THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Captivity, every so often triggers creativity, with the captives figuring out ingenious ways to break out. Our friends in the city zoo - the predecessors of the buffaloes who escaped from the enclosures some days ago - have wriggled, climbed, crawled and even swung out of their enclosures, creating panic and fear, and finally when they are caught, relief with a capital R.
The biggest scare happened in the early eighties. It was a Monday, a holiday for the zoo, and an off-day for the zoo-keepers. A little girl and her grandpa was having a long-distance look at the zoo from the garden area. Suddenly she noticed a tiger on a tree looking down into the cage of the spotted deer. The resultant hue and cry brought down the zoo officials, but to their horror they found that instead of just one, all three tigers in the zoo had escaped from their cages!.
The cage was empty and the two shutters to the enclosures were open. One tiger was seen wandering around the hippo cage and then the compound wall of the Nanthencode road and the other circling the big pond in the zoo. Within minutes police armed with rifles, and with orders to shoot the carnivores at sight, surrounded the zoo both from inside and outside on the road too. ‘‘Somehow we convinced them not to use fire until we failed to get them inside the cages,’’ recalled Dr.C.J.Chandra, who was the zoo veterinarian then.
‘‘Fortunately, the tigers being zoo-born were used to seeing people. Another point in our favour was that they were hungry and could be teased back into the cages with meat,’’ he said. So with the proverbial carrot, nay chunks of beef at the end of the stick, they were all brought back to the enclosure without any casualty. It was the carelessness of a keeper, who had forgotten to close the shutter at the visitor’s end after opening the one at the open enclosure end, that caused all the panic.
The most frequent escape culprits have been the deer and the primates. The male deer have a problem with co-existence during the breeding season. They fight for mates and the ‘fittest’ often drives out the ‘less-fittest’ from the cage. The war is of the worst kind in the case of black-bucks. The deer also jump cages to more greener pastures as what happened when the spotted deer were shifted to the cage of Neelghai.
Hunger also prompts escape as it used to be the case with Maheswari, the elephant. She would somehow manage to break loose, whenever her tummy groaned, especially in the night. She would just go to two locations - either the plantain-farm in the director’s quarters or to the zoo-store. ‘‘We would hear the sound of the chain dragging behind her and we would know that she is hungry. But nowadays she has grown too old for such antics,’’ said Dr.Chandra.
Monkeys do what they know best - climb up walls, jump across them, swing around from one tree to another and at times across the boundary wall of their enclosures, leaping away to freedom. The zoo-keepers have brought them back from various places inside the zoo, the Sree Chitra Art Gallery and sometimes, from even the road near Nanthencode. The lion-tailed macaque, the langurs, the macaques have all been at it.
Recently a young lion-tailed monkey Kannan, had been giving a lot of thought to how to escape from his open enclosure. After many days and nights of hard work and calculation, he arrived at a solution. Kannan would stretch across one leg wide on the wall near the corner, and after getting a firm hold there, he would stretch a second leg on to the other wall, till he reached the top in a ‘diagonal’ sort of manner. Just before he perfected his skills, the zoo doctor Dr.Joe Jacob Sebastian sent him to solitary confinement so that ‘‘the others won’t learn the trick from him’’ he said.
Although the monkeys are the leading offenders, some of their less-heralded colleagues have also been specialising in the art and science of mission-escapes. The tiny porcupines for example, bores through the toughest of concrete floors, makes the most scientific tunnels around, to surface on the main road of the zoo! The next-door neighbours, the jackals, who were inspired by these burrowers had to be shifted to new cages.
‘‘Escapes are part of the life of any zoo and in one way it is good for it brings all the zoo officials together, and they all work together towards one goal,’’ remarked Dr.Chandra. Some of the breakouts have been flukes, like what happened way back in 1957.
The adult male rhino, Mani, started his journey from the Assam zoo, across the Brahmaputra river to our city zoo. It was a time when there there was no bridge over River Brahmaputra. The crate with the animal was loaded to a steamer and it took over a month for the animal to reach the zoo. There were no cranes and the crate was placed near a sandbed slope for the animal to climb down. Somehow, the crate got opened and Mani, having been shut inside for more than a month, decided to go for a walk!. Obviously, the zoo had to be evacuated and closed until he was brought back to the cage, where he lived all on his own for several decades.
Escape of the poisonous crawlies have always been a cause of massive headache-epidemic for the zoo staff, especially since only a few are trained in handling poisonous snakes. A pair of King Cobras from Kolkata once pushed out a stump used to plug the water hole in a cage and decided to make the green lawn their home rather than the stuffy glass cages. Finally it was an animal-dealer from outside the state, Mithra, who got them back into the cage.
But the incident that none of the former zoo staff would forget is the visit of a high-profile Chief Minister to the zoo. The zoo officials were informed that this VIP would be coming for a morning walk the next day. The previous day, the zoo was spruced up nice and tidy,and that was when they came to know that two pythons had escaped. ‘‘We searched high and low, but could not find the snakes. There was no way that we could tell him the truth either. We were completely lost,’’ an old-timer recalled. Finally, when the Chief Minister came for a walk, unknown to him, all the zoo staff too had to go walk with him as a pre-cautionary measure, some in front, some behind and the rest on either side!!.
reema_narendran@epmltd.com