Gerald Durrell - Menagerie Manor

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 tank 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 as those people must have felt who erected Stonehenge—that none of us was ruptured was a miracle. With a final colossal effort 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, with 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 apologize for half an acre of trampled anemones and twelve broken cloches.

Jacquie, as always, was unsympathetic. As I lay supine in the comforting warmth of the bath, she placed a large whiskey within easy reach and summed up the night’s endeavour. “It’s your own fault,” she said. “You would get this blasted zoo.”

Dear Mr Durrell,

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 or become diseased, and that eventually 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 with 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, he is 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. He continues in this vein, rather like a Scotland Yard official questioning a murder suspect. The more attractive the animal, of course, the more searching do the inquiries become. The visitor seems to be under the impression that, while pig, 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, because every zoo, no matter how well fed and cared for its animals are, has its dismal list of casualties.

In dealing with the diseases of wild animals one is 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 be a particularly unpleasant tropical complaint. The case of Louie, our gibbon, was typical.

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 must have 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 allowed us to stroke her hand through the wire, and would wake us very 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 wracked my brains to try and 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 Terramycin, for this is made up in a thick, sweet, bright red mixture which, we have found, 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 hers clean. 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 Terramycin 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, for Louie refused to 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 I did not know that apes or monkeys could contract this disease. On the fifth day Louie died 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 diseased by an infestation of filaria, a very unpleasant tropical sickness that can cause, among other things, blindness and elephantiasis. We realized, 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, one of them 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, each of which has to be treated in a different manner. It is all extremely frustrating.