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Zoo: Loved, but overlooked

September 26, 2004 11:33 am

WASHINGTON--History has a way of repeating itself at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park.

In the late 1950s, the zoo was in serious trouble.

A child had been mauled and killed by a lion--and that tragic event was just the exclamation point on a long list of problems.

The poorly funded and badly managed zoo of that era was in disarray. Most of the staff members weren't properly trained to work with animals, and facilities were woefully inadequate.

Things have changed in the 48 years since Bill Xanten was hired as a gardener at the 163-acre National Zoo located in the Adams Morgan area of Northwest D.C.

For one thing, the zoo smells better now.

When a 19-year-old Xanten came to work at the zoo in 1956, the monkey house, which had been built in the '20s, was made entirely of wood. No matter how conscientiously it was scrubbed, urine and feces soaked into the structure.

"It was ripe," said Xanten, now the zoo's general curator.

"The first time I took my oldest daughter in there, she immediately threw up," he said.

The National Zoo has gone through many changes since then, evolving into an entity with a mission to research wildlife, to educate the public, and to help endangered species--not merely to entertain families on lazy Sunday afternoons.

The more things change, however, the more they stay the same.

Today the National Zoo is again at a crossroads because of the same kind of neglect that caused the problems of the 1950s.

Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican and zoo supporter, has said the venerable park requires "a staggering backlog" of $250 million in repairs and renovation.

In an op-ed piece in the The Washington Post, Frist wrote: "There were many reasons for the decline--stingy congressional appropriators, tight-fisted White House budgeteers and other Smithsonian priorities that conflicted with the zoo's needs."

Over the last 20 years, Xanten said, uneven funding has resulted in attrition-driven staffing cuts, which would appear to have contributed to a series of tragedies including the infamous rat-poisoning of two red pandas, Luke and Quentin. Grevy's zebras Buumba and Har died of hypothermia and malnutrition.

Oddly, the zoo was cited by the USDA for causing gorillas to have diarrhea by feeding them baked fish and beef instead of a vegetarian diet.

In the last four years there have been 20 questionable deaths in the 27,000-animal population, creating a firestorm of criticism. Frist, a physician who has been involved with treatment at the zoo, said most of those deaths were unavoidable.

The biggest flap followed the deaths of the red pandas. Because of its urban environment, rats will always be a concern, said spokeswoman Peper Long. The zoo hired a contractor to help control rodents, and aluminum phosphide tablets were buried in the red pandas' yard, she said. The animals ingested small pieces of the pellets that broke off on the ground, Long said.

And this month, word that Mei Xiang, the giant panda, is not pregnant became a national news story. Mei Xiang, who had been artificially inseminated, had experienced a "pseudopregnancy" not unusual for her species.

It's understandable if zoo officials rushed to get the word out about the faux pregnancy, lest the story leak to the media first and they be accused once again of veterinary ineptitude.

Things have gotten so bad image-wise that when a 52-year-old Nile hippopotamus fell down the steps leading to a pool and died recently, some Washington media treated it like a celebrity murder mystery that required a "CSI"-style investigation.

Normally, the animal would be expected to live from 40 to 45 years in the wild. In captivity, it might be expected to survive a few extra years.

"The hippo was just old," Long said.

But so, some say, is the concept of zoos--old and outdated. Critics say zoos are a relic no longer needed by a more advanced and enlightened society.

The National Zoo was founded in 1889, in what was essentially a different world. The critics say technological advances have made it possible for children to watch animals in their natural habitats on the Discovery Channel or in IMAX theaters.

Lisa Wathne, a specialist in captive exotic animals with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk, blasted the National Zoo for the recent deaths of animals there and said parents should not take their kids to that or any zoo.

"It's a horrible situation at the National Zoo," she said. "I wish I could say it's the exception to the rule, but it isn't."

She said things are probably worse at zoos with no public funding, because their records are not open to the public.

"If you want your children to learn about and foster a respect and compassion for animals," Wathne said, "the best way to do it is with today's incredible video technology, where you've got theaters with IMAX screens and documentaries that can show you things about animals you're never going to see at a zoo."

So does America need a National Zoo, or is technology alone enough?

"You need both," said Virginia Sen. George Allen.

Allen said zoo appropriation requests will have to be mulled over, but, "Just with my own children going to the zoo in Washington, the Virginia Aquarium in Virginia Beach, the Virginia Living Museum in Newport Newsseeing the actual live animal means a great deal."

National Zoo general curator Xanten, 66, first went to the zoo with his father. Later he took his children. Then his children took their children.

"I'd hate to think about a generation not having the chance to see animals close up," Xanten said.

"You can't get a feel for real wildlife if [video is] all you see," he said.

You need, he said, "the smell." You need, he said, to get a feel for what wild creatures from around the world really look like in the flesh, or fur, or feathers. You need the thrill of proximity.

"The IMAX Grand Canyon film is wonderful, but it's not the same as standing on the rim, face to face with a hawk," Xanten said.

One of the new attractions at the National Zoo is a bald-eagle blind that allows visitors to look America's symbol directly in the eye from as little as 10 feet away.

Fredericksburg-area residents are fortunate to be able to spot bald eagles in the wild on the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. But that requires luck. And binoculars.

When Xanten came to work at the National Zoo in 1956, it had more serious fundamental problems than it does today.

"The staffing was not on a professional level," he said. Many of the zookeepers, he said, came from farm work and had no knowledge whatsoever of exotic animals.

"It had a big collection of animals, but the zoo was in very, very bad shape," Xanten said.

Theodore H. Reed became director in 1958. At that time, and with the help of S. Dillon Ripley, who became secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1964, the zoo became one of the jewels of the city and a destination for foreign tourists.

"Reed and Ripley transformed the zoo," Xanten said. "They argued on [Capitol] Hill for change. They got a lot of money flowing into the zoo. They hired the first general curator and more and more professional staff and administrative staff over 10 years."

They opened a major research department and acquired the 3,200-acre Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal as a research and exotic-animal breeding facility in 1974.

What Xanten called "major, major growth" continued until the retirements of Reed in 1983 and Ripley in 1984.

"Then," Xanten said, "the zoo started to lose its pre-eminence with the Smithsonian. The zoo started to lose funding, to see a slow erosion of facilities and staffing."

In 1990, when Lucy H. Spelman took over as zoo director, she was faced with a situation similar to the one that existed in 1956, Xanten said.

"The budget was cut so drastically the zoo was sweating payroll in 1996," he said. "When people left Front Royal, their jobs were not filled.

"Facilities began to deteriorate and one exhibit after another wasabandoned. Animals were left to sit--just left to sit, from 1993 to now," he said.

That might sound as though the Smithsonian is to blame.

"I don't think it's our place to point a finger," said Long. "It was a snowball effect."

"This didn't happen overnight," Xanten agreed. "A lot of circumstances" led to the situation becoming dire.

Linda St. Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, said money is not the problem at the zoo.

"The zoo is not under-funded," St. Thomas said in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions. "In fact, the last Congressional appropriation gave the zoo more funding for repair and restoration [$19 million] than ever before."

She said that years ago the zoo was underfunded, but "that situation has been gradually corrected, with the most action on this front happening in the past three years."

Zoo spokeswoman Long said in an e-mail: "For a number of years, restoration and repair of buildings throughout the institution was not an Smithsonian Institution priority. However, for the past few years, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small has made an enormous effort to secure funding and refocus attention on Smithsonian's infrastructure--including the zoo's."

In any case, leadership at the Smithsonian has not been as steady as it was during the decades when Ripley led the Smithsonian and Reed headed the zoo.

Small, a former Fannie Mae president and the first businessman to be named secretary of the Smithsonian, has himself been embroiled in a number of controversies, some verging on the bizarre.

Small, who took the Smithsonian secretary position in 2000, pleaded guilty earlier this year to a misdemeanor violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act when his Amazonian tribal headdress collection was discovered to contain feathers from several protected species. He was given two years' probation and required to perform community service.

According to The Washington Post, some of Small's decisions have led to Congressional debate about the Smithsonian's direction. Congress gave the institution $628 million for fiscal 2005, increasing its appropriation by 5 percent as public donations have reportedly decreased.

The National Zoo's budget is built into the Smithsonian's overall budget. The zoo's annual federal appropriation is $24 million. The capital budget appropriated by Congress for fiscal 2003 was $18.7 million, including facility infrastructure repairs and design of new exhibition facilities. Friends of the National Zoo provides another $2 million to $5 million in private funds annually. Admission to the zoo is free.

Because of declining public donations for the Smithsonian, its leadership has sought to cut costs, and the zoo is one of the places it has looked.

One of Small's more controversial proposals came in 2001, when he suggested closing the National Zoo's sprawling research facility at Front Royal, which works to preserve endangered species. Those cuts were strongly opposed by the Virginia congressional delegation, including Sen. John Warner and Rep. Frank Wolf.

In 1996, the year the zoo had trouble making payroll, a frustrated Xanten retired and went to work at a hardware store, a job he wryly called "less stressful."

But in February 2003, the Xantens received a call from National Zoo director Lucy Spelman.

"In a way I was surprised when my wife said Lucy called," he said. "I hadn't expected it. "

But he knew full well how bad things were.

"I'd read about the panda poisoning in the papers and thought, 'Wow, that's a real tragedy.' I knew what was going on. I had stayed in touch with people at the zoo," he said.

The call left him torn.

"I was not sure I wanted to come back," he said. "I said I'd think about it."

His wife was flabbergasted.

"For seven years, all you've done is bitch and complain about what's wrong at the zoo," she told him. "If you don't take this chance to do something about it, I never want to hear about the zoo again."

Xanten's return didn't bring a magical, overnight fix.

"We went through a really bad period," he said. "It all came at the same time."

He was stunned when the zoo's accreditation was thrown into doubt, with deteriorating facilities and a reduced collection cited.

And The Washington Post stepped up reports on problems at the zoo.

This spring, Spelman announced her intention to leave at the end of the year, saying she had become too much of a "lightning rod."

"Everyone at the zoo is committed to revitalizing our animal collection, facilities and science programs," Spelman said this month.

"While we've taken the first steps--which are often the toughest--it's clear that this commitment to renewing the zoo must remain firm for many years to come," she said.

"We've already seen our partners, including Congress, FONZ and our visitors, come together to help in this renewal," Spelman said. "However, it's critical that this advocacy continues through strong funding and support for the zoo."

Looking ahead

There is much to be done in terms of repairing facilities, some of which cannot be torn down because they are historic landmarks. The sloth bear exhibit was built in 1890, and the elephant house is more than 70 years old.

The zoo and FONZ have outlined a 10-year revitalization program.

Asia Trail is the first step in the effort to renovate and modernize the zoo. One-fourth of the zoo will undergo renovation as part of Asia Trail.

Kids' Farm, a congressionally funded interactive exhibit designed to introduce young visitors to domesticated farm animals, opened in June.

Things have begun to turn around in part because Xanten borrowed a Ted Reed tactic from the late '50s and '60s--a conscious effort to get staff out to see other zoos. "It really made a difference. They'd come back excited," Xanten said.

When Reed left in 1983, Xanten said, everything started to stagnate. The zoo, he said, became a very parochial organization.

"Nobody went anywhere," he said. "There were no new ideas."

"That's turned around now. You can already see the change of attitude."

Now comes the hard part--convincing Congress that "We need a regular infusion of money," Xanten said.

"They can't just write a check and walk away and forget it," he said. "We're going to need their support for years to come."

Xanten said he's not embarrassed to plead for congressional help.

"We deserve it," he said. "We've been the stepchild."

Staff librarian Craig Schulin contributed to this report.

To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408 mikez@freelancestar.com