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From Erika Bauer, the Zoo’s first Fujifilm Curatorial Resident in Animal Care
September 2007
A Cat Is a Cat... Is a Dangerous Cat
This curatorial residency continues to be a wonderful experience, and I am constantly amazed at how many new experiences I have between these diary entries.
My rotations through the different animal areas at the National Zoo have brought me to the area that houses lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) and forest carnivores.
It seems that, in every area, there’s at least one individual animal that makes a major impression on me, and creates a memory I know I will always keep close to my heart. Sometimes the impression takes a while to form, as I get to know the personality of the animals over time and in different contexts. And sometimes it takes just a fleeting moment. It’s one of these fleeting moments that got me hooked on Luke, our two-year-old male lion.
Behind the Scenes
Let me set the scene for you: As you might imagine, the behind-the-scenes area in the lion/tiger building is equipped to house the Zoo's four African lions and five Sumatran tigers in comfortable indoor rooms when they are off exhibit, and has a transfer chute system for moving the animals safely from the outdoor exhibits to the indoor enclosures and vice versa.
The transfer chute runs along the back side of the indoor stalls. A wall separates the chute from the enclosures so that the cats passing through the chute can’t make physical contact with the cats in the stalls, but the cats in the stalls can view the chute if they stand on their back legs and look down through the fence above the chute. In fact, these cats have a pretty good view of much of the off-exhibit area and are aware of and interested in what the other cats and the keepers are doing throughout the day.
Watching Cats Watching Us
I’d already spent several hours shadowing keepers in this area, and I’d observed the lions and tigers interacting with or observing keepers in various ways.
Sometimes the cats are so totally absorbed in their own social interactions that they pay no mind to the keepers in the hallway. Sometimes they want attention, and some cats even jump up and cling to the bars to attract attention from the humans on the other side. Others run from side to side as people pass, trying to engage them in a round of “chase.”
During training sessions, the cats focus on what the keepers are communicating to them with intense concentration. At other times, the keepers engage in independent activities like cleaning, and the cats will peer down the hallways and watch the entire process like it’s the most interesting thing they’ve ever seen—who needs TV when you can watch zookeepers clean? And sometimes they glare at the humans as if they are a yummy lunch that they would just love to polish off!
Peek-a-boo
On the day Luke made his most lasting impression on me, I was just walking down the hallway on the back side of the stalls (just beyond the transfer chute) with the keeper I was shadowing that day. As we walked along, we realized that we were being watched.
A very thin patch of brown was visible above the wall that separated the chute from the enclosure. And a pair of eyes was glued to our every move, but we could see little else. Luke was making himself as invisible as possible—he was crouched as low as he could go while still keeping us in his sights, his ears pressed back against his head, and only his eyes and the smallest patch of forehead visible above the wall. We took note of this, and decided to play along.
Together, we bent down behind the transfer chute, knowing that if we were low, Luke wouldn’t be able to see us from his current angle. Almost immediately, he bounded up, looking quite amazed that we had disappeared from view, with the most playful glean in his eyes and his almost-fully-developed mane looking quite tousled. It was exactly the same reaction I’ve seen time and time again in my cats at home when we’re playfully chasing each other around the furniture at my house. A little game of peek-a-boo. At that moment it was clear just how similar this great cat is to my 11-pound domestic cats. He’s just a big housecat when it comes to peek-a-boo!
But in reality this lion is no housecat. There are incredible differences between him and my cats at home. The first major difference: I would never want to be in a room with Luke unless there were big heavy bars protecting me from him. He could kill me in an instant, either intentionally or unintentionally with just a playful swat at my body.
Lions have been known to kill and devour people, and although this lion enjoyed our playful interaction from opposite sides of the fence, it’s of the utmost importance that anyone dealing directly with these cats remember their dangerous potential. The keepers in this unit are working in one of the most dangerous areas in the Zoo. Safety has to be the number-one priority.
Safety First
You might be surprised to learn that four of the five keepers in this area are women. I’m 5’4” and fairly slender, and I fit right into this group. You don’t have to be big to work around big cats, but you do have to follow appropriate safety protocols for your own protection and for the protection of your co-workers and the public. (Plus, you have to be strong enough to operate a system of pulleys to open some pretty heavy shift doors!) The lion/tiger unit has safety protocol after safety protocol to maintain the highest safety standards. I’ll share just a few of these with you here, but be aware that there are many more systems in place, and the animal care staff in this unit are well prepared for almost any contingency.
The first thing that I noticed when I began working in this area is that keepers pay close attention to locks. One of the best practices in this unit is to check, double-check, and then check again after any doors have been opened and closed, and before cats are going to be given access to any new area. All locks must be secure, and there are always two closed doors between any cat and any human (a built-in back-up system). The “check, double-check, and check again” procedure is there to protect the people from the cats as well as to protect the cats from each other—some combinations of animals simply will not mix well, and if unfamiliar cats are accidentally given access to one another, very bad things can happen.
A wonderful aspect of the behind-the-scenes configuration of stalls and transfer chutes is that keepers can move cats from the outdoor exhibits, or from any of the indoor stalls, to pretty much any other indoor stall. This is a great feature in terms of animal management because it provides a high level of flexibility for moving animals around. However, this flexibility requires that a solid system of checks and balances must be in place.
If a keeper were to open the wrong shift door at any point along the path they want a particular cat to take, it could set the scene for a dangerous situation. One mistake or one moment of distraction can make all the difference. In fact, I am only allowed to shadow the most experienced keepers in this area, to reduce the likelihood that my presence will present a distraction to them in their work. Many proactive precautions like this are in place to reduce the level of risk as much as possible.
Shifting Cats
The system used by keepers when shifting cats sounds simple, but it is essential for safety purposes and requires the keepers’ full attention.
The first safety measure is that, each day, one keeper is assigned to each line (lions or tigers) and only that keeper is allowed to shift cats on that line. This system rules out the chance that keepers might set up conflicting shifting plans simply because they haven’t communicated with one another appropriately.
Also, before shifting, keepers must call out to one another that they are shifting animals so that everyone in the area is aware that cats are being moved.
To shift a cat to a new location, the keeper starts opening shift doors at the destination location, the place where they want the cats to go. From there, the keeper works backwards, opening shift door after shift door and confirming that the path is safe for the cat to travel.
After releasing the cat and letting it run down the runway to the final destination, keepers backtrack and close the doors. If the animal has been released into the outdoor exhibit area, keepers then plan ahead for any emergency that might require calling the cats back into the building as quickly as possible. They arrange the doors along the transfer chute to allow the cat enough room to be shifted off the exhibit in an emergency, and then they ensure that any doors that would give the incoming cat access to other cats if accidentally opened (or access to keepers who might be cleaning the indoor stalls at any point during the day), are securely locked. This prevents accidents from happening, even when keepers might be stressed, as in an emergency response situation.
MANY safety procedures and safety checks are in place in this unit for a very important reason. Although the behavioral repertoire of these cats is very like that of their domestic cat relatives, they are dangerous wild animals that must be managed safely—for their protection, and ours.
