Going Right To The Source Of Animal Magnetism

The Age

Thursday March 12, 1998

MEAGHAN SHAW

AT THE Royal Melbourne Zoo you can laugh at the seals' antics, wonder at the gorillas' humanity and tut-tut at the elephants' cramped quarters before packing up your picnic and heading home.

But that's only a fraction of what goes on at the zoo. Go backstage with the ABC's eight-part half-hour series, Zoo's Company, and you see the effort it takes to keep wild animals in an artificial environment, the relationship that develops between keepers and their charges, and the competing demands placed upon zoos in the age of user-pays.

The new series from the ABC's award-winning Natural History Unit begins this Wednesday and features Melbourne's three world-class zoos - the Royal Melbourne Zoo, the Open Range Zoo at Werribee and the Healesville Sanctuary.

It shows the bizarre range of activities that are part of a zoo-keeper's job: one keeper has to provoke and fight a giant tortoise to keep it mentally stimulated; others take it in turns stimulating a rare white rhino to get a sample of his sperm.

Tosca Looby, the series' associate producer, was amazed to see snakes put in plaster casts, gorillas fed milkshakes and iguanas having their teeth checked. She spent five months tailing the zoo staff with the ABC crew. "I had this really fixed idea about what a zoo was and what a bad thing it was," she said. "But there's so much more of a story to it than that - it's such a patchwork of different things."

The series debates many thorny issues. It examines whether elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses - traditional zoo animals and crowd favorites - should be displayed at city zoos and what effect removing them would have on zoo attendances.

It looks at the marketing of the Royal Melbourne Zoo to raise money for a new elephant enclosure and the demands this places upon the animals and their keepers.

It also tackles life and death issues: whether a pair of bear cubs should be allowed to live when there is not enough space to keep them; and the risks taken transporting zebras to other zoos for breeding programs.

Looby says the fly-on-the-wall style of the series meant the ABC crew was privy to the highs and lows of zoo life, despite the cameras being an extra worry for zoo staff when things got hairy.

"There were things like that zebra instance when it all went horribly wrong . . . and in a way it was unfortunate we were there, but that's how it is - it's really hard to keep exotic animals in an urban environment," Looby says.

The cameras were also in the operating room when a lion was being examined under anaesthetic.

"That's a really nerve-wracking exercise for everyone, because if the lion wakes up everyone's basically a goner . . . and you wander in with a camera . . . asking 'And what are you doing now?'," Looby says.

Looby says the gorillas were the most difficult animals to film because they were sensitive to any change in their routine and to the smell of outsiders.

"We'd have to send the keepers in with microphones and different cameras and have miniature cameras set up in all different places," she says.

"But even then the gorillas would find them and want to chew them and break them."

The series' executive producer, Dione Gilmour, says Zoo's Company was faster and cheaper to produce than the usual blue-chip natural history programs which require miles of footage and crews with years of experience.

"Natural history programs sink or swim on getting animals to do their thing in a totally natural way," Gilmour says. "These programs are more about the people-animal relations and the institute as an umbrella thing as well."

She says the series gives the ABC a regular natural history program with Australian content, rather than buying in BBC programs, and hopefully appeals to a wider audience than the blue-chips.

"These three zoos have a world status, are on our doorstep and we've never utilised them before," Gilmour says. "How crazy."

Zoo's Company screens 8pm Wednesday on ABC.