zoo animals and their discontents

"It was in Oregon that he had the first of what he describes as his two epiphanies, while treating a flat-coated retriever named Pongo. His owners, an elderly professor and his wife, took him to the clinic on a rainy night after the 2-year-old dog was hit by a car. Pongo was in shock, and despite administering medication and an IV, Virga couldn’t stabilize the patient — his pulse was weak, his eyes unfocused and his breathing ragged and labored. The dog was dying. Virga looked in on him at 3 a.m., after a busy emergency-room shift was over and the clinic had finally gone quiet. If anything, Pongo’s condition had worsened. Resigned, Virga sat on the floor beside him; he filled out medical records while leaving his other hand draped loosely around the dog. Virga was exhausted and engrossed in the paperwork, and an hour passed before he noticed that Pongo’s pulse had grown stronger and movement was returning to his body. By the time the sun had come up, Pongo was nuzzling in Virga’s lap and licking his hand.

Virga had been an emergency-room vet for four years and yet, poring over the dog’s chart, he could find no sound medical reason for Pongo’s recovery. He couldn’t escape the conviction that medicine had little to do with it, that it had been the physical contact and the closeness that effected the sudden change. In the coming years, Virga began to notice similar recoveries happening in time frames that made little apparent sense. In 1994, he decided to leave general practice and eventually enrolled in a postgraduate animal-behavior residency at Cornell. At the time, he frequently drove to New York, working primarily with cats and dogs. “I realized that when I was called in to solve an animal’s behavioral problem, I was usually treating the relationship between the pet and his or her owner,” he says. (Virga will not use the inanimate pronoun when talking about animals.) “Mostly, my job turned out to be helping the owners interpret their animals’ behavior.”

His second epiphany happened at an East Coast zoo where he was a resident (zoo directors occupy a close-knit world, and Virga spoke to me on the condition that I wouldn’t identify certain zoos or animals). He was working with a 16-year-old clouded leopard — an arboreal felid somewhere in size between a lynx and a bobcat, with a spectacularly large tail. The case occupied him for months. An elderly animal at her third zoo, the leopard was occupying a 12-foot-by-24-foot space surrounded by concrete and glass. It contained little except a dead eucalyptus tree and a jungle mural lit by spotlights. Some time earlier, the leopard’s mate died, and she had licked her majestic tail bald. She perched on the branch of the dead tree and stared ahead with a vacant, faraway expression. All the attempts to interest her in her environment — a muntjac deer hide, a chunk of ice with horse blood and meat inside it, a pile of bamboo leaves spotted with spices — elicited no reaction.

Clouded leopards are among the most solitary of the large cats, ranging among the trees of Nepal, Sumatra and coastal areas along the South China Sea, and they often have difficulty adapting to the public, cramped conditions of a zoo exhibit. Virga watched the leopard for hours at a time, but her eyes came alive only momentarily. The remainder of the day she spent perched on her branch, staring into the middle distance, and no treat or diversion engaged her. Virga could find nothing obviously wrong — she was in seemingly fine health. “I sat there for hours, looking for signs and videotaping,” Virga told me. “I realized finally that at some point, she had lost all interest in her world because it offered her nothing to do or to explore. You could say that she was suffering from severe clinical depression; another way to say it is that she had lost her will to live.” Virga never managed to help her. “It just tore me apart,” he says. “I was a lowly resident, and no one there was inclined to listen to what I thought.” The case made Virga determined to do what he could for zoo animals. He could not find a zoo that was looking to hire a behaviorist, so he began to volunteer, eventually leaving his private practice and working with captive animals as a paid consultant.

Virga still feels apprehensive when visiting an unfamiliar zoo. But several months ago, I asked him to come with me to a large zoo in a mid-Atlantic city; I wanted to see the exhibits through his eyes. Like many American zoos, it was in the midst of a transition from old-fashioned habitats — the polar bear’s was little more than a concrete amphitheater with a moat, and the animal lay on its back, motionless — to more considered ones. The brown bears nearby were playing in a swimming hole; one was chewing on a branch. They were surrounded by trees and had places to climb and even a section where they could be out of view. (Virga thinks the last part is especially important. “How would you feel,” he asked me once, “if your one-room apartment had a huge picture window, and all day strangers stood outside of it, looking in?”) He thought the brown-bear exhibit was one of the best he’d seen. After listening for a while to the cries of peacocks and scrutinizing the African-wild-dog habitat (“even tracks indicate pacing, and dogs pace when they’re bored,” Virga explained), we found ourselves in front of two black panthers sitting on a bleached, horizontal tree trunk. They were enclosed on the long sides by glass, like a lab slide, in a space smaller than an average studio apartment in Manhattan. The panthers looked at us with their green eyes. Their sleek bodies were contracted, and their expressions wan. They didn’t move. In the famous poem about watching a caged panther at a zoo, Rilke wrote, “A mighty will stands paralyzed.” That about covered it. Virga watched the panthers for maybe 20 minutes. “This is the worst thing I’ve seen in a long time,” he said finally, then turned away, wiped his eyes with his hand and motioned for us to go."

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Virga began working with BaHee after Gloria, the female gibbon who shared his habitat, left. BaHee and Gloria were quite the (platonic) couple: His fur was black, hers was buff, and she played a chiding matronly figure to his teenage brat. Though BaHee liked to antagonize Gloria from time to time, making her swat at him when he became annoying, they groomed each other and liked to trade creaky calls — his drawn out, hers short. (“BaHee sounded like he needed oil,” said Kelly Froio, his primary keeper.) The two small apes shared their space for three years in mostly affectionate equipoise.

In 2012, Gloria was in her early 30s and began to exhibit symptoms of a Parkinson’s-like illness. After she lost the use of her legs to tremors and routine movements became labored — and treatment proved unsuccessful — the zoo staff decided that the most humane course of action was to euthanize her. Once Gloria was gone, BaHee withdrew. He ate less, moved less and sometimes refused to go on exhibit. The bag he liked to wear on his head now lay on the ground. Most striking, he lashed out and bared his teeth at Froio, who took Gloria from the barn on that last day. “I think he blamed me for Gloria’s death,” she said. “Mostly, he sat in his big blue barrel, frowning. When he came out, he was sluggish and distant.”

Virga believed that BaHee was clinically depressed. The cause was grief, which is the reason Virga didn’t pursue an aggressive course of treatment for the gibbon’s symptoms, instead prescribing “concern, patience and understanding” and advising BaHee’s keepers to not overreact. The worst of the depression lasted three or four months, a span similar to the acute phase of human grief after the sudden death of a family member. By the summer of the next year, BaHee’s symptoms had mostly disappeared. When I asked Kim Warren, another of his keepers, about the episode, she said: “BaHee was grieving. You could see it on his face.” Then she reconsidered. “I shouldn’t say that,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “because that’s anthropomorphism. I should say instead that BaHee was displaying withdrawal behaviors.”

Several staff members at Roger Williams told me, privately, that they felt uncomfortable talking about what their animals felt, especially in front of supervisors, though they were convinced that their animals experienced thoughts and emotions. At its worst, anthropomorphism, the fallacy of attributing human characteristics to nonhumans, leads us to imbue animals with our perceptions and motives, reducing the worldview of another species to a bush-league version of our own.

Yet avoiding anthropomorphism at all costs may be the main cause of the schism between scientists and the public in the debate about animal sentience. “Most reasonable people will be on the side of animals being sentient creatures despite the absence of conclusive evidence,” Jaak Panksepp told me. “But scientists tend to be skeptics. And, in this field, it pays to be a skeptic if you want to get your research funded.” Irene Pepperberg recalls receiving comments from colleagues on an early grant proposal to study verbal comprehension in African grays: “One of the notes was ‘What is this woman smoking?’ ” The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote the seminal essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” used a term for the tendency to deny the existence of phenomena that cannot be proved empirically. “Scientism,” he wrote in 1986, “puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it. At its most myopic, it assumes that everything there is must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories like those we have developed to date — physics and evolutionary biology are the current paradigms — as if the present age were not just another in the series.”