Menagerie Manor

by Gerald Durrell

  We stood round him in a sodden, exhausted circle and looked at each other. There were five of us and four hundredweight of reluctant tapir. It was beyond our powers to carry him, and yet it was quite obvious that Claudius had no intention of helping us in any way. He lay there with a mulish expression on his face. If we wanted to get him back to the Zoo, it implied, we would jolly well have to carry him. We had no more reinforcements to call on, and so it appeared that we had reached an impasse. However, as Claudius was prepared to be stubborn, I was prepared to be equally so. I sent one of my dripping team back to the Zoo for a rope. I should, of course, have brought this very necessary adjunct of capture with me, but in my innocence I had assumed that Claudius could be chivied back to his paddock with no more trouble than a domestic goat. When the rope arrived, we attached it firmly round Claudius’ neck, making sure that it was not a slip-knot. I thought one drenched member of the staff was heard to mutter that a slip-knot would be ideal. Then two of us took hold of the rope, two more took hold of his ears, and the fifth took hold of his hind legs, and by the application of considerable exertion we raised him to his feet and wheel-barrowed him all of ten feet, before he collapsed again. We had a short pause to regain our breath and started off again. Once more we carted him for about ten feet, in the process of which I lost a slipper and had my hand heavily trodden on by one of the larger and weightier members of my team. We rested again, sitting dejectedly and panting in the rain, longing for a cigarette and unanimously deciding that tapirs were animals that should never in any circumstances have been invented.

  The field in which these operations took place was large and muddy. At that hour of night, under the stinging rain, it resembled an ancient tank-training ground which had been abandoned because the tanks could no longer get through it. The mud in it appeared to have a glue-like quality not found elsewhere in the Island of Jersey. It took us an hour and a half to get Claudius out of that field, and at the end of it we felt rather like those people must have felt who erected Stonehenge – that none of us was ruptured was a miracle. A final colossal effort and we hauled Claudius out of the field and over the boundary into the Zoo. Here we were going to pause for further recuperation, but Claudius decided that since we had brought him back into the Zoo grounds and would, it appeared, inevitably return him to his paddock, it would be silly to delay. He suddenly rose to his feet and took off like a rocket, all of us desperately clinging to various parts of his body. It seemed ludicrous that for an hour and a half we should have been making the valiant attempt to get him to move at all and now we were clinging to his fat body in an effort to slow him down for fear that in his normal blundering way he would run full tilt into one of the granite archways and hurt or perhaps even kill himself.

  We clung to him like sucker-fish to a speeding shark, and, to our intense relief, managed to steer our irritating vehicle back into its paddock, without any further mishap, and so we returned to our respective bedrooms, bruised, cold and covered with mud. I had a hot bath to recuperate, but as I lay in it drowsily, I reflected that the worst was yet to come: the following morning I had to telephone Leonard du Feu and try to apologise for half an acre of trampled anemones and 12 broken cloches.

  Jacquie, as always, was unsympathetic. As I lay supine in the comforting warmth of the bath, she placed a large whisky within easy reach and summed up the night’s endeavour:

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ she said, ‘you would get this blasted Zoo.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NIGHTINGALE TOUCH

  Dear Mr Durrel,

  You are the most evil man I know. All God’s creatures should have their freedom, and for you to lock them up is against His Will. Are you a man or a devil? You would be locked up in prison for the rest of your life if I had my way...

  Whether you run a pig farm, a poultry farm, a mink farm or a zoo, it is inevitable that occasionally your animals will damage themselves, become diseased, and eventually that they will die. In the case of death, however, the pig, mink or poultry farmer is in a very different position from the person who owns a zoo. Someone who visits a pig farm and inquires where the white pig with the black ears has gone, is told that it has been sent to market. The inquirer accepts this explanation without demur, as a sort of porcine kismet. This same person will go to a zoo, become attracted to some creature, visit it off and on for some time, and then, one day, will come and find it missing. On being told that it has died, they are immediately filled with the gravest suspicion. Was it being looked after properly? Was it having enough to eat? Was the vet called in? And so on. They continue in this vein, rather like a Scotland Yard official questioning a murder suspect. The more attractive the animal, of course, the more searching do their inquiries become. They seem to be under the impression that, while pigs, poultry or mink die or are killed as a matter of course, wild creatures should be endowed with a sort of perpetual life, and only some gross inefficiency on your part has removed them to a happier hunting ground. This makes life very difficult, for every zoo, no matter how well-fed and cared-for are its animals, has its dismal list of casualties.

  In dealing with the diseases of wild animals you are venturing into a realm about which few people know anything, even qualified veterinary surgeons, so a lot of the time one is working, if not in the dark, in the twilight. Sometimes the creature contracts the disease in the zoo, and at other times it arrives with the disease already well established, and it may well be a particularly unpleasant tropical complaint. The case of Louie, our gibbon, was a typical one.

  Louie was a large, black gibbon with white hands, and she had been sent to us by a friend in Singapore. She had been the star attraction in a small RAF zoo where – to judge by her dislike of humans, and men in particular – she had received some pretty rough handling. We put her in a spacious cage in the Mammal House, and hoped that, by kind treatment, we would eventually gain her confidence. For a month all went well. Louie ate prodigiously, actually allowing us to stroke her hand through the wire, and would wake us every morning with her joyous war cries, a series of ringing ‘whoops’ rising to a rapid crescendo and then tailing off into what sounded like a maniacal giggle. One morning, Jeremy came to me and said that Louie was not well. We went down to have a look at her, and found her hunched up in the corner of her cage, looking thoroughly miserable, her long arms wrapped protectively round her body. She gazed at me with the most woebegone expression, while I racked my brains to try to discover what was wrong with her. There seemed to be no signs of a cold, and her motions were normal, though I noticed her urine was very strong and had an unpleasant pungent smell. This indicated some internal disorder, and I decided to give her an antibiotic. We always use Tetramycin, for this is made up in a thick, sweet, bright red mixture, which we have found by experience that very few animals can resist. Some monkeys would, if allowed, drink it by the gallon. At first, Louie was clearly so poorly that she would not even come to try the medicine. At last, after considerable effort, we managed to attract her to the wire, and I tipped a teaspoonful of the mixture over one of her hands. Hands, of course, are of tremendous importance to such an agile, arboreal creature as a gibbon, and Louie was always very particular about keeping her hands clean. So to have a sticky pink substance poured over her fur was more than she could endure, and she set to work and licked it off, pausing after each lick to savour the taste. After she had cleaned up her hand to her satisfaction, I pushed another teaspoonful of Tetramydn through the wire, and to my delight she drank it greedily. I continued this treatment for three days, but it appeared to be having no effect whatsoever, for Louie would not eat and grew progressively weaker. On the fourth day I caught a glimpse of the inside of her mouth, and saw that it was bright yellow. It seemed obvious that she had jaundice, and I was most surprised, for did not know that apes or monkeys could contract this disease. On the fifth day Louie died quite quietly, and I sent her pathetic corpse away to have a post-mortem done, to make sure my diagnosis was correct. The result of the
post-mortem was most interesting. Louie had indeed died of jaundice, but this had been caused by the fact that her liver was terribly diseased by an infestation of filaria, a very unpleasant tropical sickness that can cause, among other things, blindness and elephantiasis. We realised, therefore, that, whatever we had tried to do, Louie had been doomed from the moment she arrived. It was typical that Louie, on arrival, had displayed no symptoms of disease, and had, indeed, appeared to be in quite good condition.

  This is one of the great drawbacks of trying to doctor wild animals. A great many creatures cuddle their illnesses to themselves, as it were, and show no signs of anything being wrong until it is too late – or almost too late – to do anything effective. I have seen a small bird eat heavily just after dawn, sing lustily throughout the morning, and at three o’clock in the afternoon be dead, without having given the slightest sign that anything was amiss. Some animals, even when suffering from the most frightful internal complaints, look perfectly healthy, eat well, and display high spirits that delude you into believing they are flourishing. Then, one morning, it looks off-colour for the first time, and, before you can do anything sensible, it is dead. And, of course, even when a creature is showing obvious symptoms of illness, you have to make up your mind as to the cause. A glance at any veterinary dictionary will show a choice of several hundred diseases, all of which have to be treated in a different manner. It is all extremely frustrating.

  Generally, you have to experiment to find a cure. Sometimes these experiments pay off in a spectacular way. Take the case of the creeping paralysis, a terrible complaint that attacks principally the New World monkeys. At one time there was no remedy for this, and the disease was a scourge that could wipe out your entire monkey collection. The first symptoms are very slight: the animal appears to have a certain stiffness in its hips. Within a few days, however, the creature shows a marked disinclination to climb about, and sits in one spot. At this stage both hind limbs have become paralysed, but still retain a certain feeling. Gradually the paralysis spreads until the whole of the body is affected. At one time, when the disease reached this stage, the only thing to do was to destroy the animal.

  We had had several cases of this paralysis, and lost some beautiful and valuable monkeys as a result. I had tried everything I could think of to effect a cure. We massaged them, we changed the diet, we gave them vitamin injections, but all to no purpose. It worried me that I could not find a cure for this unpleasant disease, since watching a monkey slowly becoming more paralysed each day is not a pretty sight.

  I happened to mention this to a veterinary surgeon friend, and said that I was convinced the cause of the disease was dietary, but that I had tried everything I could think of without result. After giving the matter some thought, my friend suggested that the monkeys might be suffering from a phosphorus deficiency in their diet, or rather that, although the phosphorus was present, their bodies were unable, for some reason, to assimilate it. Injections of D3 were the answer to this, if it was the trouble. So the next monkey that displayed the first signs of the paralysis was hauled unceremoniously out of its cage (protesting loudly at the indignity) and given an injection of D3. Then I watched it carefully for a week, and, to my delight, it showed distinct evidence of improvement. At the end of the week it was given another injection, and within a fortnight it was completely cured. I then turned my attention to a beautiful red West African patas monkey, who had had the paralysis for some considerable time. This poor creature had become completely immobile, so that we had to lift up her head when she fed. I decided that, if D3 worked with her, it would prove beyond all doubt that this was the cure. I doubled the normal dose and injected the patas; three days later I gave her another massive dose. Within a week she could lift her head to eat, and within a month was completely cured. This was a really spectacular cure, and convinced me that D3 was the answer to the paralysis. When a monkey now starts to shuffle, we no longer have that sinking feeling, knowing that it is the first step towards death; we simply inject them, and within a short time they are fit and well again.

  Another injection that we use a lot with conspicuous success is vitamin B12. This acts as a general pick-me-up and, more valuable still, as a stimulant to the appetite. If any animal looks a bit off-colour, or starts to lack interest in its food, a shot of B12 soon pulls it round. I had only used this product on mammals and birds, but never on reptiles. Reptiles are so differently constructed from birds and mammals that one has to be a bit circumspect in the remedies you employ for them, as what may suit a squirrel or a monkey might well kill a snake or a tortoise. However, there was in the Reptile House a young boa constrictor which we had obtained from a dealer some six months previously. From the day it arrived it had shown remarkable tameness, but what worried me was that it steadfastly declined to eat. So, once a week, we had to haul the boa out of its cage, force open its mouth and push dead rats or mice down its throat, a process which he did not care for, but which he accepted with his usual meekness. Force-feeding a snake like this is always a risky business, for, however carefully you do it, there is always the chance that you might damage the delicate membranes in the mouth, and thus set up an infection which would quickly turn to mouth canker a disease to which snakes are very prone, and which is very difficult to cure. So, with a certain amount of trepidation I decided to give the boa a shot of B12, and see what happened. I injected halfway down his body, in the thick muscular layer that covers the backbone. He did not appear to even notice it, lying quite quietly coiled round my hand. I put him back into his cage and left him. Later on that day he did not seem to be any worse for his experience, and I suggested to John that he put some food in the cage that night. John placed two rats inside, and in the morning reported to me delightedly that not only had the boa eaten the rats but had also actually struck at his hand when he had opened the cage. From that moment on, the boa never looked back. As it had obviously only done good to the snake, I experimented with B12 on other reptiles. Lizards and tortoises I found benefited greatly from periodical shots, especially in the colder weather, and on several occasions the reptiles concerned would certainly have died but for the injections.

  Wild animals, of course, make the worst possible patients in the world. Any nurse who thinks her lot is a hard one, handling human beings, should try her hand at a bit of wild animal nursing. They are rarely grateful for your ministrations, but you do not expect that. What you do hope for (and never, or hardly ever, receive) is a little cooperation in the matter of taking medicines, keeping on bandages, and so forth. After the first few hundred bitter experiences you reconcile yourself to the fact that every administration of a medicine is a sort of all-in wrestling match, in which you are more likely to apply more of the healing balm to your own external anatomy than to the interior of your patient. You soon give up all hope of keeping a wound covered, for nothing short of encasing your patient entirely in plaster of Paris is going to prevent it from removing the dressings within thirty seconds of their application. Monkeys are, of course, some of the worst patients. To begin with, they have, as it were, four hands with which to fight you off, or remove bandages. They are very intelligent and highly strung, on the whole, and look upon any medical treatment as a form of refined torture, even when you know it is completely painless. Being highly strung means that they are apt to behave rather like hypochondriacs, and quite a simple and curable disease may kill them because they just work themselves into a state of acute melancholy and fade away. You have to develop a gay, hearty bedside manner (rather reminiscent of a Harley Street specialist) when dealing with a mournful monkey which thinks he is no longer for this world.

  Among the apes, with their far superior intelligence, you are on less shaky ground, and can even expect some sort of cooperation occasionally. During the first two years of the Zoo’s existence we had both the chimps, Chumley and Lulu, down with sickness. Both cases were different, and both were interesting.

  One morning I was informed that Lulu’s ear wa
s sticking out at a peculiar angle, but that, apart from this, she looked all right. Now Lulu’s ears stuck out at the best of times, so I felt it must be something out of the ordinary for it to be so noticeable. I went and had a look at her and found her squatting on the floor of the cage, munching an apple with every sign of appetite, while she gazed at the world, her sad, wrinkled face screwed up in intense concentration. She was carefully chewing the flesh of the apple, sucking at it noisily, and then, when it was quite devoid of juice, spitting it into her hand daintily, placing it on her knee and gazing at it with the air of an ancient scientist who has, when he is too old to appreciate it, discovered the elixir of life. I called to her and she came over to the wire, uttering little breathless grunts of greeting. Sure enough, her ear looked most peculiar, sticking out at right angles to her head. I tried to coax her to turn round so that I could see the back of the ear, but she was too intent in putting her fingers through the wire and trying to pull the buttons off my coat. There was nothing for it but to get her out, and this was a complicated procedure, for Chumley became most jealous if Lulu went out of the cage without him. However, I did not feel like having Chumley as my partner during a medical examination. So, after much bribery, I managed to lure him into their bedroom and lock him in, much to his vocal indignation. Then I went into the outer cage, where Lulu immediately came and sat on my lap and put her arms round me. She was an immensely affectionate ape, and had the most endearing character. I gave her a lump of sugar to keep her happy, and examined the ear. To my horror, I found that, behind the ear on the mastoid bone, there was an immense swelling, the size of half an orange, and the skin was discoloured a deep purplish black. The reason this had not been noticed in the early stages was that Lulu had thick hair on her head, and particularly behind her ears, so that – until the swelling became so large that it pushed the ear out of position – nothing was noticeable. Also Lulu had displayed no signs of distress, which was amazing when one considered the size of the lump. She allowed me to explore the exact extent of the swelling gently, without doing anything more than carefully and politely removing my fingers if their pressure became too painful. I decided, after investigation, that I would have to lance it, as it was obviously full of matter, so I picked Lulu up in my arms and carried her into the house, where I put her down on the sofa and gave her a banana to keep her occupied until I had everything ready.