Zoo accidents and incidents of people getting hurt or even killed by animals were more common when zoos put their big, most dangerous beasts inside heavily barred, jail-like cages.
That is the consensus of zoologists, design specialists and zoo park construction experts who weigh the pros and cons of modern, open habitat designs that most often use moats to separate animals from humans.
Last Friday, the safety efficacy of moated exhibits was called into question when a toddler fell into the gorilla habitat in Brookfield Zoo’s Tropic World exhibit. An 8-year-old lowland gorilla female, Binti-Jua, amazed onlookers by gently picking up the unconscious child and carrying him to a service entrance where keepers pulled the boy to safety. The 3-year-old boy was released Tuesday afternoon from Loyola University Medical Center, where he had been treated since the fall.
Parents and children have jammed the Tropic World exhibit since then, and most of them clearly favor the new animal habitats over old-fashioned, tightly confined cages.
“If it was a glass cage, it would take away from the learning environment,” said Sue Wilson of La Grange Park, who was there with her son, Brett, 7. “It’s natural. It’s open. It’s almost like you are a part of it.”
Despite Friday’s incident, many visitors interviewed this week at the zoo in suburban Brookfield didn’t feel safety was much of an issue.
“Accidents can happen anywhere,” said Alice Stewart of Park Ridge, who was at the zoo with her grandson, Eric Vargas, 8. “It happens in your back yard, in your swimming pool.”
Zoo experts maintain that new exhibits, while giving the appearance of making the animals more accessible to visitors, actually are far safer than the old cages.
“The vast majority of accidents and incidents occurred in old, barred exhibits,” said William Conway, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs New York City’s zoos.
“Bars are no guarantee of safety when people do not behave reasonably. Moats usually are sufficiently formidable so that people don’t try to jump them.”
The move to put zoo animals into more naturalistic settings has been evolving since moats were first introduced to German zoos in the early 1930s. The first zoo in this country to adopt the “open” concept was Brookfield Zoo, which copied German zoos during its construction in the mid-1930s.
The idea behind the 14-year-old Tropic World is to place the animals in a setting where they will be able to live lives closer to what they would be in nature, said Jay Petersen, Brookfield’s zoo collection manager. Replacing cage bars with a moat, he said, allows zoo visitors to see more natural animal behavior and learn to appreciate the ecosystem their wild counterparts live in.
“Is safety a compromise? If we had a chain-link fence over the whole exhibit, no child could fall in,” Petersen said. “But given our track record here–that 15 million people have been through here and this is the first time anything like this has happened–I don’t think safety has been compromised.”
Several people have been injured and killed by animals in zoo exhibits in recent years. Most of those incidents were the result of deliberate efforts to get into the exhibits made by heedless children or mentally unstable adults.
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In the past three years, a disturbed woman was killed in Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo when she sneaked into a lion habitat during the night, and a mentally ill man was slightly injured by bears at the San Diego Zoo.
A mentally disturbed man recently was rescued from the lion exhibit at the Bronx Zoo after he jumped a fence, climbed through shrubs and crossed a moat to get to the surprised animals. He was the exhibit’s first human interloper since it was built in 1941.
“Older cages were not safer than the new, open exhibits,” said J. Michael Rice, a consultant at Zoological Planning Associates Inc. in Wichita, Kan., a major zoo design firm.
The old-fashioned cages usually were spartan, concrete-and-steel cubicles with nothing in them to stimulate the animals. The sterility of their lives sometimes caused zoo animals to become more irritable and hostile to other animals and humans.
“Old-style cages created behaviors that were more dangerous to spectators and workers than exhibits are today,” said Rice.
Cages, he said, had few barriers between animals and the public except for the bars themselves and a railing holding people just out of reach. In earlier times accidents occurred when people ducked under the bar to reach inside the cages to touch animals, or when they held young children up to the cages for a closer look.
“In a modern exhibit,” Rice said, “somebody has to make a considerable effort to make contact with an animal. Usually they have to climb a fence or a rail, cross dense foliage, leap across a moat or swim across a pond.”
In an exhibit like the one at Brookfield’s Tropic World, Rice said, fear of the sheer drop-off from the human observation deck into the animal habitat is a considerable deterrent.
“The danger to the boy (who fell at Brookfield Friday) was not the animals, it was the fall,” he said. “He and his parents were exposed to the same sort of hazards as they would have been in any natural park.”
The open zoo designs may serve as a psychological safety barrier that, in effect, makes people more cautious about zoo animals, said Andrew Rowan, director of Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, a sort of animal-welfare think tank.
“Open designs,” he said, “let us feel a little bit more on an equal footing with the animals, perhaps recalling ancient times when in nature there were no barriers at all, and humans had to be quite cautious.”