In the Shadows of the Zoo

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2001 WLNR 3438929

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA)

January 2, 2001

Section: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

DIANA NELSON JONES, POST-GAZETTE STAFF WRITER

* * * THE SUN THROWS LONG SHADOWS over the paths and hillsides as the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium prepares to close for the day. Tiny Christmas lights dot the foliage, their colors frail in the half light. Two lions lounge on rocks, their tawny tails gray in shadow. A giraffe paces on its skirt of land. In the Kodiak bear exhibit, a tiny fountain splatters above wide steps into a pool that's rimmed in rock. The sun's slant casts jittery designs on the rock where a female bear fell dead last year.

Animals die. It's a fact of life at a zoo. Some die old, some die sick, some kill each other. Each death has a story. Some have more than one.

Soon, in the twilight, most everyone will be gone for the night. Sometimes a caretaker must stay, or return after hours, for a reason that may have been written in a keeper's log: An animal is lethargic, not eating, running a temperature.

Late at night, when a keeper returns to his charge, he is most at one with his career. He didn't become a keeper because the pay and hours are good, with opportunity to advance. He was smitten by the animal. He knows the animal's emotions. Sometimes its heart pounds. So does his because the animal he loves is wild.

Animal keepers are a small fraternity. The public doesn't really see them. They wear drab colors that blend with their surroundings. But they are outspoken for their animals, the reason the zoo exists.

But a zoo must do more than exist. It must thrive. It must raise money. It must court the community. It must build and keep building. The keeper of these ideals comes to work by 8 the next morning. Barbara Baker, zoo director, may be thinking about an animal, about budgets, about spreadsheets, about deadlines. She may be thinking about the knots of discontent within her staff.

Praise and criticism

Many zoo stories are fun to tell. A baby elephant is born. A rare leopard has a healthy litter. Everyone is beaming. Photographers are mobilized, reporters called. But the sad stories usually are quiet, often not officially volunteered. The unofficial versions come after hours, maybe somewhere over coffee. The employee is nervous -- please, you can't use my name.

Very few employees speak on the record at the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium. Zoo policy, written in the employee handbook, bars employees from talking to the media without going through the public relations office first. Nonunion staff could be fired for the transgression. Union staff are protected but not, they say, from reprisals. At most institutions, critics ask for anonymity when they go public. But some people, long gone from the zoo, continue to fear. One former staff veterinarian called Baker from across the state to ask whether it was permissible to talk to the Post-Gazette. A zoo director went silent on the phone when asked about a specific event in his past association with Baker. His voice quivered when he eventually said, "No comment. No comment."

Anonymity extends to zoo animals as well. Early in her tenure, Baker took all animal names off the roster. The public was baffled, having become used to hearing animals' names and even helping to name them. Her reason: Animals in the wild don't have names, and these are essentially wild animals. Keepers, of course, continue to name the animals. How else could they train them, build relationships with them, speak to them as individuals?

In Baker's 10 years here, the zoo has made much news. She has done what the best CEOs do for companies. She took a lackluster ward of the city and turned it into a nonprofit enterprise of aggressive expansion. Attendance has doubled in 10 years. Through a mix of private and public funding, the budget has tripled, with more than $55 million in economic ripples annually. The board has grown from 20-plus members to more than 60 community leaders with expertise and contacts Baker has drawn on to raise money and attention.

"She's the best thing that ever happened to this zoo," says board chairman Ken McCrory. Incoming chairman Linda Dickerson agrees. "When you mention her name at other zoos, people practically bow."

Within her ranks, it's often a different story. A dozen employees and six former employees, talking off the record, listed a variety of wrongs they attribute to Baker, from her treating people like servants to cavalier and careless decisions they say have hurt animals. The zoo has 91 full-time employees, about 24 in office jobs. In the past three to four years, a dozen people have left white-collar jobs, at least one without a job to go to. The turnover has prompted a staff joke as to who would next "bite the dust."

Baker cites high turnover as a bane of nonprofit institutions in general. But in interviews with six who left, all but one said Baker was the main reason.

Treatment of animals

A honey-haired North Carolina farm girl, Baker, 43, has a broad, wholesome face and blue-gray eyes that can go steely on you if you interrupt or challenge her. She can be effusive and chatty or cut you off, depending on how she warms to the subject. She walks bigger than she is, with the confidence of an athlete. Demanding of herself, she expects fealty from others. She has little to no patience with people who tell her that something she wants can't be done, even if it really can't.

She tells her side of unhappy animal stories as the person in charge. She has the authority and medical training to be believed. She has the force of personality, the self-assurance of her status and the confidence of all but a few members of a large board. Her advocates say animus against her comes from people who vilify strong women in charge, that if a man were making the same decisions with the same force, he would be admired.

Baker says that some of her detractors know that to blame her for animal care problems is a surer way to turn the public against her than to discuss their real complaints, such as the less sympathetic issues of vacation and pay.

Henry Kacprzyk, curator of Kids' Kingdom, is a 20-year veteran of the zoo. He says Baker rankles some people because "she is fast-paced and somewhat aggressive. She's trying to make us a leader. The first director I worked for was laissez-faire and not even concerned about maintaining accreditation."

Carolee Switalski, head veterinarian since ' 97, has known Baker for 15 years, first as a student extern. "She was very competent and a wonderful supervisor. I have found her to be caring and capable. She's been my mentor."

Mem Feher coordinated special events for a year until May ' 99. She was expected to work long hours planning parties and events. "I was newly married, and I didn't want to work that much. But I always found her to be fair. Very tough, yes, but a woman in that kind of position has to be. She was always open to my suggestions, though I know she didn't always take other people's."

Against Baker's solid bank of credibility and support, her detractors have remained adamant. It is not gender or a strong hand for which they loathe her, they say, but for her almost ruthless zeal to be more important than the zoo itself, sometimes, they say, at the expense of animals.

"She became a business person," said one keeper. "She doesn't really have a lot of compassion for animals if it doesn't advance the cause of Barbara."

"She thinks she is the zoo," said another.

Her critics say she has marketed herself an image that makes her impervious to criticism, that she is a spin doctor whose explanations always wash: She can take a controversy, pour it into a verbal solution and make it dissolve.

While several of Baker's critics mention her management style as abrasive and her treatment of white-collar staff as demeaning -- pulling them into garbage detail after union workers have knocked off, for example -- the most persistent outcry has been over the treatment of the animals.

Baker says that stands to reason: The most passionate people at the zoo tend to animals.

"My day-to-day focus is on where the zoo is going," Baker says, making parentheses around her eyes to indicate the focus of people who care for animals. Theirs is narrow, specific, a microcosm. They see only what happens to their animals.

And they are among the number of voices who have raised this issue: Has Baker been good enough for the animals at the zoo?

When an animal dies

Baker says she was "that little girl who dragged baby bunnies home and drove my mother crazy." She juxtaposes this image with a more recent one: "When my terrier got hit by a car, I put her body in the freezer. Because I wanted to do a necropsy to find out what happened."

The process of finding out what happened when an animal dies at the zoo begins with a pool of theories, ruminations and rumors. Baker says it is these theories and rumors that have fueled the anonymous sources against her.

"We constantly second-guess the decisions we make. Even the baby elephant birth, which went perfectly, we scrutinized to see how we could do it better next time. The night the sharks died, we were all crushed. I let down at home, so the staff may not see my disappointment. But you have to be able to move on, and I have to move on more quickly."

Baker says she can't remember ever wanting to be anything but a veterinarian: "I wish I was God and I could be the best vet in the world and that none of them would ever die. But as long as we keep animals in captivity, we will have these challenges."

Captive animals die for many reasons, in spite of the best efforts and the best intentions, she said. But in the case of the Kodiak bear that died in August 1999, several staffers concur with one who says, "A year ago, we killed this bear."

The 17-year-old female Kodiak -- they can live to be more than 30 -- died with a number of conditions, including epicarditis, pericarditis, sepsis, spleenitis and hepatitis. There was hemorrhage in a variety of organs. The zoo sent tissue samples to a veterinarian pathologist in Sacramento, Calif., Dr. Robert E. Schmidt, who suggested the possibility of bacterial toxemia or a previous infection. Bacteria does not always say why it is present. The bacteria found in the bear's heart, for instance, is everywhere, in feces, in the air.

Several staff members were worried about the bears' situation at the time. The August heat was intense, and the pool was too deep for them to use.

"They were out there frying in the heat," says one employee. "You could see them; even visitors complained."

The male and female Kodiak occupied the former polar bear exhibit, where the pool was 7-feet deep. Polar bears jump into such deep water, but Kodiaks don't like to swim. Head curator Lee Nesler, to whom keepers report directly, said the maintenance department responded to a work order by installing a swimming-pool-type ladder, but the bears never warmed to it because it was wobbly and awkward. "We drained the water down so they could see the ladder," she said. "We had levels up and down, trying to show them this was a way to get in and out."

When it didn't work, she said she wrote another work order for construction of wider steps leading into the water at a more inviting grade. Nesler says she discussed the heat and the depth of the pool with keepers, and that they were trying for a solution when the bear died. Neither dehydration nor heat stroke was at issue in the necropsy, but a few staffers believe the pool situation was a factor.

Angry over this bear's death, they said the female sought relief in a moat that surrounds the exhibit. The moat is supposed to drain. It is where the animals' feces are hosed. But a ' 30s-era drainpipe often clogged, and the standing water attracted the bear. They say they saw the filthy water, and that there was a report to indicate fecal matter had contaminated an abscess under the skin of her armpit. The necropsy report Baker supplied the newspaper does not include such information. The pathologist, Schmidt, described the site as hemorrhagic and inflamed but made no mention of fecal matter. Baker says fecal matter couldn't have gotten through the bear's fur to such a small abscess under its arm.

Schmidt's comments suggest several possibilities for the death, several things to rule out and nothing conclusive.

Nesler agrees the clogged drain was a bane of the bear exhibit. "The plumbing is original and needs work." With regularity, the clog is relieved with a mechanical snake, but Nesler says the problem "will be rectified." Meanwhile, the pool has been made Kodiak-friendly, with wide steps of Belgian block and concrete leading into it and a fountain slapping against the top step.

Aquarium problems

In interviews with Baker about her staff critics, she says it is good to have staffers who care deeply enough to second-guess decisions. "If they didn't, we wouldn't improve." But it was one such second-guesser whose firing last summer united a large group of his colleagues, past and present. They consider themselves whistle-blowers on a Baker the public doesn't see.

Aquatics curator Jim Prappas' passions reverberated deeply, both before and after Baker fired him last July.

Charged with care of the aquarium animals, he also supervised work on exhibits at the new aquarium, which opened in mid-June after months of lengthy workdays to make the deadline. Work crews and staff reported many red eyes and jangled nerves. Baker herself pitched in, crawling on her knees with cleaning rags. The opening was scheduled so tightly against work to be done that the shark tank, the last big exhibit, was just recently completed. It awaits the replacement of three sharks that died when the ozone machine malfunctioned in November.

A variety of fish began to die in incidents that stretched into the summer. Aquarists say that is not unusual at start-up. Chemicals, mechanical parts and the monitoring inherent in healthy fish tanks are particularly vulnerable. But Prappas saw no excuse for much of it.

High-strung and frustrated by the construction pace, the 20-year aquarium veteran questioned decisions routinely as the new, $17.4 million building was taking shape. Contractors heard him rail against Baker. Several co-workers say they don't like Prappas any more than they like Baker, but they respect his experience and his ethics. His animals were not warm and fuzzy, but he loved them as though they were.

When the penguins returned early from temporary quarters, Prappas, now employed at the Galveston Zoo in Texas, was livid. He had argued against it and says Baker knew the exhibit would not be ready for them. Baker says it could have been any day.

The birds lived in a refrigerated truck with a single light bulb and a compressor roaring for 10 days before their exhibit was ready. Christina Slager, a penguin specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, with no firsthand knowledge of this situation, said birds are susceptible to dangerous stress in such conditions and that their confinement was not wise.

A month after the aquarium opened, Prappas was fired. Neither side would discuss the reasons, citing legal restrictions. But Prappas quickly made public allegations about the aquarium itself, and the board reacted with a three-part review of the controversy. It hired a labor lawyer to confirm what state statute allowed -- that Baker didn't need just cause to fire Prappas, a nonunion employee. It appointed an architect who sits on the zoo board and whose firm has done several zoo projects to confirm that the admittedly aggressive construction schedule was justified and doable. And, it brought in two members of the American Zoological and Aquarium Association, who ruled some 20 deaths of marine animals were accidental.

Jackson Andrews of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga and Jeff Bonner of the Indianapolis Zoo visited for two days and spent part of one with Prappas.

"Obviously, he Prappas had some things he was concerned about," Andrews says. Any other discontent there might have been among the staff, he said, "was not to the point where it popped out at me." Other staff interviews were not held one-on-one.

In Prappas' most serious allegation, Baker had suggested exhibiting animals for the grand-opening gala in tanks that were not ready, and perhaps not safe. He said she used the word "disposable" for such animals. Baker has denied this, but several present and former staffers say they have heard the suggestion from her before.

In forming the aquarium review committee, McCrory was emphatic that it was not an investigation of Baker. At the time, several staff members ruefully agreed. Said one, "It will be a whitewash."

The Red Book

During Baker's first years in Pittsburgh, she mounted the campaign to move the zoo from public oversight, where it was not thriving, to private status. During that process, a number of animals died and union employees feared Baker would dismantle the union. That's when the loathing began. In 1993, several employees prepared and distributed a report to City Council and the media requesting "further investigation into the true conditions and management of the Pittsburgh Zoo before it is relinquished in its entirety to Barbara Thomas Baker."

It became known as the "Red Book," and it detailed a string of mishaps that its authors said keepers foresaw and pleaded against, to no avail. The weekly In Pittsburgh magazine ran an expose that zoo authorities belittled as the effort of a tabloid.

Baker defused the Red Book allegations at the time and interpreted the challenge against her as a small group trying to undermine her authority to prevent privatization. "The reports were sent to the zoo board, they were sent to the media," she said. "Nothing was ever found to be of any truth. People asked questions, and they found no truth to it."

The Red Book focused on animal misfortunes in the early ' 90s -- six pinioned cattle egrets, which were put in an outdoor display where raccoons could, and did, get them; two agoutis, rodents that were added to the porcupine exhibit and subsequently quilled; a Diana monkey, paralyzed while in an exhibit with gorillas; and the particularly wrenching loss of an immature female lion who died in surgery after being attacked by a male that had killed before.

As a cub, the lion had been hand-raised and bottle-fed, and in spite of restrictions against use of names, "Savanna" was widely known. Staffers say they begged Baker to wait until the cat began cycling before placing her in an exhibit with a mature male lion, to increase her chances of survival. Baker, they said, was adamant about the pairing, although she says she does not recall any protest.

Introductions of animals into exhibits are often risky and worrisome. Baker cites the dangerous first days of a baby elephant being underfoot among 800-plus-pound mothers and aunts. But efforts of pairing and introductions are part of the dynamic of a progressive zoo, she says. The methods are always discussed and planned. "Unfortunately, aggression is part of life."

Savanna was placed with the male for a few hours one day. Baker compares animal introductions to first dates -- a few hours at a time. But neither of the first two dates went well. The male attacked both days. Five days after the second date, Savanna was in surgery for a jaw fracture. Savanna never awoke from the anesthesia.

The staff was shattered. A range of people, from docents and volunteers to the visiting public, still talk about her death as senseless.

The Red Book also detailed the death of Mitch, a Diana monkey. While Dianas and gorillas share a habitat in the wild, the introduction of a dominant 17-pound male in an exhibit with gorillas did not sit well with some staffers in August 1992. Mitch was an obnoxious monkey with whom the dominant male gorilla fought repeatedly. But, the report reads, "the decision to extract him from this situation was withheld."

One day late in January, Mitch was found lying in the exhibit with multiple fractures and a crushed spinal cord. Baker said the monkey, which had a congenital spine abnormality, had lived with the gorillas for six months without incident.

"He was prone to jumping high in trees," Baker said recently. "He could have fallen. One of the gorillas certainly could have caught him, but he was very quick."

Baker says the Pittsburgh Zoo actually has a death rate low for the industry. But there is no way to test that assertion because the AZA doesn't keep comparative statistics, and neither does the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which licenses and inspects zoos.

Eight years after the deaths of the lion and monkey, Baker is still wrestling with the ghosts of these animals. In the case of Mitch, she says, "No one actually saw what happened." As for Savanna, she allowed that with hindsight, "obviously we'd do things differently. Hindsight is a wonderful thing."

From each impact, Baker must move on. But that is very hard for a keeper. His grief cannot be quantified or quickly dispelled. The cause of death doesn't yield easy answers, either.

Nothing much does, in the shadows of a zoo.

---- INDEX REFERENCES ---

INDUSTRY: (Healthcare (1HE06); Infectious Diseases (1IN99); Environmental (1EN24); Bacterial (1BA64); Nature & Wildlife (1NA75))

REGION: (Pennsylvania (1PE71); USA (1US73); Americas (1AM92); Tennessee (1TE37); North America (1NO39); California (1CA98); Texas (1TE14))

Language: EN

OTHER INDEXING: (AMERICAN ZOOLOGICAL; ANIMALS; AQUARIUM ASSOCIATION; AZA; DIANAS; GALVESTON ZOO; INDIANAPOLIS ZOO; RED BOOK; TENNESSEE AQUARIUM; US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE) (Andrews; Angry; Aquarists; Aquatics; Attendance; Baker; Barbara; Barbara Baker; Carolee Switalski; Chemicals; Christina Slager; Contractors; During Baker; God; Henry Kacprzyk; Incoming; Jackson Andrews; Jeff Bonner; Jim Prappas; Ken McCrory; Lee Nesler; Linda Dickerson; McCrory; Mem Feher; Mitch; Nesler; Praise; Prappas; Robert E. Schmidt; Savanna; Schmidt; Thomas Baker)

EDITION: ONE STAR

Word Count: 4237

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