A ZOO WITHOUT MONKEYS
GRANBY, QuebecAttracting more than half a million visitors a year, housing over 1,000 specimens of 226 species, and generating an annual budget of $4.5 million, the Granby Zoo is among the biggest wholly self-financed zoos in the world. The fiscal pressure is intense and unrelenting. Yet under general manager Pierre Cartier, the zoo has become a model of rapid self-improvement by pursuing policies that previous administrations would have called economic suicide. In less than five years Cartier doubled admission prices, made carnival rides free with a general admission ticket and moved them all away from the animal areas, exponentially multiplied capital spending, cut the size of the collection in half, and, most audaciously, closed the primate exhibits for three years, which were the zoo's top attraction.
"For three years, we were a zoo without monkeys," Cartier smiles. "Everyone said we were crazy, but it was necessary to close the monkey exhibits to change the character of the zoo. The zoo had become a place that attracted the wrong sort of crowd, with the wrong mentality. When we got rid of the people who came to throw peanuts at the monkeys, we were able to reorient our focus toward education and conservation. We rebuilt our audience by focussing upon schoolchildren and families. Now we are a place where families come together to spend the entire day. The admission is high, but when the rides are included, it is not so high, and the most important thing is that we can now say with pride that we are presenting a first-class educational exhibit."
Cartier came to the zoo from a background in the textile industry, with no previous zoo experienceand not even any related background. That, he explains, was a plus. "I was able to look at things with a clean slate," he says. "I was able to see that it was necessary to get rid of all the personnel who had the old 'zoo' attitudethat the animals had to be kept in cages that were a certain kind and had to be disciplined in a certain way, just because that was what they had always done before."
Inspecting other zoos to see how they did things, Cartier quickly saw that, "The better conditions were for the animals, the bigger the crowds, because the more often people came back." Granby Zoo conditions were notoriously bad, and had been bad for decades.
"When I went to the Granby Zoo in the 1950s," recalls Sherbrooke Record editor Charles Bury, "it was a dusty, smelly place," consisting of "a few steel-fenced enclosures surrounding some overheated, tired-looking, slighly mangy deer and lions, and a cage of ratty raccoons."
Begun as a hobby by longtime Granby mayor Horace Boivin in 1944, the zoo relocated twice before the local Catholic diocese donated the first 60 acres of the present 100-acre site in 1953, when the Granby Zoological Society was formally incorporated. Attractive landscaping and facilities that were considered spacious for the time initially drew praise. But the zoo grew with the town, whose population increased tenfold in 40 years. Boivin traveled around the world to boost Granbyand everywhere he went, he visited the local zoo, where he would solicit gifts of animals for addition to the Granby collection.
Unfortunately, the collection outgrew the facility, and the expertise of the staff. As zoo literature admits, "The zoo attendants soon were completely overwhelmed and prayed that the boss would limit his trips."
But conditions got much worse before they improved. By 1984 the zoo had become so crowded that a bear was kept in a cage too small for him to stand upright. Desperate to sell enough tickets to feed the collection, the management placed heavy emphasis upon displaying as many exotic creatures as possible, hyping each new addition with a barrage of advertising. The standard of care was low, as former staff veterinarian Louise Beaudoin documented with her book Zoo, published around the same time that the former management got into trouble for hiring a smuggler to bootleg snakes from the U.S., to populate a new reptile house after the Bronx Zoo deemed the facility so substandard that it refused to sell specimens to Granby. Those scandals were barely settled when the zoo imported an infant gorilla through a loophole in the Convention on International Trade in Exotic Species, touching off an international furor.
By 1988, when Cartier was hired, the directors realized the Granby Zoo would have to take another direction. Their objective became earning accreditation from the American Society of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, a process that took more than three years, involving such intensive expansion and renovation that the facility the ANIMAL PEOPLE editor extensively documented as a Record reporter was virtually unrecognizable a decade later. Most of the animals now have at least twice as much space as then. The facilities are much more naturalistic and diversified. And the crowds have quadrupled. As Cartier emphasizes, "People are sensitive to the animals now. If the animals are unhappy, the visitors sense this. Happy animals bring them back."
Native species, natural habitat
WATERTOWN, New York"The Thompson Park Zoo was one of the worst in North America until 1990," admits a fact sheet for visitors, "when it was closed for renovations. Its old, smelly monkey and lion cages were turned into a visitors' center, the old stainless steel aviary was turned into a walk-through wetland, and drive-by deer yards have become large natural habitat exhibits for species native to New York state."
That's a quick version of a spectacular turnaround at a former concrete-and-bars facility built 80 years ago with contributions raised by school children. The zoo was considered state-of-the-art then, but over the years the art changed, as the goal shifted from public amusement to the protection and preservation of species. Initially a huge money-maker for the city, the zoo gradually became a loserand the less it earned, the less there was to spend on upkeep and improvements.
Watertown resident Winnie Dushkind began trying to turn the zoo around in the mid-1980s. After direct approaches to public officials got nowhere, she advertised in animal protection periodicals, urging readers to send the city postcards of protest. She circulated photographs of the dreary conditions. She encouraged the USDA to crack down on frequent violations of care standards. And finally, in 1988, the city obtained funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with which to draft a new master plan for the zoo. Under the plan, the city closed the zoo snack bar, which used to sell candy for visitors to toss to the animals. Concluding that the available resources were not up to keeping exotic species humanely, the city sharply cut the size of the collection, getting rid of even the popular primates. The only exotics kept today are Clyde the riding camel and several peacocks. Except for farm animals, the remainder of the collection enjoys space measured in acres, rather than square feet.
Dushkind now works to bring visitors into the zoo. "In my opinion, the lynx and cougars could stand more room," she says, while acknowledging that they already have more room and a far more varied habitat than most captives of their species. Wolves and elk have some chance to roam; a similar exhibit for black bears is under construction.
Where Dushkind once cringed as she entered the zoo gate, she now calls each visit "a most enjoyable experienceone million times better."
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