Ever wonder what the animals at your local zoo eat? BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK "these guys won't usually eat their food unless it's moving," she explains, pointing to a couple of bored looking turtles. "Yeah, that's the way I am," I say. I'm talking to a zoo keeper acquaintance of mine named Tanya (honest) as we stand next to the amphibian enclosure. Next door a young alligator is chewing on something unrecognizable. "What does he like for dinner?" I ask. "It's a she," Tanya says. "Crickets, chopped-up mice and goldfish. We try to wean most of the animals off of live food. We can't afford to have them attacked by their meal." "You don't want the dinner injuring the diner?" "You got it." The story of how I've come to be taking a kitchen tour of the zoo is a long and fascinating one, but it's much longer than it is fascinating so we'll skip it. Anyway, here I am and Tanya is being both gracious and thorough in satisfying my curiosity about zoo cuisine. When I arrived, she'd just returned from the grocery with bags of yams for the sun bears, white potatoes for the elephants, grapes for the emus, raisins, rice, rutabagas and two cases of Gatorade. "For the gators?" I asked. "No," she said without smiling. "It's mainly for the primates, especially if they're ill. It provides electrolyte replacement. It's a nutrient treat for them. And it helps if there's any dehydration. Tanya takes me in a garage-sized storage shed filled with stacks of canned Zu/Preem Primate Diet, pillow-sized bags of Mazuri ("The Complete Zoo Feeding Resource") and sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. "Have some," she says, pointing to the Monkey Chow. I reach in the bag, grab a handful of the thumb-sized biscuits and put them in my pocket. "So the turtles are the only animals in the zoo that get live food?" "No," Tanya says. "We give crickets and meal worms to the tamarinds -- they're a small primate from Brazil. That's an important source of protein for them. But we cool them down first." "The tamarinds?" "No, the crickets. We refrigerate them so they're sluggish and aren't jumping all over the place when the tamarinds are trying to eat them." Tanya opens the door to a giant walk-in freezer. "After you," she says. Inside are large plastic bags holding several different varieties of fish, packages ominously labeled "chopped frozen feline food," feathers-on chickens, rats and mice for the birds of prey and horse meat for the big cats. "People are pretty squeamish about horse meat in this country," I say brightly, "but it's served in Europe and Asia." (Calvin Schwabe's "Unmentionable Cuisine" lists eight horse-meat dishes, including a Siberian wedding feast "built around a boiled horse head garlanded with horsemeat sausages" and a spaghetti sauce Bolognese.) "We used to eat horse meat on a regular basis here at the zoo -- every Friday afternoon," Tanya says. "It's a very sweet meat. We'd make a weekly stew. We used to get it from a slaughterhouse and the guy in the kitchen here would take out a filet, cook it up with potatoes and carrots and we'd buy bread. It made a delicious stew. A plateful of that and you're really feelin' your oats." She winks at me. "Just kiddin' -- zoo humor." Her account of the horse-meat stew jump-starts my appetite. I pull one of the monkey-chow biscuits from my pocket and absent-mindedly gnaw on the primate food. The stuff's no worse than crackers I've made the mistake of purchasing at health food stores, though it would be helped along considerably by a slathering of Camembert and a glass of Duckhorn cabernet. As I snack, Tanya leads me to the koala cages and I tell her about the close encounter I had with one of the slow-moving beasts. "It was several years ago. I was on a press tour of a koala park in Brisbane and somebody handed me one named Stuart. They said he was the largest koala in captivity." "How large was he?" "Forty-five pounds." "Oh yeah, he was a big brute." "He seemed stoned," I say, "but charming." "You know they sleep about 19 hours a day," Tanya explains. "That's why. They're never entirely awake. They're probably the pickiest eaters in the zoo," she tells me. "Much pickier than pandas. We did a study of the 13 types of eucalyptus we were feeding them. And we found that generally they select for high protein and high water content. Koalas don't actually sip water," Tanya continues. "Unless they're very sick, all their water comes from the leaves they eat. So you've got to be sure you're feeding the right kind of eucalyptus, otherwise you're depriving them of water." "What do baby koalas eat?" Tanya grimaces. "Uh, pre-digested eucalyptus leaves. And where do you think they get that?" "I don't like guessing," I say. "I'll give you a hint. It's not regurgitated and the mother doesn't pick it out of her own mouth." The conversation's taking an unpalatable turn and Tanya seems to be getting a little too much pleasure out of it. It suddenly dawns on me what she's driving at. I don't like thinking of the darling baby teddy bears doing something un-teddy bear like, but nature can be profoundly unappealing at time. Disgusting even. Tanya, however, is relishing the subject. "I have to tell ya," she says, "the most amazing thing I've ever seen was when we had a newborn albino koala. I went over and saw it and its face was dark brown. I said 'Are you gonna put that on display?' and they said 'Well, uh, no, no not for the public.'" "That was the most amazing thing you've ever seen?" "That's right. I've never looked at those Qantas advertisements in quite the same way." At the eagle cage Tanya reiterates the zoo's no live food policy. "Except we also feed these fellows pinkies," she says cheerfully. "We feed 'em pinkies live because pinkies don't have any teeth." "What's a pinkie," I ask nervously. "Baby mice or baby rats." "Where's the name come from?" "They're pink. Unless they happen to be baby brown mice, in which case they're brown." "I guess those are called brownies." Tanya ignores my comment and leads me into a kitchen where a serious-looking fellow named Josie is standing at a cutting board carefully dicing mice with a French chef's knife. "Some of the big birds get chopped up chicks and mice." Tanya tells me, "and other ones get whole mice and they have to rip them up themselves. We disembowel the mice because we don't want the birds eating the guts by mistake; the intestines tend to harbor more parasites. A lot of people think that birds will get food from the animals gut but it's not true. We do give 'em whole day-old chicks because the chicks haven't actually consumed any chick food yet. We freeze them for two weeks to kill any bacteria, and the birds love those." She opens a large refrigerator. "Down here," Tanya says, leaning over to the lowest shelf, "we've got hard-boiled eggs. The possums, crows, ravens, skunks, hedgehogs, the doves, starlings and the toucan all go for the eggs in a big way. The raccoon likes the yolk but not the white." Tanya opens the freezer compartment. "In here we keep our low iron toucan diet -- soft-billed birds have a tendency to get liver disease from iron. Would you care to try some?" she asks me as she sticks a container of the small brown pellets under my nose. "Sure, let's have a little nibble," I say. It's nasty stuff -- tastes of vinegar; moist, weird, something only a toucan could like. I pull out an ice tray filled with what appear to be ice cubes made of hamburger. "We make that special for our turtles," she says. "Both our aquatic turtles and our bottom dwellers eat it. It contains ground-up beef heart, kale, spinach, vitamins, calcium, oil and a little bit of fish food." I pick up a large zip-lock baggy full of the tiniest, cutest baby mice you'd ever want to see -- frozen solid. "Those are fuzzies," Tanya says. Fuzzies are the next step up from pinkies. Fuzzies have fuzz, pinkies have little or no fuzz. Fuzzies or pinkies, they both remind me of those pink elephant novelty ice cubes that add a festive touch to summer parties. "Would you like one?" she asks me.
"No, no," I say, "I kinda filled up on monkey chow. Besides, they're too cute to eat."
Douglas Cruickshank is a writer who lives in Lagunitas, Calif. His last piece for Salon was The Pope of Pazool.
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