3/8/97

Jews and zoos

    That's not lemon sherbet in Beverly Burge's freezer. It's iced elephant pee. What looks like a chunk of cheese is, in fact, a rat.
    This is not the kitchen at the Hilton.
    It's like a zoo where Beverly works -- well, actually, it is a zoo. From her infirmary/quarantine unit, Beverly keeps tabs on everything at the Jerusalem zoo from a hippo's mood swings to the shoe size of the centipedes. 
    Last week, her unit hit the news pages with a dramatic life-saving effort: a baby siamang fell out of a tree and then staggered into an electrified fence. "This little guy's heart stopped, it was pretty special that we saved him. We had two people up with him all night, making sure he kept breathing." The monkey was not exactly appreciative. "Yeah. He kept biting us. We solved that by giving him something else to bite. Bananas."
    This is not your run-of-the-mill medical center.
    "Got a cassowary with cataracts, and we're looking for an eye doctor with experience -- in cataracts, not cassowaries. Over there's a depressed wallaby we don't know what to do with. This cage is sort of a retirement home for aged lemurs. That? Oh, he's having surgery. Castration. This is a boxful of barn owls brought to us from the wild. And as you can see, we're up to our eyeballs in baby kestrels."
    On a patch of lawn outside her clinic is a chintzy-looking plastic swan. But it's not plastic. "Broke its leg in a fight," says Beverly. "C'mere, I'll show you the x-rays."
    Spend a couple of hours with her and you get the feeling she'd climb into the lions' den to boost their protein levels. She's already been chewed by just about everything else. "I've been bitten by parrots, iguanas, all the primates, snakes, mad swans, wallabies and the head zookeeper. Oh, and I was scratched by a leopard." She shrugs off an admiring ooh: "It's nothing. Like cutting your hand if you're a dishwasher. Or developing flat feet if you're a cop."
    She forgives any animal its savage ways, except for one: the ticket-buying genus that thinks obnoxious behavior is permitted with the price of admission.
    "We have a type of visitor who has a lot to learn," says the California native. "Some Israelis don't think. They lack education." There are too many stories of idiots who behave like ... well, if only they would behave like animals.
    Visitors pelt them with garbage, including morons who've launched bottles at the lions (one of which was badly hurt). "A toucan died because someone fed it an avocado, which is extremely toxic." Cassie, the gentle old cassowary, was once grabbed by the neck and throttled.
      The public pays for the bad behavior of a few, in ways it does not realize. Management will not acquire certain animals that won't tolerate, shall we say, "interactive spectatorship." Coveted koalas, for instance, are too sensitive. Wild boars, native to Israel and "remarkably intelligent," were pulled from the exhibit because haredim threw rocks at them. Hyenas are conspicuously missing for a similar reason: Arabs used to stone them as "soul stealers."
    There was a crazy rumor around town some time ago that the zoo might acquire that greatest of all zoo spectacles, the giant panda. "The rumor was true," Beverly says. "Shoul Eisenberg wanted to do it, but we begged him not to. Sure, it would be good for the zoo, in terms of ticket sales and prestige. But it's not good for the pandas. They should be left where they are."
    It's a lucrative business for the Chinese, this Rent-a-Panda: they lease the animals for about $1 million a year.
    Is Beverly squeamish about feeding animals to animals? "I have no qualms about it -- look, you can't feed a lion tofu. Anyway, we do very little live-feeding, and never in the public's view. The pythons get live rabbits we raise for the purpose, and rats we get from labs. Sometimes the meerkats get live chicks. Mostly, carnivores are taught to eat dead meat."
    Which brings up the question you've all been wondering: does the zoo kitchen have kashrut supervision? The answer, believe it or not, is yes -- but don't jump to conclusions: the supervision is to ensure that the food is not kosher. And herein lies a supreme uniqueness among zoos of the world.
    "About 40 to 50 percent of a zoo's budget is food, but in this regard I'd have to say, thank God we're in a Jewish country: most of our food is free."
    Free?
    "Other zoos freak out over this: There's a Jewish law, ma'aser, that decrees 10 percent of produce be given as tithes for the Temple. This food may not be eaten by humans, so we get it." That 10 percent is skimmed off the top, not the bottom; the animals are getting the finest fruits and veg in the land. "You won't believe this," Beverly says, nudging me into a giant walk-in refrigerator. "Look: we even get cherries. Pineapples. Artichokes and lychees. First rate stuff, free." There's a condition all workers here understand: touch any of this food to your lips, and you're fired on the spot.
    The Ramat Gan Safari has just started getting in on this too.
    The zoo also gets almost free, from a slaughterhouse, carcasses of cows not deemed perfect enough to be kosher, as well as crates of misshapen bread from a major bakery. "The rest we have to buy: milk, eggs, grains, cereals, insects."
     Inevitably, not all is hunky-dory with the religious establishment: the haredim recently threatened a boycott if the zoo continues to sell tickets on Shabbat -- even though the tickets are sold outside the premises, by a private entrepreneur who buys them in bulk. "We are not selling tickets on Shabbat," Beverly insists hotly.
     It's an inviolable law of the jungle in this city that extremist haredim will spoil a good thing. And a good thing this zoo is. "It's one of the only places where all Jerusalemites can mingle together: Arabs, Jews, Right and Left, religious, secular; it's a remarkably tension-free environment."
    Put in animal terms, it's the one place where the wolf can lie down with the lamb.