Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell

Author:Gerald Durrell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2011-09-20T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE NIGHTINGALE TOUCH

Dear Mr Durrel,

You are the most evil man I know. All God’s creatures should have their freedom, and for you to lock them up is against His Will. Are you a man or a devil? You would be locked up in prison for the rest of your life if I had my way...

Whether you run a pig farm, a poultry farm, a mink farm or a zoo, it is inevitable that occasionally your animals will damage themselves, become diseased, and eventually that they will die. In the case of death, however, the pig, mink or poultry farmer is in a very different position from the person who owns a zoo. Someone who visits a pig farm and inquires where the white pig with the black ears has gone, is told that it has been sent to market. The inquirer accepts this explanation without demur, as a sort of porcine kismet. This same person will go to a zoo, become attracted to some creature, visit it off and on for some time, and then, one day, will come and find it missing. On being told that it has died, they are immediately filled with the gravest suspicion. Was it being looked after properly? Was it having enough to eat? Was the vet called in? And so on. They continue in this vein, rather like a Scotland Yard official questioning a murder suspect. The more attractive the animal, of course, the more searching do their inquiries become. They seem to be under the impression that, while pigs, poultry or mink die or are killed as a matter of course, wild creatures should be endowed with a sort of perpetual life, and only some gross inefficiency on your part has removed them to a happier hunting ground. This makes life very difficult, for every zoo, no matter how well-fed and cared-for are its animals, has its dismal list of casualties.

In dealing with the diseases of wild animals you are venturing into a realm about which few people know anything, even qualified veterinary surgeons, so a lot of the time one is working, if not in the dark, in the twilight. Sometimes the creature contracts the disease in the zoo, and at other times it arrives with the disease already well established, and it may well be a particularly unpleasant tropical complaint. The case of Louie, our gibbon, was a typical one.

Louie was a large, black gibbon with white hands, and she had been sent to us by a friend in Singapore. She had been the star attraction in a small RAF zoo where – to judge by her dislike of humans, and men in particular – she had received some pretty rough handling. We put her in a spacious cage in the Mammal House, and hoped that, by kind treatment, we would eventually gain her confidence. For a month all went well. Louie ate prodigiously, actually allowing us to stroke her hand through the wire, and would wake us every

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