Radiolab - Zoos

Episode Date: June 4, 2007

In a cruel trick of evolution, humans can stand just three feet from a ferocious animal and still be perfectly safe. This hour, Radiolab goes to the zoo.

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio. W.N.Y. C. And NPR. If you want your animals frisky, you'll start as early as possible. Today's show is about animals.

And at 6 o'clock, there would be crowds of people flowing, pushing each other out of the way, jostling, laughing, streaming towards the venue. About people getting close to animals. You had hundreds of lions and panthers, cheetahs, you had a baboon, you had an Indian rhinoceros. About what happens when we bring animals into our world. The slaughter is unimaginable. There is war of the crowd.

There is musical instruments rolling everybody up. That's Marina Belaruskaya. She's a historian, and what she's describing is Rome, 80-A-D. If you were lucky enough to be alive then and get a seat at the Roman Coliseum on a good day, you could watch, no joke, hundreds of animals slaughtered right in front of your eyes, one after the other. All kinds of exotic creatures. The populace never knew what would take place.

That was part of the agitation. They wanted the suspense. They wanted the tension. All right. So now that you have that picture in your mind, consider this one. Baby gorilla! Here we are at the Bronx Zoo, the gorilla exhibit, and what you've got are, well, no blood, no cheap thrills, just kids. You see the baby on the bats?

On the back. Like a piggyback ride? Yeah. Lots of kids, smushing their faces to the glass, trying to get the attention of the gorillas on the other side. Mommy, look at the gorilla. Gorillas aren't really noticing. But then, and this is a big moment, one of the adult guerrillas turns around walks to its side of the glass and taps. Today on Radio Lab, we wonder, how did we get here?

I mean, throughout history, even before Rome, our relationship to animals is pretty simple. We brutalized them. That's how it worked. Then in the 19th century, someone created the zoological garden, which wasn't much better. And now we've got the zoo. We still lured over the animals, but now we want to be their friends. We want to help them. How did that happen?

And how exactly do you help an animal? And this is an honest question, when it has to spend its entire life in a cage. Today on Radio Lab, zoos are our topic. I'm Chad, at boomrod. Well, you know, I think I can take you to the very moment in modern zoo history when the balance kind of shifted. And who are you? I'm Robert Krollwitch. And I love the zoo.

What are you? I don't know about the zoo. Kind of, yiky. Why? I just, I want the animals to not be there in the cage. Somebody's what, prettier, safer? Safer, prettier. I'd rather watch them on TV, frankly, and let them run around their own.

Well, this is interesting. The guy who made the big move in modern zoo history. Hello. Hello. That's him. Hello. His name is David Hancox. We got him into a studio.

And he's sort of a little bit like you. He was very ambivalent about zoos. I'd actually, for a while, toyed with the idea of, do I want to go and work in zoos and try to change them? or do I want to stay outside zoos and work to close them down? And I came to conclusion that there's no way you're going to close zoos down. The fascination of wanting to be close to wild animals cuts across every strata of society. You know, this is my case, by the way.

I love being close to them. Anyway, David Hancock's decided, if you can't beat him, you join him. And it was in the mid-1970s, and David was working actually as an architect. He was between jobs when he got a call, a friend to record. recommended him for a job at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Yes, yes. And he gets hired. I was in an unusually fortunate situation in that just after I was hired and got there,

the zoo director left. And so there was nobody to run the place, well, except for David. So he decided to take a look at the entire philosophy of the zoo and change everything, starting with the gorillas. They lived in awful cages. The gorillas were living in a small concrete building. It was a spare, empty, concrete box with a glass window. The guerrillas, of course, were bored and slowly going out of their mind.

Occasionally, you'd find a gorilla who'd take his feces and smear it on the wall. Yes. I mean, they had nothing else to interact with. The only natural components in his life that he ever came into contact with would have been the food that he ate and the feces that he had. produced. So cages were the problem, the solution he decided. Well, he wanted to rip up the cages, yank them out completely and replace them with something, a natural setting of some sort. But when he looked around for a model, no zoo in the world had guerrillas in what you would call a natural

setting. And he wasn't even sure what is natural for, say, a gorilla? There was very, very little known about guerrillas and their wild behavior. In fact, all the books said that gorillas don't climb. This was early in the 70s, remember. So David invited a person who did know. I heard about Diane Fossi. Diane Fossi's work was beginning to be carried in National Geographic. No, Diane Fossi. And yeah, from that Sigourney Weaver, she played the Sigourney Weaver. She was played by Sigourney Weaver. Diane Fossi was an actual person. Yeah, right, right. She lived with a group of guerrillas, wrote down everything she saw, their social interactions and all, and was the guerrilla expert at that time. And I heard that she was.

coming to the US, and she agreed to come to Seattle and spend a couple of days with us. We were trying to get images from her of the sort of environment we could create, and the breakthrough came after the couple of days she'd spent with us. I was driving her back to the airport, and I said, is there anything you've seen around here or anywhere in this part of the world, that in any way resembles the sort of places where you've seen gorillas in the wild? and she just pointed to this verge on the freeway. I don't know what a verge is. What's a verge?

A verge. Oh, sorry. The landscape on the side of the freeway, the sloping, what would you call it? I would call it, if it were President Kennedy, I would call it a no. What do they call it? A no. Yes, a no. But I wouldn't call that because only President Kennedy gets that.

No. I would call it the green stuff on the side of the road. Okay, yeah. It was a banked area that had once been cleared, and then this verdant growth that you get in Seattle was springing back. And she said, that, right there, that's where I would expect to see to be observing gorillas in the wild.

So I dropped her at the airport, came back and on the way back, illegally parked on the side of the freeway and took photographs. And then said, here, this is what Diane Fossey said we should be designing. So, as you could tell, they had absolutely no idea

what they were doing. But they also didn't have a boss. And within a few months, with help from a landscape architect. Hi, I'm Grant Jones, from Seattle, Washington. They drew up a plan and out came the bulldozers. Exactly.

And we were creating huge mounds and hills about 10 or 15 feet high. Some rocky cliffs along one side. It's a creek. Trees. Shrubs about three or four feet high. Big herbs and vegetables and tangles of vines, undergrowth, lots of laurel bushes. Hawthorn trees. A big comfrey leaves that we plant that have long, berries and pointed, drip tips, tropical-like leaves.

This growing pioneer plants. We just let it grow wild. Now, nobody was watching. And nobody was watching us. And that was the critical factor, I think, yes. Because if a traditional zoo director had seen or heard what we were doing, he would have stopped it. And why?

Why would a traditional zookeeper have stopped this? Well, because they were worried about what would... Suppose you had been a gorilla. And your whole life living in a cage, in a concrete cage. Right. Now I'm going to take you little jubes. my baby gorilla and stick him into a completely new place with sky and jagged things. I mean, I would be worried you'd hurt yourself. In the zoo world generally, I think people were very nervous about it.

That's Violet Sunday. She was the gorilla keeper at the Seattle Zoo. Yes, I was their primary keeper at that time, and the zoo was advised by a lot of zoo experts that it wouldn't work. I had zoo directors tell me it was stupid, irresponsible, and it was unnecessary. That, you know, the guerrillas would fall out of the trees and hurt themselves. If the guerrillas climbed, they would fall and break their necks. Fall and break their bones, or they'd get... They were putting their health at risk. Diseases.

They would get sick because it wasn't a sterile environment where you could, you know, disinfect concrete. And that they'd get psychologically deranged from all this space. Yes. Sometimes I'd go to David Hancock's and say, what are we going to do about these people? people. He'd say, ignore them. A bold statement, but as the clock ticked down to the day that these five animals would

walk from their iron cage through a door into this field, it was a real open question at the time, what will happen? I think we were all somewhat nervous. Oh, we were nervous. Oh, sure. How will they react? What will they do? The truth is, nobody knew. And so after five years getting ready, After 16,000 square feet of guerrilla display area were prepared, finally, it was time. On this sunny July, I think, so I remember it was a July morning.

I can't remember the exact year. I think it's 70s. Actually, I just looked it up. July 31st, 1979. We let them out. Kiki was the first to come to that doorway and look out. Kiki was the dominant gorilla of this group. There were six guerrillas.

He was the star. Kiki was my star. favorite. I have to confess. He was so smart. And he was big. He was six feet tall, 460 pounds. Kiki came into view first. And of course he's never seen anything remotely like this before. So here he is this huge creature standing at the doorway, just looking at this unknown world. He stood in the doorway for many minutes. And finally, Kiki starts to slowly step forward. First a step

and another. And he went as far as a creek and sat down. And then he looked up. We noticed he looked up for a long time and we looked up also. Clouds were blowing by at fairly low

altitude. Swallows flying over there were crows in the trees. There was a wind blowing. The trees were rustling. The grass was moving. You could see the hair on his face moving. He looked up for a long time and took all this in. And then he looked down into the water in a little Eddie there and you could see that he was looking at his face in the water, which he'd never seen. And then he just starts looking all around and then all of a

sudden he sees us. Grant, Violet, and David and a few others were standing behind some glass at an observation point. They were about a hundred yards. away from the doorway. And he came right up to the glass where we were. And they knew that Kiki had been a pretty angry gorilla before. And then he did something that we, in a million years, hoped he never would, which was to reach down into the sand, screwed his arm down deep into the sand,

and he pulled out this big chunk of broken concrete about six, eight inches wide. And then he held it up over his head. We thought, oh, this is it. He's going to break the windows. We'd spent weeks raking and telling the contractor to remove all debris and begging them to check and recheck to look for such things as this piece of concrete. And there it was. So Kiki held it over his head and sort of waved it around a little bit

and looked with an angry look at us. And he just held it there. Then he just dropped it. He almost threw it down. He just sort of dropped it down. We all breathed the sigh of relief. And then he laid down on his back, and his mate Nina came over and sat beside him, and a little baby came over and laid on his chest,

and they just proceeded to enjoy themselves like we weren't there. It was magic. It was just, it was magic. They looked like different animals. Totally different animals. It felt like we were seeing a gorilla in the wild. Needless to say, we all cried after he came over. I didn't cry, no, but I had a lump in my throat.

I felt like, finally, this is right. This is really what's right for them. I remember there was this strange feeling afterwards. It was almost like we'd been to a wedding where there was this mixture of happiness and sadness. And I think more than anything else, though, it was just a great sense of relief. We thought, well, when will he produce this angry behavior and pound on the glass?

And, you know, he never, ever did it. The old Kiki never returned, never filled his body again. He was never angry anymore? Well, I think what he's saying is that Kiki had really changed. The change in cages truly changed the animal here. Well, there's an interesting science question to ask about that. It's like if you do that, if you take an animal and put them into a radically different environment, How exactly does that change the animal?

Well, it clearly makes them feel better. Can you measure that? I think the closest we've come to an answer to that question is Elizabeth Gould has actually done a test with primates where she's put them in different types of enriched environments. That's Joan O'Leary. He's a science writer and regular radio lab contributor, and what he's talking about is a Princeton experiment.

A group of scientists, led by Elizabeth Gould, took three groups of monkeys and put them into three different kinds of cases. Sort of like classes, social classes. Like she divided them into a lower, a middle, and an upper. We can go through each one. Let's start at the top. One group of primates, group A, was in the Beverly Hills of cages.

Describe it. Lots of different monkeys running around today. Lots of social interaction. They had to forage for all their food, lots of toys. What kind of toys, do you know? Squeezy toys or like balls? I don't really... That doesn't matter.

So they had lots of choices to make lots of things to be engaged with, lots of conversations to have. Yeah, lots of stuff to occupy their mind. What about Group B, the middle class? Group B had, you know, we'll call it like the standard suburban setup. Not too fancy, they drove a Chevy. What are we really talking about here? They just had a bit less of everything.

They're a few less toys, a few less monkeys in this grand enclosure. So we can say that they had less. Yeah, they had less. And the third group was kind of the standard experiments on closure, you know, wire cage. So they had a lot less. Yeah. All right, so you've got these three classes of monkeys, upper, middle, lower,

Gould and her team put a bunch of monkeys in each class, let them do their thing for a while, and then they took a few of individuals from each of these groups and looked at their brains. So they looked at the amount of proteins you have in your synapses. They looked at the density of your dendritic arbors, which is... Did you just say dendritic arbors? Yeah, that's what...

That's a great name. They look botanical. Especially when they're happy, those little... You mean like each brain cell branches out in all kinds of different directions when it's happy, so you get a kind of a bushy kind of a feel? Yeah, exactly. What does that mean if I'm an animal? Is that good?

Yeah, they think it is. I mean, you can't exactly ask a monkey or a gorilla, are you happy? Are you doing okay in that cage? But you can look at their brain cells and ask, are they branching? Are they growing and making new connections and getting full and bushy? That's what these scientists wanted to know. Which of the class of monkeys had the busiest brain cells? Because of those monkeys would be the one of the ones.

that are most engaged with their world, most alive. Okay, Jonah, so jumping forward, Elizabeth Gould, looks into the brains of individuals from each of the three classes. Yeah. And what did she find? She found that there's a big difference between the impoverished in the middle class. Big difference between the bottom and the middle.

Yeah, the bottom and the middle is a big difference. How big? It's very significant. It was generally between 20% and 40%. 40%? 40% busier brain. Yeah. Wow.

So what about the difference between the upper and the middle? What was the difference there? There's almost no difference. What? No difference at all? That's the weird thing. Between the lower and the middle, huge difference, huge. But between the middle and the upper?

They really couldn't find much. Why? Well, I think the lesson is at a certain point, a tipping point is reached and your brain says, okay, we're in a complex world here. We have enough toys, we have enough social interactions, we've hit the tipping point. We've hit the tipping point. Let's go full throttle. Invest in new neurons

and a nice, complex brain. Let me ask you a question. What if you're a zoo animal and you're living in a crappy wire cage and then they move you to a nicer one? What would happen to your brain then? Has she looked into that? Yeah.

And she's found that within four weeks. Four weeks? About a month, the brain itself has changed. It begins to flourish again. And how long did it take you say? Four weeks. Holy moly. This is just four weeks.

Imagine what it looked like after a year. Yeah. After just four weeks, they saw significant changes in the basic architecture of their brain. So, Robert, just imagine Kiki now. A gorilla whose brain has been stunted by eight years of living in this little concrete box, suddenly Kiki is thrust outside where the weather changes. Birds fly, the rain falls from the sky. Where trees sway when he climbs. Suddenly Kiki has challenges, choices.

Right. And to think that after eight years of being stuck, his brain could explode with new activity in just four weeks? I mean, but that makes sense, you know, nature has to respond quickly. They don't, you know, most animals don't have four years to sit around and develop a complex brain. Yeah. Our neurons have to act fast. The message from this research is clear. From the perspective of the brain, you can easily create a cage which allows the brain to flourish.

You see, I told you that if you make the zoo better, you can make the best. beasts better. This is built in. Zos are not horrible places. No, no, no, I know. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me just throw one more... Keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. Yeah, let me just throw one more category into our little class hierarchy here. Okay. The category of creatures

who live in the wild. No cages. So in a sense, this is like your lab. Yeah. He paid a visit to a guy named Fernando Notbom. I'm a biologist of Rockefeller University in New York. And that's where we are. We're in the woods outside his lab.

stretch for thousands of acres and he calls these woods his real lab. That right there? Which one? They're little teeny guys, huh? And in the trees are his subjects. What these birds do is in the fall they start hiding seeds or nuts throughout the forest and they have to remember where they put them. Winter will come and at some point everything will be under a blanket of snow. So if you remember where you hit those seeds, you'll be the survivor because, I mean, in the case of chickadees, which are very small, for them to be alive the next morning, they'll have to go to sleep with a full belly.

Is that because their metabolism is so fast? Right, right. I mean, they're small birds. They lose heat like mad. It's a cold night. It's long. It lasts 10 hours. I mean, you go to sleep with an empty stomach.

Next morning, you're dead. Knowing this, Notbomb didn't experiment. He caught a bunch of wild chickadees divided. them into two groups. First group you put in a cage, pretty big cage. Ten by five, by three or something like that. Second group, set free so they could roam the woods as they please. Over this home range of about 30 acres. He did place bird feeders throughout the woods so they'd come back and visit it. Winter time rolls around. The wild chickadees are out there,

snatching seeds from the bird feeder and hiding them everywhere. The cracks of bark or crack of a stone. How many hiding places are we talking about here? We're probably talking about thousands. Thousands. It's a phenomenal memory task. The caged chickadees, meanwhile, didn't have to remember anything because they could eat as many seeds as they wanted from a little trough in the cage. Not Bob did a brain comparison.

And what he found was in certain brain regions, the wild chickadees had twice as many new neurons. The three birds... The caged ones. ...were recruiting twice as many new neurons as the old one. Twice. Twice as many. You know, that process of replacement was moving out of much briskered.

His theory is that these new neurons are always showing up every day like day laborers. The only question is, is there a job for them? In the wild group, absolutely, we need your help to remember where we put all those seeds in the caged group. There's nothing for those neurons to do. But here's the sad part. They still show up every single day. I think it's a period of a few days over which a neuron either gets a job or doesn't, and it doesn't get a job, and he does.

So it just offs himself? You don't get a job, you're gone. You don't have to kill yourself. You're just not going to get what it takes to stay alive. Which makes it all the more poignant to me. I mean, in the captives, you've got all these new cells. They're ready to do some work. Come on, give me a job.

Precisely. Yeah, they'd love to do it. But it's a shrinking economy, guys. What can I do? Thanks to Fernando Notbaum, he's a biologist at Rockefeller University in upstate New York. And also, before him, to science writer Jonah Lairer, who is the author of the upcoming book, Proust, was a neuroscientist. And coming up, what does a ferocious meat-eating, 500-pound feral cat eat for dinner at the zoo?

What? It's such a disaffling... Well, no, I don't want to tell you. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad. You're Robert, and we will continue with our program on zoos. Zoo. If you think a zoo, what an unusual...

Don't you wonder, like, where it comes from? We have to go to break. It used to be One second. It used to be called the zoological gardens, and then it got this, like, short name. Yeah, where is it? A song.

Let me introduce you. This is a lovely Miss Lou. In 178 called Walking in the Zoo. Walking in the zoo. After people heard the song, they just couldn't think of a place in any other way. Walking in the zoo. Walking in the zoo.

Hi, this is Lisa Beck. from Fort Worth, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alford P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Swoon at work. Crowich, I'm just going to go. Yeah, just go. Ready? Yeah.

This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abum-Rod. And I'm Robert Crowley. And today our topic is zoos. We're doing a little sort of chronological thing. Tracing a line from past to present, starting back at those old... nasty concrete enclosures, which I'm sure you love to visit as a little boy. What do you mean? You know, you're a city boy.

You don't have much animals here. But there's nothing to do with New York. What is like Tennessee? Right, right, right. You're right. Fine. In this case, when you talk about, you know, enriching the lives of gorillas as we did before the break, it's a simple heartwarming story because gorillas are, well, they're vegetarians, frankly.

It gets a lot more complicated when you switch. to a predator animal. Who likes to pounce and chase and bite. Yes. If you're going to put those animals in a cage and their whole being is organized around killing things, well, what do you feed them?

I asked that question to NPR science reporter, Nell Boyce. If we're talking like the big carnivores, like the tigers that would normally be out in the wild ripping other animals to shreds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do they eat? They're eating mostly this.

This is a little bag of kibble. It's basically like dog food. Here, check it out. This is for a meat-eating animal? Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. Try one. All right.

It's like getting chalk. This is what the predators eat, according to Nell. Really? Why don't they just give them meat? That's sort of what she wanted to know. Testing the mini-disp before heading to the zoo. Testing the mini-disp before heading to the zoo. Nell recently took a trip to the Toledo Zoo. Oh, hi.

She wanted to know what it might look like if a zoo actually gave the predators what they want. In this regard, the Toledo Zoo is pretty radical. Once a year they have this event, they call the Big Feed. The Big Feed. The Big Feed. The Big Feed. And that cage should be opening. Thank you.

Nell got there a day early just to check things out. Okay, so I duck behind the rhino house. We're going to go behind the scenes here. If I go in the back door, and where I finally end up is this kind of nondescript. Hello. Kitchen. This is the kitchen. We have a freezer.

and refrigerator down here. You don't think about a kitchen being at the zoo, but there's a kitchen here. Yes. Yes, there is. So I'm sorry, your name again was Beverly. Scoonover. Schoonover.

Yes, Beverly Schoonover. And this kitchen is actually the reason I came. This is our freezer. It usually runs about 10 below. These are the rats. And we actually have rats in about four sizes. We have large jumbo monsters. And then we have packs of 50 miles.

packs a 25 mice. And then I... These are the fuzzies. These are probably about 10 days old. The fuzzies and the pinkies are pretty much newborn. Here's the basic idea. You want to get closer to what the animals actually eat in the wild. So you want to give them some sort of whole animal.

Whole as in like all the fur still on. Eyeballs. Whiskers. So, um, what, are things different today because the big fetus tomorrow? Hooves. Um... Hooves? Yeah.

The tigers are getting some calves. And that's not something that we give out all the time. Caves? Can we look at it? Yeah. So they take me into the freezer. And in the corner, just sort of on the floor, is this box, and it's got a black garbage bag kind of thing in it,

which we open up, you know, and like looking right up at me. It happens to be the head part. Is the baby calf. But that's just the head. It was like a little baby, little eyelashes, little ears. It's a baby cow, you know, and I thought, oh, baby cow. And then I thought, oh, my God, tomorrow little children are going to be watching this baby cow be ripped apart by a giant wild cat. They're wild animals.

You know, they live in a captive situation, but they still have those wild instincts. That's Beth Stark. She's the one who brought carcass feeding to the Toledo Zoo. At the time we hear, oh, carnivores are meat eaters, but really, they're not just meat eaters, they're flesh eaters. They eat other animals. And one of the challenges there is, you know, how do we provide for the welfare of the animals while at the same time providing for the needs of our visitors? So it's about 10 o'clock in the morning, and the gates are open now, so visitors are starting to stream in. In about 15 minutes or so, they're going to start the tiger feed.

The tiger feeding was the first feeding of the day. A big crowd was beginning to gather. Right now, the tigers aren't in the pen. How many people? Oh, like maybe 150 people. a lot of little kids. So we brought the boy down. Been pumped since my wife told me about it,

so we made sure we got here early to check this out. The carcasses were already out. The zookeeper comes out with her microphone and sort of gives a little... A part of our enrichment program... ...description of carcass feeding... ...why they do it. ...all of the animals...

behavioral needs as well as their psychological needs. And nobody at this point is listening to the interpretive discussion of this. Because as she's doing this... Hey, bud. I think I heard a door. they let the tigers into the pen. Oh, look, here come the tigers. Watch Brian, look, the big one's coming down.

One of the tigers just, like, streaks across the pen and grabs the carcass. It's like, you know, it starts, like, immediately playing with it. And I have never seen, in all my years of zoo going, I have never seen a tiger move that fast. Like, at one point, one of the tigers was, like, carrying one around by the ear. You could see the little calf face and it was dragging it around.

What were people doing? Were they cheering? Were they crying? There was nobody there that seemed to be disturbed by it. Really? Although here was a conversation that I heard many, many times. The children would say, what is that? What is he eating? And the parent would say, it's a baby cow. And the kid would say, why is he doing that? Why do they do it?

What's how they eat, honey? you have to eat. Well, that's what he eats. That's the kind of food that they eat. And the child would say, well, I don't eat cows. I don't eat cow. What, honey? I don't eat cows. Yeah, you do. And the parent would say, what? Of course you eat cow. Well, at home. You eat hamburgers? What do you think a hamburger is?

It's made out of cows. Sure is. And there would just be this shocked look on the kid. And I must have heard that conversation like five times. Why is the dead? Because it's food, honey. But they're, but they're dead. And now it's food.

Wow, that's like a birds and the beast kind of moment. Yeah, it really was. People are just fascinated by it. They appreciate being so close to it. Tommy, see them back there? Way back in the back. They'll say, oh, guy, that's really gross, but then moving closer for a better view. What Beth Stark was telling me is that, you know, the whole time that they've been doing this carcass feeding program,

and they would interview people afterwards and ask them questions. We did survey people. How did you feel? What did you think? And found that more than... And what she found... 98% of them... is that the public is pretty much uniformly.

Very positive in what they saw. Enthusiastic. One of the questions we put on the survey is, do you want to see more of this and which animals would you like to see? And so what do people say? Just about everybody, from what I can remember, circled every animal we put. Every animal?

Just about every animal. Yeah, every animal. You know, like, you know, do you want to see dead rabbits? Do you want to see dead rats? Do you want to see dead calves? Do you want to see dead dears? And do you want them to see them fed to polar bears, tigers, wolves, you know, like a Chinese menu, you know, like pick your prey animal, pick your predator.

Do you want to see that? And they're like, yes, yes, we want to see this. The only complaints were people didn't want rabbits fed at Easter. And around Easter, you know, parents complaining or worrying that their kid was thinking that the Easter bunny was being eaten. It just shows you how, like, what the animals eat at the zoo is fraught with sort of human emotions and ideas about right and wrong. Here's another example. Okay. So when I was at the tiger pen, there was this woman who came up and was very interested. She didn't seem turned off by the idea that they were eating a dead calf, right? But then she got this very strange look on her face and she said, I hope that was dead. And I said, well, does it matter? I mean, because at some point, it died. You know, does it matter whether it died at the hands of a human or the hands of a tiger? And it was late in the afternoon and I'm ready to go. So I turn off my tape recorder. And just at that second, even though she did, She's just expressed sort of relief that the calf was dead when it was put in the tiger's pen.

She starts to tell this story that was so diametrically opposed to what she had just expressed that I just had to turn my tape recorder back on and say like, wait a minute. Okay, wait, can you start at the whole beginning? So what was happening? What happened? A squirrel fell through the layers on the snow leopard's cage. She and her daughter had been hanging out by the snow leopard's pen. There's this sort of net kind of above the pen.

and there was this squirrel that had been walking on the net, and it fell down. The squirrel is really dumb. Into the snow leper's pen. And her daughter described this story to me where the snow leopard, who had just been kind of hanging out, kind of bored, immediately began to stalk the squirrel. The snow leopard was pouncing.

And the squirrel, like, started trying to get away. Her mother said it was, like, this standoff where, like, the snow leopard was matching all of the moves of the squirrel. Yes, he followed a move for moves. And, like, the audience was kind of transfixed. Her daughter, like, could not watch. She hid when she thought the squirrel was coming down. Yeah.

Yeah, she took off. Her daughter couldn't watch, was hiding her face. And in the end, the squirrel escaped. The squirrel got away. He was smarter. And I said to the girl, well, how did you feel? Were you rooting for the leopard or the squirrel? Which one?

And she said, Leopard. I was rooting for the snow leopard. Huh. And I said, but you didn't want to see it eat the squirrel. You didn't want to see that. And she said, well. I still wanted for the snow leopard because...

I didn't want to see it, but I sort of wanted to see it. Because it was cool, but... Nature, right? Yeah. It's still wild. I think that the reason they felt comfortable watching that and telling me about it was because it seemed like an episode that was not between the animals and the human. It was between the animals.

But what about you? If you were that little girl, how would you watch that whole scene? You watch it kind of gleefully or more sheepishly? You just watch. It's just happening in front of you. I mean, that has nothing to do with you. It's funny, you know, she never mentioned the possibility of feeding live animals to a predator. By the way, N.

N.P.R. Thank you, N.L. Not those frozen ratsical things, but something that scurries and you can bite the animals. Yeah, well, live feeding is a long. which American zoos will not cross. The only places that do feed out live animals, as far as we could find, are in China. But lucky for us. Yeah, I live in Beijing.

That's where reporter Jocelyn Ford lives. It was just over an hour's bus ride outside of Beijing. We asked Jocelyn to go visit one of these live feeding parks. That's what they're called live feeding parks? You just get on a bus. They drive you right into the lion's den, and they'll even sell you a chicken. The chickens are about $4 each.

And the tour people sell them. right there on the bus? Right in the bus. Okay, so they drive to the lion's den, and one of the people on the bus, one of the tourists, decided, okay, I'm going to buy a chicken, and I'm going to feed the lion.

And everyone sort of leaps to that side of the bus. The guy who bought the chicken, he would pick it up and press it against the glass. Here come the lions. And soon we had four or five lions. Sitting right under our window looking at us. They're circling us. Two lions.

Three lionesses. Waiting at the window. He looks very intense. I tell you, they had the most intent look I have ever seen anywhere. I mean, they have these very cold amber eyes. being angry, hungry eyes. Well, he looks like he's ready to pounce. And the guy with a chicken just opened the window

and dropped the chicken out. The second that lion grabbed the chicken and just took it in his mouth. It held in his mouth and I noticed that its legs were still quivering. Now it's working away at it, just... at it, just sort of ripping it to bits. Now it's a pile of feathers. I asked a grandmother who was on the bus, she was with something like a five-year-old. And I asked her if she thought this was a healthy thing to have this, her grandson watching this cruel event.

And she said, hey, it'll make him a braver guy. if you don't eat them first, they're going to eat you. And she was just very matter of fact about it. One woman said, we should teach our kids to love animals. But at the same time, if the bigger animal eats the smaller animal, that's the way the world works. So you should understand this. Survival of the fittest. Just your Darwin.

And you should also understand where you fit into it. If you're weak, you're weak. and you can't, you know, run fast, escape or whatever, you'll become somebody's dinner. And that's the lesson of life. I think in the United States that we're often so far removed from the ugly part of the food we eat. We just get squeamish when we see it.

Whereas, especially the rural people in China, you know, they deal with life and death of animals around them all the time. And I think we're just closing our eyes to it. Having said that, I mean, personally, I feel that it does make for a more humane society when you do feel sorry or compassionate about the animals around you. And there was no concern at the safari park here, nothing of that sort. It was all about fun and games. Okay, so at the end of the bus ride, they drop you off at a little circus-like place.

And they had a little fake shooting gallery. with all sorts of brinky-tink music. And I went and looked under this dirty old tent when he was thrown up over some metal rods. And there were rows of cages and tigers pacing back and forth and yowling. Have you ever heard a tiger yowl?

Caged just the length of his body can turn around, but that's about it. Thanks to the reporter Jocelyn Ford. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. And I'm Robert Quilwich. And we'll continue in a moment. This is Candace currently calling from her bicycle. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation

and by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thank you. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Aboum-Roy. And I'm Robert Crullwit. And our topic today on Radio Lab is zoos, the saddest places on the planet.

They're not. What do I have to do? No, they're not the saddest places on. No, you know, I'm right. The point, look, despite everything we've said up to now about the true wildness of a zoo animal, the fact remains, looking into the eyes of a live animal can be an extraordinarily transformative experience. And don't ask me. Ask Alan Rabinowitz.

Okay, I'm Alan Rabinowitz. He's going to be our last stop on the show. I'm the head of a program that seeks to explore the Earth's last great wild areas and try to protect them. Alan Rabinowitz is a renowned animal conservationist. He's set up wildlife preserves all over the world. And Jed, like you, he's not particularly thrilled by zoos. Although, without a zoo, and I'm thinking of the Bronx Zoo in particular, He wouldn't be who he is today, because when Alan was very young, very young, he had a terrible stutter.

Oh, I couldn't talk. My body would spasm. So if you wanted to say, coming mom... See, Cumming's a hard contact. Coming is the tongue against the upper palate. So you couldn't get the word out? I didn't speak a fluent sentence to another human being until I went to this, finally, this clinic when I was a senior in college. a senior in college.

Yeah. I never went on a date. I never kissed a girl other than my mom. How do you connect to anybody? I don't connect to anybody. I had no friends. None? That's how I...

None. I had little animals that I would take into the closet with me and I would talk to them fluently. And that's how it was for Alan. For much of his childhood, the only time he says he could free his tongue to talk was in the dark with his pets.

Green turtles. hamsters and gerbils and chameleons, which would all die. I would talk the way we're talking. Really? I could talk fluently to the animals. And his father one time overheard him talking to the dark. I thought, well, maybe we should take this boy to the zoo. To the Bronx Zoo.

To the Bronx Zoo. He used to bring me to the old great cat house. Horrendous. You remember the great cat house? It was an iron, black key. It was classic old. old concrete floors, but you'd go in

I mean talk about an experience you'd walk in and hear growling, roaring I mean it sounded incredible raw power and he loved being there he just loved it all those noises of like 20 cats

all together vocalizing at the same time maybe it was the sound which appealed to me as a kid they couldn't speak. And once again, in front of the zoo cats, if he was alone, he could talk.

Yes, my father's funny, because he knew I'd talk to the animals, so he would stand back. He knew. If he came too close, I'd stop because I would stutter because he was there. But if he wasn't, you could talk more fluently. I could talk fluently.

And there was one old jaguar. And I remember, as a kid, I would stand there and I would watch this magnificent, huge, strong beast. This massive, strong animal had blank eyes. It just looked blank, and it was pacing back and forth and back and forth. I felt this animal is like me, because I felt strong. I felt good. I felt powerful inside.

But yet I was trapped inside this cage of my body. And that's when Alan remembers turning to that cat as a kind of felt. exile and whispering a promise that I would try to find a place for us. I remember that. I remember saying once, I'll find a place for us. And I didn't mean that particular, I don't know what I mean, I can't really look back and know exactly what I meant. But I felt, no matter what, I would find a place for us. And that promise... I would find a place for us. He kept that promise in his head for two decades. He went on and visited a speech therapist. He learned how to use his mouth and tongue to get past his stutter, not completely,

but enough to finish college and then to go into graduate school and study wildlife ecology. And it was at his graduation party from graduate school. We got the offer that would change his life. At my going away party, my major professor asked me if I wanted to go to Belize and do and study jaguars. Not just study them, count them. An objective survey of how many jaguars are really in the country. Alan asked, how do you count? Count Jaguars. And that's when the professor said, well, you've got to catch them. Catch a jaguar?

How do I know? I had no idea. It's like saying, go catch a dragon. Everybody knew the Jaguars are stealthy, almost ghost-like cats in a forest. Nobody had ever captured Jaguars in the range forest. But that was exactly what the professor was proposing. Go to a little country in Central America. Please.

Go deep into its jungle, collar as many jaguars as you can so that we contract them and learn about them. Weeks past, picture Alan on the edge of the jungle in Belize with absolutely no idea what to do next. We opened a map of Belize. It had one dirt road down the entire country. Alan figures the only way he's going to catch a jaguar. Why do this is to talk to people who hunt jaguars. Now, they're there. He calls them Mayans and they live in the forest.

And I went to the hunters and they told me, run them with dogs. And one hunter still had Jaguar. dogs. And I'll tell you, of everything I have ever done in my life, I still rank that as the absolute hardest. Because when these dogs get on a jaguar scent, it's a bloodlust. You're running full speed through the jungle. The Mayans are in front of us, running and chopping at the same time. And I knew in my mind there were poisonous snakes, but you can't think about it because you don't have time to look where you're running or your feet. And one time dashing behind dogs and machete waving hunters, disaster struck.

They were just about to actually tree a jaguar when one of the crew got bit by a poisonous snake. And he died. So everybody quit. Nobody had worked for me. They all thought I was jinxed. So then I had to figure out how to capture Jaguars by myself. Nobody worked for me.

Finally, one Mayan Indian came to work for me. And we ended up building traps. And I would put live pigs because they didn't want dead meat. they would want live meat, which they could kill themselves. So I'd put live pigs in the back of these traps. I'd have to go feed the pigs every single day. The first trap I built, I built it out of two-by-fours. I caught a jaguar, and the jaguar chewed its way through the two-by-four door

and busted its way out of the two-by-force. Whoa. I mean, they are powerful animals. And then I built iron rebar. Even then I made a mistake. One jaguar got so mad, it bit the iron rebar, and pulled at the iron rebar and snapped its canines.

It snapped its own canines trying to bust the iron rebar. I mean, its roots were hanging out and I put it down. I tried to do primitive dentistry. I had to cut the roots. And it was lying there dying, and I just felt so bad.

I carried the jaguar back to my cabin. I lay next to it, and it died on the floor next to me. I just lost it. I lost it. But one good thing came out of this experience, he learned to build a better trap. And so cat by cat by cat, Alan was able, and he was the first to do this. He was able to count the jaguars in that forest, and there were thousands of them.

But he had the sense, and again, he was first, that they were in real danger, because around them, people were cutting down their forest. And if the forest went, the jaguars go too. So that's when he began the campaign, which eventually led him to the prime minister. I was given a chance, and not only did the prime minister agree to meet me, but he invited me to address him in the whole cabinet, but only 15 minutes. Now remember, this is a guy who for two whole decades could barely speak. His stutter, which is now less of a problem, was still there. And now he's being asked to address a prime minister and a cabinet in a high pressure, make it or break it, 15 minutes. or bust situation.

I knew I couldn't stutter. I mean, I only had 15 minutes. I said, look, you will lose nothing by this. If you don't protect it, guaranteed it's going to be gone because the citrus people want it for both timber and citrus. Make it a forest reserve

and make it tentative. Make it a five-year agreement. If I can't prove to you, I can bring in outside money in five years. What do you have to lose? And if it works, you've got a jaguar preserve. You have the world's first jaguar preserve.

Now his pitch was supposed to last 15 minutes. That's the time he was allotted, but he went way over there. I ended up staying in there an hour and a half. And the vote was a tie in the cabinet. The prime minister himself broke the tie in Allen's favor. And by the end, he agreed. The prime minister voted in my favor. That made it.

It got great press as the world's first jaguar preserve. To this day, it's the world's only area. designated specifically as a Jaguar prison. And by the way, the whole time with the Prime Minister and all, that whole time, he never stuttered. So Alan decided his work was more or less done. He could go home now to New York. And just before he left, he decided to go for one last walk in the jungle,

a last visit. He wasn't looking for Jaguars. He wasn't expecting to see one. This was his goodbye. But when he was looking down at the ground as he walked along, And suddenly he thought, well, hello, because there on the ground, right in front of him, was a fresh print of a jaguar, a big one. Bigger than any I had seen in that area, and that just got my blood going. So I started following it.

You almost never, never see a jaguar when you follow its tracks because it knows you're there. I mean, I was hoping against hope that maybe I'd see the jaguar, but actually I didn't think I would. because they always knew I was coming and they'd always go away. And then it started getting died. I started getting late and I didn't want to be in the jungle at night. I'd have a flashlight or anything. So that's when I turned around. There was the Jaguar, about 15 feet away. Behind you.

It was behind me. It'd been behind me probably quite a ways. So it knew that you were tracking it and it decided to find out who you were. It had circled around and it probably cut off into the fire. watched me as I passed, then got back on the trail and just stayed back of good ways. And it was pretty clear this cat had been creeping closer and closer. To where by the time I turned around it had shortened the distance between us really small. I mean, that was...

So it was in leaping distance? I couldn't have gotten away from it. And I knew that. So I did what I thought was the right thing, which is make myself small, make myself sub-dive. just crouched down. And then the Jaguar did something which I didn't expect it to do. It sat down. That was strange to me.

And then I got scared. And I stood up and I stepped back because I felt the distance was too close now. That it didn't like. And all this time, I mean, I'm totally aware. I have no place to go. And with no place to go, nowhere to run, Alan just stood there. Alan just stood there, frozen in place. And the Jaguar rose, and it too just stood absolutely silent.

Then it just turned, started walking off into the jungle. And before it disappeared into the brush, it turned back to look at me. Then I really looked at in the eyes. They were wild eyes. There was fire in the Jaguar's eyes. The last thing I remember very clearly is looking into itself.

to its eyes and thinking of seeing the Jaguar in the Bronx Zoo as a child, but seeing the wildness in this animal's eyes, it didn't look anything like that cat in the cage. It showed strength and freedom. We had just protected this incredible area, which now would be its home. And I remember telling the cat at one point that I'd find it. a place for us. Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is the director for science and exploration at the Wildlife Conservation Society. And if you want to read more about his Jaguar Adventures in Belize, the book is called Jaguar.

One Man's Struggle to Establish the World's First Jaguar Preserve. We should wrap up. For more information on anything that you heard today, check our website,radioLab.org. We got a podcast. We do. You can sign up for it there or at iTunes. And send us an email. Let us know what you think.

Radio Lab at WNYC.org is the address. And Radio Lab is one word. It is. I'm Chad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Krollwich. And we'll see you. At the zoo. We'll see you with the zoo.

At least some of us. First message. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Ellen Horn, senior producer, Lulu Miller, assistant producer. Production Executive Dean Capello, production support by Sarah Pellegrini, Brett Beyer, Scott Goldberg, Alaska Keyville, Sam Levy Ander, Aviamitra, Ryan Scammell and Jacob Weinberg.

Also, very special thanks to Tamar Lewin and Amy Bush's class at North Star Academy for their musical contributions.