Pithecophobia

 Years ago, on my first trip to Africa, I was spending my first night out in the bush, when I awoke with a start.  I became aware that there was an animal outside my tent, shuffling around.  Fascination turned to fear, seconds later, when whatever it was let out an ear-piercing shriek and started smacking into the side of my tent.  I was pretty sure for a few seconds there that my first night on safari would also be my last.

The late night visitor, surprisingly, ended up being a pint-sized bat-eared fox.  Talking around the breakfast table the next morning, my companions - all who were safe and snug in their tents during this - had expressed their fears that there was a lion or a hyena in the camp, which could have done much more damage.  I guess I agreed.  I hadn't quite realized it at the time, but what had really scared me more than anything that night, what I really, really was afraid I'd see when the side of the tent tore open, was a baboon.  And that I was glad that I wasn't in a part of that country that had chimpanzees.

A lot of people are famously afraid of clowns.  The same can be said about skeletons, and zombie horror is a popular genre.  I think I heard it explained to me somewhere that we're afraid of these things because they are sort-of, but not quite, human in our eyes.  They are close enough to be like us, but our brain perceives something different and, therefore wrong and worrying about them.  With that in mind, I'm surprised that the fear of apes and monkeys, pithecophobia, isn't more of a thing.

There's something that I find very unnerving about a lot of non-human primates, and the more closely related they are to humans, they more off-putting I can find them.  They're the animals that I've probably enjoyed working with the least; the one day that I spent filling in for the chimp keepers, in the cavernous depths of their holding building, echoing with shrieks and the rattling of doors, was one of the creepiest experiences of my life.  Years later, when I watched Silence of the Lambs for the first time, that scene in which Clarice Starling first walks down the hallway of the insane asylum, past the various psychopaths as she made her way to Hannibal Lecter, reminded me of that day.

I find zookeepers very divided on the subject of chimps, which, being the most human-like of the primates, are also the most violent and mercurial.  Some of them absolutely adore them, finding their closeness to us fascinating and incredibly, and delighting in their intelligence and behavioral complexity, their dynamic social lives.  Others are horrified and disgusted by them - their grossness, their loudness, their brutality, to each other and to other animals.  One registrar I spoke with likened reading the daily report of the chimp keepers to a catalog of injuries that they inflicted upon each other, seemingly on a whim.  A former keeper who visited me at one zoo where I worked literally put her hands over her eyes as she walked past our chimps, asking me to guide her by and let her know when she had passed them.  I know of no other zoo animal that is so polarizing among keepers as to how they feel about it.

When most animals defecate on you, or threaten you, or display a sexual fixation on you, it can feel unpleasant enough, but you brush it off, usually.  When it's an ape, or a large monkey, however... well, it feels creepier, and a lot more personal.  It becomes harder to think of it as animal expressing that hostility and/or lust (they two have a weird habit of going together with primates), and more like a strange, wild person.

I'll throw myself on the back of an alligator, or wrangle an anaconda.  I'll go in with wolves and cheetahs.  I'll walk a thin catwalk above a shark tank.  But ask me to work chimps again?  Sorry, I think I have to wash my hair that day... and not just because the damn monkeys pooped in it again.

The Dangers of Finger Food

Last week, the President and CEO of the Indianapolis Zoo, Dr. Rob Shumaker, was treated after having his finger bitten by a chimpanzee at the facility.  According to an anonymous post on Reddit (the veracity of which cannot be confirmed), the bite occurred after he was feeding the ape "inappropriate foods" after hours.  Also according to the poster, this bite which was not the first after-hours ape-inflicted injury that Shumaker has experienced.  He's apparently had his hand hurt by an orangutan in the past.

Zookeepers getting bitten or grabbed through fencing is, whether we like to admit it or not, something that happens, though we try to be careful.  Shortly after this made the news, there was a report of an orangutan biting a keeper at Woodland Park Zoo and a jaguar scratching a keeper at Brevard Zoo.  I myself have had my hand grabbed and (thankfully, lightly) clawed and mouthed by a clouded leopard.  I was trying to palm some meat against the mesh, keeping my hand flat and outside the fencing.  Which would have been a great plan - if the leopard hadn't been able to reach her paws out and grab me.  Looking back, it was not an ideal plan.  It was made worse because it was happening in front of our director, to whom I was trying to demonstrate how our new clouded leopard was really coming out of her shell.

A more successful hand-feeding attempt with said clouded leopard

Accidents are something to be avoided, but not always successfully, and you learn from mistakes.

What separates the Indianapolis incident from the others, however, is that Dr. Shumaker isn't the caretaker of the chimps and, if the Redditor is to be believed, shouldn't have been doing what he's doing.  Now, at a smaller facility the director may be more involved in day to day animal care.  But at a larger zoo (and if your title is "CEO," it's probably a larger one), that's probably not the case, and even if the President/CEO is a former animal person, they probably don't know those individual animals as well as the keepers do, and the animals probably don't know them.  

In these cases, the boss at the top is the decision maker and steward of the animals.  That shouldn't let them fool themselves into thinking that the animals are their pets, and that they should pop in whenever they want to feed some nibblies.

I hope Dr. Shumaker learned a lesson from this embarrassing (and, I assume, painful) experience.  Though if it is not, in fact, the first time that this has happened, maybe not...

Satire: De-Wokifying the National Zoo

What's so woke about the zoo?

"What's woke about the zoo?

Zoos have important lessons to teach, as they do to millions of children who pass through them each year.

Zoos teach us that, where there is no diversity in a species, a single virus or invasive predator can wipe it from existence.

Zoos show us that, where there is no equity or balance in a habitat, the whole ecosystem can be at risk of collapse.

Zoos put us on notice that, when we humans make no room for inclusion, we erase the natural world from the earth.

Zoos demonstrate that diversity, equity and inclusion are not just things that happen on college campuses or in your company's HR department, but are vital things from the natural world.

At the zoo, you can't look the other way, even when an animal is off-exhibit."