Milwaukee Zoo - Washington Park

Modern Zoo Problems

Undated Manuscript from Ernest Untermann Papers

[Ernest Untermann was director of the Washington Park Zoo, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This manuscript was probably presented during a meeting of the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums in Milwaukee in 1938.]

In the last 40 years, the character of the zoo has changed from a mere menagerie of show animals to a center of scientific research and a link in the educational system. Formerly a good stable boss could manage the zoo. This type of zoo manager no longer meets modern requirements. The zoo is expected to be not only a show place, but also an aid to the study of zoology, biology and paleontology, an experiment station for the study of animal and human psychology, a character builder, and a refuge for the conservation of valuable animals threatened with extinction.

While some of the old circus atmosphere still clings to the zoo, it has lost its side-show tinsel. Some of its animals are still trained, but not so much for the amusement of superficial spectators as for the exercise of their own intelligence and for their relief from the monotony of cage life. The zoo has assumed an increasingly valuable role for students, artists and scientists.

The great mass of zoo visitors come only to satisfy their curiosity. The zoo has to take this fact into account in the purchase of animal exhibits. But it also aims to offer to students and scientists an opportunity to observe at close range those animals which otherwise could not be studied alive, except by very few fortunate individuals who can make trips of exploration.

Of course, it is impossible to exhibit specimens of every family of mammals and birds. Neither the available space nor the habits of many animals will permit it. We cannot exhibit a live whale. Manatees and dugongs don't last long in captivity. The Duckbill Platypus of Australia cannot be kept even in Australian zoos. The koala, or Australian marsupial Teddy Bear, lives on Eucalyptus leaves, which cannot be regularly and freshly supplied to a zoo in our climate. Many mammals and birds lead night lives and for this reason make poor exhibits. But a fair cross section of the orders of Mammals and Birds can be exhibited. The Milwaukee zoo compares favorably with the best zoos in the country, at least in this respect.

The report of Washington Park Zoo from October 1, 1935 to October 1, 1936 shows an increase in the total animal collection from 973 to 1007 specimens. The zoo now exhibits 81 species of mammals, 170 species of Birds and 4 species of Reptiles. Among its new purchases are one pair of Chimpanzees and one pair of Great Anteaters. Between these two extremes of the mammal scale of life, we have a fair representation of the principal mammal families. Our bird collection has some rare specimens not found in any other zoo. The figures, of course, do not indicate how difficult it is to increase the number of exhibits and to balance the birth and death rates.

During the year, we recorded 77 births among the following species: Rhesus Monkeys, Lions, Genettes, Black Bears, Red Foxes, Grey Wolves, Kingajous, Pronghorns, Bighorns, Buffaloes, Sasin Antelopes, Deer of the Axis, White-tail, Black Fallow, white Fallow, Sambar and Sika species, Elks, Zebus, American Egrets, Snowy Herons, Blue Peafowl, Amherst Pheasants, Ring-neck Pheasants, Mute Swans and Mallard Ducks. We don't count Guinea Pigs, White Mice, Rabbits, Rats, Pigeons and Sparrows in this survey.

During the same period the zoo lost 171 animals through various causes. They were mostly small birds, monkeys and new-born animals with vital defects due to the cagelife of the parents. Some of these newborn animals were so called "blue babies" with an excess of blood. Some were unseasonable runts.

The principal diseases causing death were tuberculosis, pneumonia, bronchitis, pleurisy, fits, broken ribs, degenerated organs or tissues, infected lungs, livers, kidneys, defective hearts, internal hemorrhages, softened bones and diseases of the digestive tract.

The greatest loss was the sudden death of the Chimpanzee Mary Lou, due to tubercular lungs and a hemorrhage of the brain brought on by excessive hot weather. A rare case was that of the Mandrill Jimmie, who went blind when softening bones and swollen tissues pinched the optical nerves. Several deaths were due to cage mates. About a dozen were traced to moronic visitors.

Among the tricks of such visitors which killed some birds and badly injured some small mammals were the following: Throwing broken glass, poisoned or tainted food, indelible pencils, lighted cigar and cigaret stubs into cages or fenced enclosures' driving pointed sticks through the bars at animals tame enough to come within reach; breaking the bones of birds and mammals with stones' cutting wire fences, bending back the cut threads and frightening the animals so as to drive them into the projecting ends.

Several birds died with fish-hooks in their throats or stomachs. two boys were caught trying to hook bear cubs with heavy fish-hooks. A gang of boys cut a hole into the wire fence of a grey wolf den, coaxed the parent wolves aside with sausages, and stole two cubs. The stolen cubs were recovered, the boys traced and punished.

These practices suggest the need of better collaboration between the zoo and the public schools, and of a campaign among parent-teacher organizations to impress a more civilized behavior upon the children. Perhaps a leaflet could be printed, to be used by teachers to instruct pupils "How to behave at the zoo."

This is a task of character building. The zoo, like the school, has to combat the monkey in man and the false standards implanted into young minds by fiction writers, movie scenarios, stage heroes and crudely glorified historical characters. The swaggering western gunman, the gangster of the city, the Seawolf sort of ship's captain, the whole melodramatic lot of high-life and low-life roughnecks and show-offs that infest our literature and art, set the silly example which the children imitate. So we have all sorts of young Buffalo Bills, Kit Carsons, Texas Kids, Hawkeyes, Sitting Bulls, Geronimos, Dilligners and Capones stalking the animals in the zoo and putting on airs of injured innocence when caught tormenting and hurting them.

It isn't so much the fault of the children as of social conditions which permit private individuals to make money by feeding mental pap to the children, demoralizing them under pretext of teaching them courage, endurance, daring and, above all, go- getting. The vast majority of fiction plots are built around heroes and heroines that have the mentality of a half-grown baboon. Most of the plots with their stereotyped climaxes can be sustained only by having the hero and heroine commit a series of incredibly stupid and emotionally insane acts. That's precisely fitted to the mentality of children and of those adults who never grow up mentally. Puck, the Boy who never grew up, may be an interesting character in a Shakespearean play, but in real life he is a nuisance who cannot be taught, but must be restrained and kept from running amuck.

The San Diego Zoo was one of the first experiment stations in this country which tried to coordinate recreation with education. The zoo management, faced by budget cuts, inadequate use of research facilities, and the ignorance of the public concerning the labors and services of a zoological garden staff aside from the simple maintenance of exhibits, decided to make the educational opportunities of the zoo available for class work.

To this end they arranged 15 informal two-hour periods of lecture and demonstration covering the history, administration and services of zoological gardens, with a brief review of the famous zoos of the world; the story of the sources, capture and shipping of wild animals; the classification of animals in systems and their evolution from now extinct forms; a discussion of diseases of zoo animals and their treatment, with a survey of the measures of sanitation available for modern zoos; a discussion of natural and artificial selection and breeding; methods of placing, housing, and feeding different wild animals; the routine of daily care, training and study of animal psychology; illustrated talks on mammals and birds in general, or selected species and individuals, with colored slides, movies, x-rays and microphotographs; guide trips through the zoo.

I have added paintings of animals in their natural landscapes, and supplemented the ordinary signs with maps showing the geographical distribution of the exhibited animals. The scientific names of the animals are also given for those who are looking for that kind of information. I hope to have our lecture hall equipped with projection machinery, films and slides.

The Washington Park Zoological Society is doing its share to advertize the zoo, and the newspapers are cooperating very well. But these efforts are not enough to secure an increasing attendance of public school students, mainly, I think, because the teachers themselves have not been trained to utilize the zoo facilities for visual instruction in zoology, biology, psychology and related subjects. If the schools would give credit to pupils for studies at the zoo, we could secure a steady stream of students that would be a welcome addition to the ordinary gaping and loafing sort of visitors. Special research problems could be assigned to different grades of students, and credit given for problem work well done.

This sort of cooperation can be developed between any class and the zoo management, and promote a better understanding of each other's objects and facilities.

Experience has proved that there are never enough pupils anywhere that will tackle such work and stay with it of their own accord. The initiative must be taken by the teachers and some form of gentle coercion used, such as is within the power of teachers and fits into the psychology of school discipline. This seems to be the only practical way to get such work organized and have it followed through to the point of achieving worthwhile results. The nature study and science clubs already existing in the schools could be used as path-breakers.

Thanks to Miss Enderis and Mr. Strehlow, we have begun to do a little of this in Milwaukee. We have started a guide service for visitors. Mr. Zeisler and Mr. Fay have taken up this work with enthusiasm. Mr. Gardener and Mr. Graves of the youth movement have helped. We find that, with few exceptions, the general run of visitors shows little interest in this service and declines to follow the guides on a tour even when assured that no charge is made for this service. But some teachers have taken it up readily and expressed their satisfaction with it. A class of children coming here for a guide tour generally pulls along some of the other visitors who ordinarily would not accept the invitation of the guides.

I hope that in time we shall be able to get this work so well systematized that we can have a regular schedule of rotation for the various public school classes, so that we know beforehand whom to expect and when. The next step would then be to have zoology and biology teachers notify us that they intend to discuss some special problem in front of the lion, monkey or bird cages, or in connection with our other exhibits. This would be an inducement to the guides to read up on this or that special subject and to contribute something to the discussion from their own store of study and experience. The young men of the Youth movement would also be encouraged to do some systematic studying and to present from time to time written evidence of their studies to the guides or to Mr. Strehlow.

The value of the zoo is that it supplements book study with some living types discussed in the books. Textbook study is dry, as every teacher knows. The museum is well equipped for the study of systems of classification and for the identification of types. But only the Zoo offers opportunities to watch the living animals. It will do so even better when equipped with modern barless dens, which enable the animals to move freely in surroundings imitating their natural habitats.

A diagram of a skeleton, of muscles or skulls with teeth is instructive, but is more interesting and instructive to watch the skeleton, muscles and mouths move, and to observe the peculiar way in which different types of animals move their limbs and use their teeth. It is still more interesting to find out by observation what goes on in the heads of the animals. The study of animal psychology is a valuable aid to the study of human psychology.

We zoo and outdoor men, who have lived with wild animals so long that we are familiar with their mental habits, know that the old fanciful distinction between animal instinct and human reason has no foundation in fact. Human beings have developed naturally from animal ancestors. There is no metaphysical gap between the animal and the human mind. A reasonable distinction between instinct and reason must be based upon this irrefutable fact. The human baby acts instinctively, that is, without deliberate reasoning, and the adult animal has reasoning faculties.

It is true that animals don't think in words. Even those who seem to respond to certain commands listen more to the sound than to the word. Animals think in pictures or emotions. But human thinking was originally also a thinking in pictures and emotions. A good deal of the most elemental human thinking still is performed in that way. Some of our happiest moments are those in which we suspend the reasoning ego and just feel. A great deal of destructive human passion blots out the reasoning faculty.

Thinking in words was no doubt a great improvement when it first became possible among human beings, but all of us know that nowadays our heads are stuffed full of many words that have a double or triple meaning, and even with words that, carefully analyzed, have only an imaginary meaning, or no definite meaning at all.

The language of philosophers, lawyers and politicians is infamous for much verbiage and dim meaning. Anybody who has studied philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Cartesius, Spinoza, Helvetius, Diderot and other French encyclopedists, and even more modern philosophers like August Comte and John Dewey, knows how little really tangible and practicable thought is contained in 2500 years of philosophical evolution in word juggling.

After reading the screwy philosophical antics of a famous mathematician like Bertrand Russell, I always turn with a feeling of grateful relief to the simple mental reactions of Simba, the lion, Yacob, the hippo, or Sultana, the world famous polar bear mother, who gave birth to 11 cubs in our zoo and raised 10 of them. You can always understand them, even though they have never heard of the square root of minus 1 and don't know that the national constitution of the United States may be misused as the last resort of the scoundrel. They don't worry about the old Kantian puzzle of whether they eat only the phenomenon of food, or the food itself.

When you get fed up on metaphysical psychology, physiological psychology, behaviorism, school psychology, new thought, Christian science and occult science, come to the zoo and look at our birds and mammals. They adjust themselves to the unnatural cage life, learn to know their friends and enemies, and exhibit all the variations of personality which are supposed to be the superior attributes of the human race.

Look at our wild geese, ducks and swans, that every year migrate from the arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico or to the Amazon Valley, and next year find their way back across thousands of miles of wilderness and cultivated country to the small lake or lagoon, where friendly hands fed them and where they know they are protected. They do this without maps, without instruments, without human training, relying merely on their memory and experience. How may human aviators can equal that?

Who teaches our wild deer to distinguish an armed hunter from an unarmed friend? Who teaches our wild range horses to know all the trails for a hundred miles around their range, to remember good pasture and the places of good drinking water? Have you ever noticed how quickly a horse brought as a colt from a wild range gets familiar with railroads, automobiles and airplanes, things that no instinct could have taught them by inheritance? What becomes of the old snobbish distinction between animal instinct and human intelligence when confronted with such facts, which we zoo men and outdoor students of animal life know at first hand?

The only real difference between animal and human intelligence is one of relative variations in the structure of brains and of experiences in different environments. So far as emotional thinking goes, wild animals are capable of every emotion that a human being is proud of, even of deliberate sacrifice for its young or for a friend. They do these things without hope of reward in this life or beyond. People who are fond of dogs, cats, parrots, horses and other domesticated animals know something of the ability of these animals to have an active mental life and vigorous emotions.

So come to the zoo and get straightened out on your psychology. You will quickly learn that you have to discriminate between different species of animals representing different degrees of intelligence. You will observe that even specimens of the same species differ in intelligence, just as human beings do. You cannot treat them all alike, you cannot expect them to act alike. But no matter how much their intelligence may differ from the human or among themselves, you will not find any metaphysical gap between their senses and their reasoning powers. You will discover that speculative philosophers who assert the opposite do not exhibit a very high degree of observation and of logical reason, the popular prejudice to the contrary notwithstanding.

A philosopher who argues that since we can know the world only through our senses, therefore we can never know the real world outside us as it is, imagines that his mother is not real, and that his mother did not know whether she gave birth to the child itself or only to a subjective phenomenon of a child. Our senses, and the senses of the animals may not always be reliable, but such as our senses are in the normal state and for all practical uses, they can distinguish a Democrat from a Republican, a Socialist or a Communist, and they don't go far wrong if used carefully. And so can an animal distinguish between a real lion, a stuffed lion, and a stuffed shirt. And when the lion eats the philosopher, there is no doubt about the reality of the fact and its results.

Thinking such things over carefully, you will probably sympathies with me when I say, after 40 years of philosophical study, that the more I see of certain philosophers, the better I like animals.

The zoo is thus a practical experiment station for the comparative study of animal and human psychology. Human visitors who come to the zoo merely to gape at the animals, to tease, irritate and torture them, are not such superior beings as they imagine. Many a despised animal in the zoo is more dignified, disciplined and well behaved than such visitors. And one of the types least respected by zoo men is the so called sportsman, who brings his children to the zoo armed with toy guns and shows off before the animals and the children as a mighty hunter.

Sportsmen nowadays pose a friends of wild animal conservation. But conservation of animals for the sport of killing them off once a year is a mockery. Everybody knows by this time that this sort of conservation does not conserve. The so called sports magazines have been full of complaints for years. In spite of protected preserves, conservation laws, fines and imprisonment, fewer wild animals survive from year to year. The passenger pigeon, trumpeter swan, heath hen and buffalo were ruthlessly killed off before we had any conservation policy, but our protected wild ducks, geese, swans, herons, egrets are getting fewer, even with a shortened hunting season or a complete suspension of hunting for several years.

The reasons for the failure of conservation in the united States are well known to the responsible authorities. There is, first, the fact that so many game wardens, being political appointees, permit favored individuals to violate the game laws and even help them to kill animals that they are sworn to protect. There is, furthermore, the fact that some of the societies, which were originally organized for the purpose of creating protected animal reserves, acquire real estate which they sell to rich shooting clubs, permitting them to build shooting lodges next door to the very same reservation which the society is supposed to protect. There is, finally, the fact that this country is too big to be properly policed, and that manufacturers of arms and ammunition, and fur companies, have millions invested in enterprises aiming at the mass destruction of animals.

So long as there is a profit in that kind of enterprises, and the government not only tolerates but promotes them, we cannot have any really effective conservation policy. If the present conservation policy is continued, it will not be long before all our large and medium-sized wild animals are exterminated to the point where only a few survivors can be found in our zoos, state and national parks. And if then we cannot succeed in breeding such animals in these few really protected areas, they will become extinct, as the others have. The future generations of human beings a few centuries hence will know them only from hearsay and pictures, as we today know the Ma, Aepyornis, Dodo and Great Auk.

If you really love animals, if you really wish to preserve enough of them in the wild state for future generations, you must help to educate the young in a new and effective conservation policy. You must help to make it unprofitable for any human individual to make arms, ammunition, traps for the mass destruction of wild animals. If it becomes necessary under a really effective conservation policy to shoot a definite number of animals that breed fast enough to interfere with cultivated areas, it should be left to government hunters to shoot a limited number. Sportsmen who want to test their skill can shoot clay pigeons or other mechanical moving targets. At least they should not pretend that the conservation of animals for the sole purpose of supplying enough animals for them to kill once a year is real conservation.

I am not a sentimental conservationist. I understand very well that we cannot let animals multiply beyond the point of our own safety. But we can protect those that have never done us any harm and that have never bred in such numbers as to be really a menace to our health and economic activities. This includes all the hoofed animals and all the birds, even the eagles, hawks and falcons, which have never bred fast.

Even these birds of prey are more useful than harmful to the human race. Wolves, coyotes, badgers, foxes, raccoons, opossums, may eat a few domestic birds or attack some young domestic mammal, but compared to the injurious pests destroyed by these carnivores, their depredations are insignificant and do not justify their wholesale destruction. The same is true of wild cats, lynxes and cougars. They destroy far more small rodents, such as rabbits, rats, mice, moles, etc., than domestic animals.

The sad truth is that our big lumber, cattle and sheep companies have done far more harm to the natural resources of this country than the wild animals for whose destruction the government pays a bounty. But to tell this obvious truth is decried as radical propaganda, although it merely appeals to the American sense of fair play. It is good sense and fair play to educate our children to understand that it is better to make this earth safe for human beings and animals than to let a few egoists destroy us all. So come to the zoo and see for yourself that the wildest animals are not as bad as some human beings, and convince yourself whenever you have the opportunity in the wild open spaces that even the most powerful wild animal will rather go out of your way than let you get close enough to shoot it. Wild animals are wild only when driven to defend their lives, and hardly one of them will do us any serious harm if left alone.

I would like our Milwaukee Zoo to be a center for the dissemination of this understanding, a strong link in a real conservation policy.