Animal Madness by Laurel Braitman

Author:Laurel Braitman [Braitman, Laurel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Early Adopters in the Cuckoo’s Nest

One of the first nonhumans to be given psychopharmaceuticals not as a test subject but as a patient was a gorilla named Willie B. Like the midcentury women given tranquilizers to ease their anxiety and encourage their compliance with the status quo, Willie was given the drug to ensure his good behavior and to keep him from expressing his displeasure over the strict limitations placed on his daily life.

Willie B. was a western lowland gorilla, famous in Atlanta, Georgia. Sometime in the 1960s he was captured in Congo as an infant and sent to Zoo Atlanta, where he lived for thirty-nine years, twenty-seven of them alone in an indoor cage with a tire swing and a television. Named after the city’s mayor, William Berry Hartsfield, Willie was the subject of countless newspaper articles and television programs, and was the inspiration for the city’s soccer team, the Atlanta Silverbacks. When he died in February of 2000, eight thousand people attended his memorial service.

According to Mel Richardson, who was working as a veterinarian at Zoo Atlanta at the time, Willie broke a glass window in his enclosure in the winter of 1970–71 and had to be transferred to a much smaller cage for six months while the glass was replaced with heavy metal bars. “He weighed around four hundred pounds, and the cage was way too small for him,” said Mel. “If he stood up and stretched each arm all the way out he could almost touch both sides of the cage at once.” The vet staff decided to medicate him so that the six months would be more bearable. They put Thorazine in the Coca-Cola he drank in the morning. According to Mel, Willie responded to the drug as many institutionalized humans do: he shuffled back and forth across his cage with dulled eyes. “It was a little like watching the men in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Mel said, “except Willie was a gorilla.”

Since then, human antipsychotics like Haldol (haloperidol) have been given to animals in zoos and aquariums throughout the world. The drugs are used to overcome phobias in birds, such as one yellow-naped Amazon parrot’s fear of being held. Haldol was given to rednecked wallabies to ease their transition to captivity. A captive black bear cub was given Haldol to treat her separation anxiety after she was moved to a cage by herself. SeaWorld has dosed their performing California sea lions. Six Flags Marine World gave antipsychotics to a young female walrus who was compulsively regurgitating her food. At the Toledo Zoo Haldol was used to calm anxious Grant’s zebras, a group of wildebeests, a pair of ostriches, and a swamp monkey named Maxine. The keepers hoped Maxine would get along better with her daughter. She didn’t. According to the vet staff, antipsychotics did help Trouble and her sister, Double Trouble, two of the Toledo Zoo’s birds of paradise. They were serious feather pluckers, but after three days on Haldol, they stopped.

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