he was at last on the road to recovery. I drove down to the airport and caught the plane to Dinard, and we motored down to the south of France. It cost a small fortune in long-distance calls to Jersey to keep myself appraised of N’Pongo’s progress, but every time I telephoned the reports got better, and when Jeremy informed me that N’Pongo had drunk one pint of Complan and eaten three slices of watermelon, two bananas, one apricot, three apples, and the whites of eight eggs, I knew there was no further cause for alarm.
By the time I returned from France, N’Pongo had put on all the weight he had lost, and when I went into the mammal house there he was to greet me, his old self—massive, black, and rotund, his eyes glittering mischievously as he tried to inveigle me close enough to the wire so that he could pull the buttons off my coat. I reflected, as I watched him rolling on his back and clapping his hands in an effort to attract my attention, that, though it was delightful to have creatures like this—and of vital importance that they should be kept and bred in captivity—it was a two-edged sword, for the anxiety you suffered when they became ill made you wonder why you started the whole thing in the first place.
8
ANIMALS IN TRUST
Dear Mr Durrell,
You will probably be astonished to receive a letter from a complete stranger…
The zoo has now been in existence for five years. During that time we have worked steadily towards our aim of building up our collection of those animals which are threatened with extinction in the wild state. Examples of these are our chimpanzees and a pair of South American tapirs, but the pair of gorillas are perhaps one of the most important of our acquisitions, and one of which we are extremely proud. Apart from these, we have over the past year obtained a number of valuable creatures. It is not always possible to buy or collect these animals, so recently we exchanged an ostrich for a binturong, a strange, small bear-like animal with a long prehensile tail, which comes from the Far East; and a spectacled bear, whom we have christened Pedro.
Spectacled bears are the only member of the family to be found in South America, inhabiting a fairly restricted range high in the Andes. They are a blackish brown colour with fawn or cinnamon spectacle markings round the eyes and short waistcoats of a similar colour. They grow to be as large as the ordinary black bear, but Pedro, when he arrived, was still quite a baby and only about the size of a large retriever. We soon found that he was ridiculously tame and liked nothing better than to have his paws held through the bars while he munched chocolate in vast quantities. He is an incredible pansy in many ways, and several of the attitudes he adopts—one foot on a log, for example, while he leans languidly against the bars of his cage, with his front paws dangling limply—remind one irresistibly of the more vapid and elegant young men one can see at cocktail parties. He very soon discovered that if he did certain tricks the flow of chocolates and other sweets increased a hundredfold, and so he taught himself to do a little dance. This consisted of standing on his hind legs and bending over backwards as far as he could, without actually falling, and then revolving slowly—a sort of backward waltz. This never failed to enchant his audience. To give him something with which to amuse himself, we hung a large empty barrel from the ceiling of his cage, having knocked both ends out of it: this formed a sort of circular swing and gave Pedro a lot of pleasure. He would gallop round the barrel and then dive head first into it, so that it swung to and fro vigorously. Occasionally he would dive a bit too strenuously, come shooting out of the other end of the barrel, and land on the ground. At other times, when he was feeling in a more soulful mood, he would climb into his barrel and just lie there, sucking his paws and humming to himself, an astonishly loud, vibrant hum as though the barrel contained quite a large dynamo.
Pedro was at first in temporary quarters, but, as we hoped to get him a mate eventually, we had to build him a new cage. During the period while his old quarters were being demolished and his new one being erected, he was confined in a large crate to which, at first, he took grave exception. However, when we moved it next to one of the animal kitchens and the fruit store, he decided that life was not so bad after all. The staff were constantly in view, and nobody passed his crate without pushing a titbit to him through the bars. Then, two days before he was due to be moved into his new home, it happened. Jacquie and I were up in the flat, having a quiet cup of tea with a friend, when the inter-communication crackled and Catha’s voice, as imperturbable as if she was announcing the arrival of the postman, said, “Mr Durrell, I though you would like to know Pedro is out.”
Now, although Pedro had been small when he arrived, he had grown with surprising rapidity and was now quite a large animal. Also, although he appeared ridiculously tame, bears, I am afraid, are among the few creatures in this world which you cannot trust in any circumstance. So, to say that I was alarmed by this news would be putting it mildly.
I fled downstairs and out of the back door. Here, where the animal kitchen and fruit store form an annex with a flat roof, I saw Pedro. He was galloping up and down on the roof, obviously having the time of his life. The unfortunate thing was that one of the main windows of the flat overlooked this roof, and if he went through that he could cause a considerable amount of havoc in our living quarters. Pedro was plainly unfamiliar with the substance called glass, and as I watched he bounded up to the window, reared up on his hind legs, and hurled himself hopefully forward. Luckily it was an old-fashioned sash window with small panes of glass, and this withstood his onslaught. If it had been one big sheet of glass, he would have gone straight through it and probably cut himself badly. But with a slightly astonished expression on his face he rebounded from it; what appeared to be a perfectly good means of getting into the flat was barred by some invisible substance. I rushed round to where the crate was, in an endeavour to lift up the sliding door, which, as always happens in moments of this sort of crisis, stuck fast. Pedro came and peered at me over the edge of the roof and obviously thought that he should come down to my assistance, but the long drop made him hesitate. I was still struggling with the door of the cage when Shep appeared with a ladder.
“We’ll never get him down without this,” he said. “He’s frightened to jump.”
He placed the ladder against the wall, while I continued my struggles with the door of the crate. Then Stephan came on the scene and was coming to my aid when Pedro suddenly discovered the ladder. With a little whoop of joy, he slid down it like a circus acrobat and landed in an untidy heap at Stephan’s feet.
Now, Stephan was completely unarmed and so was I, but fortunately he kept his head and did the right thing: he stood absolutely still. Pedro righted himself and, seeing Stephan standing next to him, gave a little grunt, reared up on his hind legs, and placed his paws on Stephan’s shoulders. Stephan went several shades whiter but still did not move. I looked round desperately for some sort of weapon with which I could hit Pedro, should this be a preliminary to an attack on Stephan. Pedro, however, was not interested in attacking anyone. He gave Stephan a prolonged and very moist kiss with his pink tongue and then dropped to all fours again and started galloping round and round the crate, like an excited dog. I was still trying ineffectually to raise the slide when Pedro made a miscalculation. In executing a particularly complicated and beautiful gambol, he rushed into the animal kitchen. It was the work of a second for Shep to slam the door, and we had our escapee safely incarcerated. Then we freed the reluctant slide, pushed the crate up to the kitchen, and opened its door; Pedro re-entered his quarters without any demur at all. Stephan went off and had a strong cup of tea to revive himself. Two days later we released Pedro into his spacious new quarters, and it was a delight to watch him rushing about, investigating every corner of the new place, hanging from the bars, pirouetting in an excess of delight at finding himself in such a large area.
When you own a zoo the question of Christmas, birthday, and anniversary presents is miraculously solved: you simply give animals to each other. To any harassed husband who has spent long sleepless nights wondering what gift to present to his wife on any of these occasions, I can strongly recommend the acquisition of a zoo, for then all problems are answered. So, having been reminded by my mother, my secretary, and three members of the staff that my twelfth wedding anniversary was looming dark and forbidding on the horizon, I sat down with a pile of dealers’ lists, to see what possible specimens I could procure that would have the twofold value of both gladdening Jacquie’s heart and enhancing the zoo. The whole subterfuge had this additional advantage: I could spend far more money than I would have otherwise, without the risk of being nagged for my gross extravagance. So, after several mouth-watering hours with the lists, I eventually settled on two pairs of crowned pigeons, birds which I knew Jacquie had always longed to possess. They are the biggest of the pigeon family and certainly among the most handsome, with their powder-blue plumage, scarlet eyes, and great feathery crests. Nobody knows how they are faring in the wild state, but they seem to be shot pretty indiscriminately both for food and for their feathering, and it is quite possible that before many years have passed crowned pigeons will be on the danger list. I saw that at that precise moment the cheapest crowned pigeons on the market were being offered by a Dutch dealer. I have a great liking for Holland and its inhabitants, so I thought it would be as well if I went over personally to select the birds; as I argued to myself, it would enable me to choose the very finest specimens (and for a wedding anniversary, surely nothing but the best would do), and at the same time give me a chance to visit some of the Dutch zoos, which are, in my opinion, among the finest in the world. Having thus salved my conscience, I went across to Holland.
It was just unfortunate that the very morning I called at the dealer’s to choose the crowned pigeons a consignment of orang-utans had arrived. This put me in an awkward position. First, I have always wanted to have an orang-utan. Second, I knew that we could not possibly afford them. Third, owing in part to the trade in these delicate and lovely apes, their numbers have been so diminished in the wild state that it is possible within the next ten years they may become extinct. As an ardent conservationist what was I to do? I could not report the dealer to anyone, for the simple reason that, now that they had managed to reach Holland, there was no law against his having them.
I was in a quandary. Either I could not even look at the apes and leave them to his tender mercies, or I could, as it were obliquely, encourage a trade of which I strongly disapproved, by rescuing them. By this time I was so worked up over the conservation aspect of this problem that the financial side of it had disappeared completely from my mind. Knowing full well what would happen, I went and peered into the crate containing the baby orang-utans and was immediately lost. They were bald and oriental-eyed; the male, who was the slightly larger of the two, looked like a particularly malevolent Mongolian brigand, while the female had a sweet and rather pathetic little face. As usual, they had great pot-bellies, owing to the ridiculous diet of rice on which the hunters and dealers insist on feeding them and which does them no good whatsoever except to distend their stomachs and give them internal disorders.
They crouched in the straw, locked in each other’s arms; to each the other was the one recognizable and understandable thing in a horrifying world. They both looked healthy, apart from their distended tummies, but they were so young I knew the chances of their survival were risky. The sight of them, however, clutching each other and staring at me with such obvious terror, decided me, and (knowing that I should never hear the end of it) I sat down and wrote out a cheque.
That evening I telephoned the zoo to tell Jacquie that all was well and that I had managed to buy not only the crowned pigeons she wanted, but also two pairs of very nice pheasants. On hearing this, both Catha and Jacquie said that I should not be allowed to go animal shopping by myself and I had no sense of economy and why was I buying pheasants when I knew the zoo could not afford them, to which I replied that they were rare pheasants and that was sufficient excuse. I then carelessly mentioned that I had also bought something else.
What, they inquired suspiciously, had I bought?
“A pair of orang-utans,” I said airily.
“Orang-utans?” said Jacquie. “You must be mad. How much did they cost? Where are we going to keep them? You must be out of your mind.”
Catha, on being told the news, agreed with her. I explained that the orang-utans were so tiny that they would practically fit in your pocket and that I could not possibly leave them just to die in a dealer’s shop in Holland.
“You’ll love them when you see them,” I said hopefully, to which Jacquie’s answer was a derisive snort.
“Well,” she said, philosophically, “if you have bought them, you have bought them, and I suggest you come back as quickly as possible before you spend any more money.”
“I am returning tomorrow,” I replied.
So the following day I sent the crowned pigeons and the pheasants off by air and travelled myself by sea with my two waifs. They were suspicious and timid, although the female was more inclined to be trusting than the male, but after a few hours of coaxing they did take titbits from my hand. I decided after much deliberation to call the male Oscar and the female Bali, since it had some vague connotation with the area of the world from which they originated. Little was I to know that this would cause Jeremy to perpetrate a revolting pun that when Oscar was wild, this made Bali high.
I had decided to travel by sea with them because, first of all, I never travel by air if I can possibly avoid it. I am convinced that every aeroplane pilot who flies me has just been released from a hospital, suffering from acute angina pectoris. Also I felt the trip would be more leisurely and would give me a chance to establish some sort of contact with my charges. As regards the latter, I was perfectly correct; Bali had begun to respond quite well and Oscar had bitten me twice by the time I arrived.
As I anticipated, as soon as I returned to the zoo with my two bald-headed, pot-bellied, red-haired waifs, everyone immediately fell in love with them. They were crooned over and placed in a special cage which had been prepared in advance, and hardly a moment of the day passed without someone or other going to peer at them and give them some delicacy. It was a month before they showed signs of recovering their self-confidence and began to realize that we were not the ogres they thought. Then their personalities blossomed forth and they very soon became two of the most popular inmates of the zoo. I think it was their bald heads, their strange slant eyes, and their Buddha-like figures that made them so hilariously funny to watch as they indulged in the most astonishing wrestling matches that I have ever seen. Owing to the fact that their hind legs can, it seems, swivel round and round on the ball-and-socket joint of the hip in a completely unanatomical manner, these wrestling matches had to be seen to be believed. Gasping and giving hoarse chuckles, the two would roll over and over in the straw, banging their great pot-bellies together, and so inextricably entwine their arms and legs that you began to wonder how they would ever disentangle themselves. Occasionally, if Oscar became too rough, Bali would protest, in a reedy high-pitched squeak which was barely audible and quite ridiculous from an animal of that size.
They grew at an astonishing rate and very soon had to be moved into a new cage. Here Jeremy had designed and had had constructed for them a special piece of furniture for their edification. It was like a long iron ladder slung from the ceiling. This gave them masses of handholds, and they enjoyed it thoroughly; they took so much exercise on this that their tummies soon reduced to a more normal size.
In character they were totally different. Oscar was a real toughy; he was a terrible coward, but never lost an opportunity for creating a bit of mischief if he could. He was definitely the more intelligent of the pair and showed his inventive genius on more than one occasion. In their cage is a recessed window; we had boarded over the window-ledge to form a platform on which they could sit, and leading up to it is an iron-runged ladder. Oscar decided (for some reason best known to himself) that it would be a good idea to remove all the boards from the window-sill. He tried standing on them and tugging, but his weight defeated his object. After considerable thought, he worked out a method of dislodging the planks which is one of the most intelligent things I have seen done by an ape. He found out that the top rung of the iron ladder lay some two inches below the overlap of the shelf. If he could slide something into this gap and press it downwards, it would act as a lever, using the top rung of the ladder as fulcrum; and what better tool for his purpose than his stainless-steel dish? By the time we had found out that we had a tool-using ape in our midst, Oscar had pried up six of the boards and was enjoying himself hugely.
It is unfortunate that, like many apes, Oscar and Bali have developed some rather revolting characteristics, one of which is the drinking of each other’s urine. It sounds frightful, but they are such enchanting animals and do it in such a way that you can only feel amused to see Oscar sitting up on his iron ladder, urinating copiously while Bali sits below with open mouth to receive the nectar, and then savours it with all the air of a connoisseur. She puts her head on one side, rolling the liquid round her mouth as if trying to make up her mind from which vineyard it came and in what year it was bottled. They also, unfortunately, enjoy eating their own excreta. As far as I know, these habits in apes apply only to specimens in captivity. In the wild state apes are on the move all the time and to a greater or lesser extent are arboreal, so that their urine and faeces drop to the forest floor below, and therefore they are not tempted to test their edibility. Once they start this habit in captivity, it is virtually impossible to break them of it. It does not appear to do them any harm, except, of course, that if they do happen to be infected with any internal parasites (of which you are endeavouring to cure them), they are constantly reinfecting themselves and each other by this means.
Other new arrivals of great importance from the point of view of conservation were a pair of tuataras from New Zealand. These astonishing reptiles at one time had a wide range but were exterminated on the mainland, and are now found only in a few scattered groups of small islands off the coast of New Zealand. They are rigidly protected by the New Zealand Government and only occasionally is the odd specimen exported for some zoo. On a brief visit I paid to that country, I explained to the authorities the work I was trying to do in Jersey and they—somewhat unwisely—asked me if there was any member of the New Zealand fauna which I would particularly like to have. Resisting the impulse to say ‘everything’ and thus appear greedy, I said that I was very interested in tuataras. The minister concerned said that he was sure they could see their way to letting me have one, to which I replied that I was not interested in having one, although this seemed like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. I explained that my idea was to build up breeding colonies, and it was difficult to say the least, to form a breeding colony with only one animal. Could I, perhaps, have a pair? After due deliberation, the authorities decided that they would let me have a true pair of tuataras. This was indeed a triumph, for as far as I know we are the only zoo in the world to have been allowed to have a true pair of these rare reptiles.
The climate of New Zealand is not unlike that of Jersey. Previously, when I had seen tuataras at various zoos they had always been incarcerated in reptile houses in cages, the temperature of which fluctuated between seventy-five and eighty degrees. At the time this had not occurred to me as being a bad thing, but when I went to New Zealand and saw the tuataras in their wild state, I realized that the mistake the majority of European zoos had been making was to keep the tuatara as though it were a tropical reptile; this accounted for the fact that very few of these creatures kept in Europe had lived for any great length of time. Having obtained permission to have a pair, I was quite determined that their cage must be the best possible, and that I would keep them at temperatures as near to the ones to which they were accustomed as we could manage. So when I was alerted by the Wildlife Department of New Zealand that the tuataras would be sent to me very shortly, we started work on their housing. This, in fact, resembles a rather superior greenhouse: it is twenty-one feet long and eleven feet wide, with a glass roof. This roof is divided into windows, so that we can keep a constant current of air flowing through the cage and thus make sure that the temperature does not rise too much. A large quantity of earth and rock-work was then arranged and planted out, so as to resemble as closely as possible the natural habitat of the reptiles. We sank one or two pipes into the earth to act as burrows, should the tuataras not feel disposed to make their own, and then we waited for their arrival excitedly.
At last the great day came, and we went down to the airport to collect them. They were carefully packed in a wooden box, the air holes of which did not allow me to see if they had survived the journey, and I remained in a state of frustration all the way back from the airport to the zoo. There I could lay my hand on a screwdriver and remove the lid of the box, to see how our new arrivals had fared. As we removed the last screw and I prepared myself to lift the lid off, I uttered a brief prayer. I lifted off the lid, and there, gazing at me benignly from the depths of the container, was a pair of the most perfect tuataras I had ever beheld. In shape they resemble lizards, though anatomically they are so different that they occupy a family all their own. They have, in fact, come down from prehistoric times virtually unchanged, so if anything in the world can be dignified with the term prehistoric monster, the tuatara can.
They have enormous, lustrous dark eyes and a rather pleasant expression. Along the back is a fringe of triangular spines, white and soft, rather like the frill on a Christmas cake. This is more accentuated on the male than on the female. A similar row of spines decorates the tail, but these are hard and sharp, like the spikes on the tail of a crocodile. Their bodies are a sort of pale beige, mottled with sage green and pale yellow. They are, altogether, very handsome creatures with an extremely aristocratic mien.
Before releasing the tuataras into their new home, I wanted to be sure that the journey had not upset them too much, and that they would feed, so we left them in their travelling box overnight and put twelve dead baby rats in with them. The next day, to my delight, the box contained no trace of baby rats but a couple of rather portly and smug tuataras. It was obvious that a plane journey of a thousand miles was a mere nothing to creatures of such ancient lineage, and so we put them into their new quarters. Here, I am glad to say, they have settled down very well and have now grown so tame that they will feed from your hand. I hope that in the not too distant future we might make zoological history by breeding them, for as far as I know no zoo outside Australia and New Zealand has succeeded in hatching baby tuataras.
Now that the zoo was solvent and had acquired so many pain of threatened species, I felt the time had come to take the next big step forward. It was essential, if we were to do the work of saving threatened species which was my aim, for us to have outside financial assistance and to put the whole operation on an intelligent scientific footing. The answer, therefore, was for the zoo to cease being a limited company and to become a proper scientific trust.
On the face of it, this seems a fairly simple manoeuvre, but in practice it is infinitely more difficult. First you have to gather together a council of altruistic and intelligent people who believe in the aims of the trust, and then launch a public appeal for funds. I shall not go into all the wearisome details of this period, which can be of no interest to anyone but myself. Suffice it to say that I managed to assemble a council of hard-working and sympathetic people on the island who did not consider my aims so fantastic as to qualify me for a lunatic asylum, and with their help the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust came into being. We launched a public appeal for funds, and once more the people of Jersey came to my rescue, as they had in the past with calves, or tomatoes, or snails, or earwigs. This time they came forward with their cheque-books, and before long the trust had acquired sufficient money to take over the zoo.
This means that after twenty-two years of endeavour I shall have achieved one of the things that I most desired in the world—to help some of the animals that have given me so much pleasure and so much interest during my lifetime. I realize that the part we can play here is only a very small one, but if by our efforts we can prevent only a tiny proportion of threatened species from becoming extinct, and by our efforts interest more people in the urgent and necessary work of conservation, then our work will not have been in vain.