Come up and see my coloured toilet rolls on a string, said the southern grey hornbill to his mate. That wasn’t all he was offering. The Johannesburg Zoo had recently installed a state of the art hornbill love nest on a pole. Tricky to get there — at least until they installed a ladder. He was suspicious of this innovation, so a human scrambled up and down to show how it was done.
It made a hornbill feel, well … horny. Ditto for his life partner, and chances are that come spring, he’ll be passing on his new climbing techniques to chicks.
Some way off, a tree trunk has rekindled the passion of another old married couple. Kleinkel, the 20-year-old African elephant, left his night quarters one morning to find tree trunks on the ground waiting to be tossed.
Lammie, his 27-year-old mate, seemed moved by his muscle power. But then he started to push the envelope by reaching over the moat, sliding his trunk under the fence and levering up the fence posts. When Kleinkel started working on a bridge to freedom, the tree trunk was replaced by a ball made of firehoses.
Logs, ropes, love nests and ice lollies are among the ploys being used to improve the lives of animals at the zoo, one of two in South Africa to have a dedicated “animal enrichment officer”. Nomusa Mhlungu works with zoo keepers to make the lives of animals as “natural” and stress-free as possible. She also attends to the emotional needs of other primates: the zoo visitors.
Zoo CEO Jenny Gray says the moral duty to improve animals’ lives has practical spin-offs. Visitors and funders are deterred by visibly unhappy animals in unsuitable enclosures, and other zoos balk at exchanging animals or cooperating with breeding programmes if conditions are considered inhumane.
Mhlungu has a zoology degree and is training in animal enrichment. She takes pride in her handicraft skills — she is a dab hand at tying ropes and hammering up nests and platforms.
One of life’s toughest challenges — finding and keeping a mate — is generally solved for zoo animals. To get them moving, Mhlungu has to rely on food. These days, animals are expected to climb, dig, jump, and swim for their supper.
“Zoo tigers don’t swim,” she says. “But in the wild they do. So we have to motivate them by floating iced meat lollies in the water.”
Monday is ice-lolly day. Giraffes give their mouths a good workout on fruit and vegetable lollies slung from a large fake tree. Bags of frozen bones are slung high in the tiger enclosures, forcing the big cats to make repeated three-metre leaps to bring them down. Baboon treats include bamboos filled with frozen strawberry jelly.
For the chimps, moved from glass boxes to an African-themed retreat with water features and an electric fence, life has also become more demanding. Now they must climb poles to reach their food and compete with pigeons for seeds by rummaging through leaves and bark on the ground.
It is the treats that have to be worked for. Peanut butter must be fished from a concrete termite mound with sticks. Other food comes in perforated geometric balls which require shaking and poking.
All toys and feeders are chained down to prevent the chimps from hurling them at visitors. But that is an improvement, according to Gray, who says the chimps in their new 2 500m2 environment have stopped hurling dung at passers-by. “Most had never climbed a tree. Now they’ve all put on weight and hair.”
Deviant chimp behaviour in captivity also includes coprophagy, constant masturbation, endless body rocking, head bobbing, begging, pacing in circles, fighting, refusing to mate, and hurting their young and themselves. Encouraging animals out of stressed behaviour caused by inappropriate care in the past is one of Mhlungu’s tasks.
Bears, naturally driven to walk long distances each day, are among the most problematic animals. Mhlungu had to help a bear that had walked for years in a small circle in the corner of his cage. Relocated to a larger enclosure, he continued his obsessional round.
The therapy involved leaving treats further and further away from his comfort zone, until he began to use all of his new environment.
The zoo’s brown bears are to be shifted from their tiny 62-year-old pens to half-acre enclosures, presenting Mhlungu with the challenge of encouraging them to hang around where visitors can see them. The difficulties in providing adequate care for large bears, including polar bears, means there are no plans to replace them when they die.
Other animals have been relocated from cages. Islands in a pond have been converted to “realistic” lemur habitats, with jungle gyms and swinging sleeping rooms. Balls of straw hide seeds, while lengths of plumbers’ pipe hung horizontally make snoozing areas.
A new tiger enclosure is being designed to make cat-human interaction more intimate, with a glassed-in “tiger toilet” and a mesh section allowing visitors and tigers to savour each others’ scents. Gray and Mhlungu are a little worried about this — tigers have a habit of spraying from the rear.
“Fight rooms” was how zoo staff described the concrete mountains that the baboons used to inhabit, with each group able to hear, but not see, each other. The three baboon troupes have been moved to the old carnivore enclosures, where the rock walls provide climbing surfaces.
Internationally, some zoos have taken animal enrichment to levels not permitted in South Africa, such as providing live food, other than insects, to predators. Animal welfare laws bar the dumping of live fish in the polar bear and otter pools.
Gray seems unsure about whether such realism would appeal to local zoo-goers. At overseas zoos she has visited, “hunts” of this kind can be a gory spectacle, she says.