“Back when things were really bad, there was a lot of talk about moving the zoo out to the suburbs, where there would be more space for more dramatic exhibits,” Donaldson said. “So long as that debate went on, very little was going to get accomplished here. We decided at the outset to accept our status as an urban zoo. Once we acknowledged that, we had to accept that there were some things we could do, and other things we couldn’t do.”
The main thing the zoo couldn’t do was continue to maintain such a large and varied collection of animals. The cost in dollars and space was simply too high. In 1971, for instance, it cost about $1,100 a year to house, feed, and care for Massa alone. In 1982, the estimated cost is $6,257. In planning for the Primate Center, it was clear that some of the zoo’s current collection of twenty-five species would have to go. The list was trimmed to fifteen. The rules for which animals would stay were set by two priorities: retaining a representative sampling of primates from different families and different parts of the world, and helping those species that are the most endangered. By those criteria, gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees were all too similar and safe—at least in captivity. But the Philadelphia Zoo is famous for its gorillas and orangutans—and chimps? Why, chimps are big favorites at zoos everywhere. Get rid of chimps?
It was an issue that prompted some soul-searching and debate at high levels inside the zoo. It was solved with one compromise—orangs would stay. And with one tough decision—chimps would go. No chimps?
“Look, there are chimps all over the place,” said the zoo’s director of mammals, Dietrich Schaaf, reflecting the hard-nosed posture of the zoo’s new breed. “We can’t be all things to all people. There would be no educational purpose served by having another chimp exhibit here. With the gorillas and orangs on display, the other great apes can be incorporated into the exhibit through films and lectures.”
Cebul’s first project, her pride and joy, is the new Children’s Zoo, which will attempt to draw children into the experience of being an animal with walks in exhibits that make the child feel the same size as an animal, with special lenses to look through that will, quite literally, allow the child to see the world through an animal’s eyes. Her approach to remaking the zoo, aside from the management and breeding considerations of giving animals more room and more naturalistic settings, is to give zoo goers something much more than the passive, static kind of experience that zoos usually provide. She talks about a dolphin exhibit at the New England Aquarium where visitors watch a film about dolphins on a large screen, and when the movie is over the screen rises and real dolphins swim out from behind it. She wants zoo goers to learn, and to teach them, she wants to find ways to give them a thrill.
Donaldson calls Cebul “one of the best things that has ever happened to the Philadelphia Zoo.” Asked to summarize the zoo’s new outlook, the initial fruits of Cebul’s labor, he explained: “I see a threefold purpose for the zoo. First, it gives us a sort of laboratory to learn how to manage wild animals in captivity. Second, it can preserve at least a few endangered species. And, third, the most important role and one that we so far aren’t doing well, is to help convince the average person that wild animals are worthwhile, that the wild world is connected to them and worth preserving. I think that what we hope to accomplish is just starting to happen here. In five or six years, then we’ll really be somewhere. It’s exciting.”
There was a period last fall when Massa’s keeper, Ralph McCarthy, and the higher-ups—who have grown used to local journalists’ premature predictions of Massa’s demise—really thought themselves that Massa was finished. He wasn’t recognizing people the way he usually does. Ralph would climb up on the wooden ladder behind Massa’s cage and call him—“Yo, Mass!”—the way he usually does, with the kind of friendly, growling tone that usually works, and old Massa would just ignore him the way he ignores the tourists who file past the front of his cage, more than a million a year. This was bad.
Massa displays a kind of affection for most of the zoo people he recognizes, and reserves a particular fondness for his buddy Ralph. Most times he’ll stir his stiff, arthritic bones and slowly, with supreme economy of motion, stand to grasp the center pole of his cage and swing Tarzan-like up to the top level, then park his hairy back up against the bars so Ralph can give him a good scratching.
But one day, for reasons he kept to himself, Massa wasn’t interested. It might just as well have been some complete stranger flagging him—“Yo, Mass!”—up in back. He responded with surly indifference, with the kind of profound arrogance God gave only to primates. This lasted for a few weeks, during which time quiet alarms went out among Massa’s extended family on the Girard Avenue property. Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, Massa came out of it.
He just keeps plodding along at his generally healthy pace. Since no gorilla has ever lived this long, there’s no predicting how long Massa can last. There are those who feel that gorillas, with proper feeding and medical care, should be able to live as long as human beings. Their physical structure is very similar, after all. If anything, gorillas seem stronger. Old Massa just might still be around to amuse our children’s children. Still, it doesn’t seem likely. You can almost hear his old bones creak every time he moves.
For almost two decades, it is said, local obituary writers have been poised to report Massa’s passing with the sentence “Massa lies in the cold, cold ground.” That won’t be the case.
“Massa has become an important animal in the study of geriatrics,” explained zoo research director Robert Snyder. “He’s led a life under very controlled circumstances, controlled diet, and very predictable lifestyle, to put it mildly. When he dies, a lot of people are going to be interested in taking a close look at him.”
For an animal who hasn’t traveled more than about thirty yards during the last forty-six years, old Mass is going to do some big traveling when he dies—in about five different directions. When the regretful day arrives, Massa’s withered carcass will be lovingly dissected in Snyder’s lab. Snyder is particularly interested in how well Massa’s diet has controlled the buildup of fatty tissue in his arteries. He suspects the results will shed some light on the role diet plays in causing or preventing heart disease—in all primates, including man.
But the process only begins there. John McGrath, professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school, plans to scarf up Massa’s brain.
“Probably the spinal column, too,” McGrath said. “I’ll be interested in looking for some of the physiological manifestations of senility—not that Massa shows any real signs of growing senile. He seems to be as clearheaded as ever. We’ll be interested in looking at it both from the standpoint of gathering information about aging in apes as well as to compare it with aging studies on humans. Both are primates, after all. We’ve never seen the brain of a gorilla Massa’s age—there’s never been a gorilla of Massa’s age. There are also some people up in New York who are doing some really elegant studies with an electron microscope of the effects of aging on the brain. They’ve expressed interest in a few slides.” He’ll prepare a sample for the folks in New York, and parcel out bits and pieces to interested colleagues here and there.
Massa’s final resting place, or at least the end of the line for most of him, will be on the sixth floor of the Smithsonian Institution’s natural history museum, up with the collection of a hundred or so great-ape skeletons kept there. Snyder plans to ship Massa’s scooped-out carcass to Jay Matternes, an artist in Fairfax, Virginia, who has done many technical illustrations for the Smithsonian’s publications and exhibits, for Time-Life books and magazines, and for National Geographic. Matternes, who also “hopes the day is a long way off,” plans to do a very detailed dissection of Massa, carefully measuring all his parts.
“It will be extremely useful in just gathering more information for comparative purposes,” Matternes said. “We’ll get as much information from the cadaver as we can. There are a lot of specific, technical
questions about gorilla anatomy that right now aren’t answered in the literature. You really have to go directly to the source for some answers.”
Taking Massa apart will be a sort of labor of love (if a dissection can ever be one) for Matternes.
“Massa is a great sentimental favorite of mine,” Matternes said. “I grew up in Lancaster, and in high school I used to spend nearly every weekend in the Monkey House doing drawings of Massa and Bamboo. Those two apes formed my idea of what a gorilla is. At the time, they were the only two adult gorillas on the East Coast. I’ve still got reams of old drawings of Massa; they were my first works.”
These days, Massa is back to his old self, grunting appreciatively when Ralph slips him a pretzel or candy bar or gumdrop—things he’s not supposed to have, but even gorillas have friends, you see. Massa will peer intently into the eyes of a visitor standing in the concrete corridor behind his cage. He will lean hard forward, laying his right arm down on the floor of the cage, resting his chin on his forearm and draping the other long arm over the top of his head, and fix his curious gaze on the human face just inches away. There is still a touch of red in the wiry mane of gray hair that stands up straight on the high crown of his forehead. His brow curls thick and coal black over wide, inquiring eyes, eyes with big blackish-brown pupils and with whites that are mostly bloodshot and brown.
Massa will stare only for a few seconds at a time if you meet his gaze. He will avert his eyes and then quickly look back for a moment, then avert them again, then steal another look. Beneath the brow and eyes, his facial structure descends in a series of broad, inverted V-shaped rims to the wide hollows of his nostrils. He works his gums just like an old man, but the gaze is more like that of a child.
You want to ask him something, somehow penetrate the biological wall.
Is it worth it, old man, living this long? They say your old companion, Buddha, your only real friend, died of distrust and viciousness, but we know better, don’t we, Massa. He died of a broken heart. Missy Lintz went to visit him just before it happened. She said he came as close to her as he could inside his air-conditioned circus cage, and pulled out his lower lip to show her a big gumboil over one of his teeth. It must have meant constant pain, so bad it added to the things that killed him. But he wouldn’t let any of his keepers know about it. He hated them all. Instead Buddha just suffered it out and died. Poor Buddha. And what about you, old boy? What keeps you hanging on? Have you triumphed over it all or just given in?
BREEDING THE BETTER COW
MARCH 1980
My first job at The Inquirer was in the suburban Wayne bureau. Because Philadelphia’s outlying areas were still primarily rural, we got a lot of farm publications at the office in Wayne. One day I noticed an ad for udder supports, with an illustration that made it clear such devices were, essentially, cow bras. Now, why on earth would a cow need a bra? The search for an answer to that question led me into the strange world of animal husbandry. The story won the first national award I had ever received, given by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which was proof positive that you didn’t need to know a lick about science to conquer science writing.
In the beginning, a cow was just a cow. Sloe-eyed, dumb but benevolent, she produced prodigious amounts of milk and a few heifers, and perhaps won a ribbon at the state fair.
Then man intervened. Employing an insidious arsenal of breeding devices, such as artificial insemination, superovulation, and embryo transfer, man has produced a cow that is little more than a gigantic lactating machine with four legs, a head, and a tail.
Take Alice, for instance. Alice is a motherly Holstein on the Oxford, Pennsylvania, farm of Dale Hostetter. She is a good milker, but Alice is, you might say, overequipped. She keeps stepping on her teats.
“Then her udder gets infected, and we can’t milk her,” Hostetter complains. “It gets damned expensive.”
So Alice wears a bra. She is a walking, somewhat sore example of the revolution that is under way in American barnyards, and she is not alone. There was a tenfold jump in the last decade in sales of Tamm Udder Supports, absurdly oversized nylon cow bras that keep mammoth modern mammaries from dragging underhoof.
Mass consumption demands animals designed for mass production. So today’s sophisticated farmer thinks of his animals as little factories. Portly, friendly breeds of yore have become stripped-down, scrawny creatures enslaved to an artificial, sexless, joyless regimen of controlled breeding, eating, exercise, production, and slaughter. Prospects for their future are even more grim and bizarre.
But the system works. By accelerating the lazy progress of evolution, new selective breeding techniques have halved the number of dairy cows in the United States in the last ten years, while actually increasing total milk production.
Other barnyard breeds have shown similar improvement.
Chickens that once, in a wild state, laid about fifty eggs a year today produce two hundred and fifty or more and eat half as much feed. Ten years after standardbred horse associations endorsed artificial insemination, the number of trotters and pacers that have run sub-two-minute miles has increased dramatically.
FIRST, THE DAIRIES
But the revolution has been felt most profoundly in the dairy industry. Because dairy herds are small and regimented, they are the first to have been thoroughly enslaved by the syringes and chemicals of veterinary medicine. With 75 percent of American dairy farmers inseminating their cows artificially, the syringe has replaced sex as the most common method of reproducing the breed.
“The widespread use of artificial insemination is the most significant development in the history of animal breeding,” said Dr. James Evans of the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center veterinary school in Kennett Square. “It has vastly accelerated the pace of breeding progress by enabling farmers to breed a multitude of animals from the top ten or twenty bulls of their time.”
Mating dairy herds today is a bit like department store shopping. Breeding firms publish catalogues that list, on the basis of records accumulated from thousands of offspring, the genetic makeup of their bulls. A farmer can match his cows’ traits with those in the catalogue and pick bulls that best complement his herd.
The overwhelming majority of bulls lack the pedigree or outstanding characteristics to mate. They are castrated, fattened up, and trucked off for meat before they ever see a cow, other than the one that weaned them. But it seems that the ten or twenty bulls that have what it takes spawn offspring, like biblical Abraham, as numerous as the stars.
350,000 DESCENDANTS
Half the seven hundred thousand Holsteins in Pennsylvania today are descended from the same sire, a massive, three-ton bull named Osborndale Ivanhoe (otherwise known as 118970).
Ivanhoe was born in 1950 at Osborndale Farms in New England. He was six before he had sired enough offspring in the natural fashion to be considered marketable for mass insemination. He was sold for $10,000 to Atlantic Breeders Cooperative (ABC), a firm in Lancaster that is one of the two largest bull semen distributors on the East Coast.
“Ivanhoe was the largest bull we’ve ever had here,” recalls Harry Roth, ABC operations director. “He stood about six feet, two inches at the withers; most of our bulls stand about five-ten. He weighed about seven hundred pounds more than most prize bulls.
“Ivanhoe was exactly what the Holstein breed was looking for in the sixties. He produced big-boned, angular, strong heifers, and his daughters were champion milk producers.”
At ABC, Ivanhoe lived seven more years inside a narrow stall about twenty yards long, ten feet wide. After his semen was tested on thousands of cows, exploring just about every genetic possibility in his makeup, his excellence as breeding stock was proved.
He became far too valuable an animal to graze freely or exercise—a leg injury, for instance, could have made it impossible for him to mount teaser steers (castrated males that are used so no copulation can take place) in ABC’s semen-collecting lab. So l
eviathan Ivanhoe spent his days confined, pampered, and chained to a demanding sexual regimen.
TO THE MATING STALL
Three times a week he was led by the ring in his nose to the mating stall, where a steer was strapped to the cage in front of him. If Ivanhoe performed as expected, his valuable seed was collected in a plastic tube. If Ivanhoe was reluctant, he got the “electro-ejaculator,” a device that jolted out his semen with a carefully applied, mild electrical shock.
One way or the other, Ivanhoe was milked for enough semen in his lifetime to impregnate roughly two hundred thousand cows. Packaged in short, thin glass straws and stored in a supercold vat of liquid nitrogen, Ivanhoe’s sperm is still being used today, for about $4,250 a shot.
Although dead for seventeen years, Osborndale Ivanhoe lives on. His semen has already sired 1,980 heifers and is expected to continue to do so for several more years.
Ivanhoe left a genetic stamp on the Holstein breed far greater than any other bull in history, far greater than nature would ever have allowed. He is one of only two bulls that ABC decided not to send for slaughter when age finally stilled his sexuality. In an uncharacteristically sentimental gesture, the breeding cooperative laid Ivanhoe’s enormous carcass to rest outside the lab that stores his sperm, under an impressive tombstone.
Roth is mildly embarrassed about it today.
“We’ll never bury another one, that’s for sure, no matter how spectacular he is,” the breeding expert said. “We don’t need a graveyard out there. There’s no value in that.”