— Ben Beck,
Smithsonian National
Zoological Park
In the zoo world, no other animal is a more wily, persistent or brilliant escape artist than the orangutan. Other animals can and do escape, but in terms of skill, tenacity and sheer balls, they are nothing compared to the red ape from Indonesia. Stories about the escape abilities of orangutans are told and retold among zookeepers and orang researchers, almost always accompanied by the raised eyebrows of amazement and many rueful shakes of the head.
Hopeless Attempts At Prevention
Zookeepers, working alongside the architects and engineers who design ape enclosures, have been tinkering with how best to keep the apes inside their exhibits pretty much since someone first decided he wanted to keep an orangutan someplace where it did not want to be. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) has published a number of recommendations concerning the design of orangutan care facilities. Among their top suggestions are moats and so-called “hot wires.”
Many types of enclosures are used in contemporary zoos, and a percentage of those involve some variety of moat. If a moat is used as part of an orangutan enclosure, says the AZA, it should be of sufficient width and depth to prevent the apes from climbing into it by hand, or across it through the use of improvised ladders (yeah, that’s a thing; see below). For the most part, orangutan moats are not filled, because orangutans cannot swim and are quite frightened of water.
Hot wires are precisely what they sound like – a copper wire, through which is a passed low-voltage electrical current. The idea is that if an orangutan attempts to get free of its exhibit via the simple expedient of climbing out, it will receive a mild jolt from the wire, and thus be dissuaded from doing that sort of thing again.
There isn’t enough electricity involved to cause anything worse for an orangutan than a good scare, but that isn’t why the wires don’t work. They don’t work, and have largely been discontinued for orangutan enclosures, because orangutans are too smart. Over and over again, orangutans have figured out how to bypass hot wires. Some have done it by bashing the ceramic insulators apart with rocks, while others have used grass to insulate their hands.
Orangutans are not stupid, a fact that they relish in demonstrating as often as possible.
Ken Allen
An orangutan who went by the unusual moniker of Ken Allen escaped nine times during the early years of his residency at the San Diego Zoo. Even as an infant he demonstrated his fondness for flight by unscrewing the bolts of his little cage, after the staff had gone home, and wandering around the nursery. Even more impressive was that he knew when the staff would be returning in the morning, and made sure that he was back in his cage before that happened. It took a while for the staff to notice his escapades because he always re-screwed the bolts of his cage, after returning.
Upon his arrival in San Diego, Ken Allen got serious about becoming an outlaw. His first escape was a no-brainer; all he had to do was climb the wall at the back of his enclosure. He was found strolling through the zoo, taking in the exhibits, as if he was just another visitor to the park. He also managed to scare the crap out of more than a few guests. Our man Ken Allen wasn’t a small guy. He was a little better than four feet tall, and weighed in at a colossal 250 pounds.
After that first escape, zoo personnel added four feet to the height of the back wall, but Ken Allen easily scaled it again. This time it appeared as if his breakout was motivated by the all too human emotion of revenge. There was another large male orangutan living at the zoo, named Otis, who was known to be a bit of a bully. He and Ken Allen did not get along and were keep apart from one another in separate enclosures. Upon Ken Allen’s second escape, he was found outside the other ape enclosure. He was throwing rocks at Otis.
And the breakouts just kept coming. A couple of months after the second escape some workmen left a crowbar in Ken’s enclosure. (One wonders if anyone at the zoo had cautioned them against doing dopey stuff like that.) Ken Allen passed the crowbar through the bars of another cage, belonging to a female orang named Vicki, who used it to pry open a window through which Mr. Allen crawled to his (temporary) freedom.
By this time Ken Allen had become something of a local celebrity. The local papers sent photographers to snap pictures of the ape they dubbed “Hairy Houdini,” and the zoo celebrated his fame by selling T-shirts emblazoned with the (un-ironic) image “Free Ken Allen.”
In the end, Ken Allen retired into a life of leisure in the company of three females. Who themselves escaped twice…
Tawan
The Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle was home to a male orangutan, Tawan, who was also fond of absconding. He was not, however, a solo artist like Ken Allen. If Tawan was going to play his Get Out Of Jail Free card, he was going to bring his buddies along for the ride. And it wasn’t long before he did just that, scaling the wall of the habitat and urging the other members of the orangutan colony to do the same.
After a bit of wandering, the troop eventually found themselves high up on the roof of their enclosure. Zookeepers attempted to talk the apes off the roof, but the apes weren’t having it. Frustrated and worried, the zookeepers finally dragged out a fire hose. Their intention wasn’t to spray Tawan and his friends, but simply to dissuade them from exiting the roof by climbing over either of the exhibit’s two rear walls. Those routes would have been very dangerous for the apes, because at the bottom of one wall was a lion enclosure and beneath the other were grizzly bears.
The introduction of the fire hose had a peculiar effect on Tawan. It didn’t scare him; it pissed him off. As it happened, there was a second fire hose up on the roof. It took Tawan maybe 90 seconds to figure out how to unspool it, and when he had pulled it free of its metal coil, he dragged it down to the edge of the roof and pointed the nozzle at the zookeepers. It was as if he was warning the humans that what befell the orangutans might just befall them too.
Eventually, all of the apes returned to their enclosure on their own initiative and, in time, Woodland Park made upgrades to the orangutan exhibit, forcing Tawan to abandon his bolts for the blue. Instead, he took up a brand-new career based on deception, larceny, and extortion. But those are tales for another time.
Jonathan
Jonathan was a very well-traveled ape. Over the course of his life he spent time at the Los Angeles Zoo, the Topeka Zoo in Kansas, the Buffalo Zoo in Upstate New York, and the Metropark Zoo in Cleveland. His peripatetic life came about almost solely because of the fact that he was an exceptional escape artist and mischief maker.
At the Los Angeles Zoo, he was to be the first, and primary, resident in the zoo’s new orangutan exhibit. The humans at the zoo were quite proud of the new enclosure, and for opening day they invited city VIPs and important zoological personnel to be on hand when Jonathan took his first steps around his new home.
The enclosure featured plenty of things for Jonathan to climb on, lots of rocks to sit on while thinking his ape thoughts, tires and boxes to play with, and a beautiful leafy tree, planted dead center of the exhibit.
Jonathan entered the enclosure. People applauded. Jonathan paused and had a look around. Everyone waited to see what he'd do next. What he did do next was get up, stroll across to the beautiful leafy tree, wrap his arms around it, and wrench the thing out of the ground, roots and all. He then dragged the foliage to the rear of the exhibit, leaned it against the wall, and climbed to his freedom.
Jonathan was in the enclosure for roughly six minutes.
Fu Manchu
Of all the great orangutan escapees, there is one fellow who stands above the rest. His name was Fu Manchu. He lived at the Omaha Zoo in the 1960s, and he was as patient and as clever as even some of the best human escape experts.
On two separate occasions keepers arrived at work in the morning to find that Fu Manchu, along with his mate and their three children, had gotten free of their “escape proof” compound. After some looking around, staffers located Fu Manchu and the others high up in the treetops outside their enclosure. The apes weren’t doing anything apart from, apparently, enjoying the view. Using some of the apes’ favorite treats – grapes, peanuts, and the like – zookeepers were able to coax the five red rapscallions back inside their enclosure.
Two days later, Fu Manchu & Co. escaped again, and this time there was trouble at the zoo. While it was true that orangutans frequently flew the coop, having it happen twice in two days caused great consternation among the zoo’s bigwigs. If it happened again, they promised, heads were going to roll.
And so, wishing that their heads would not roll, the keepers responsible for the primates initiated round-the-clock surveillance of the ne’er-do-well orangutans. Using cameras and on-site volunteers, they were at last able to figure out how Fu Manchu was escaping. And it was pretty dazzling.
There was a moat around the orangutan enclosure; it was the 1960s and moats were standard practice. At the bottom there was a maintenance door that could only be locked or unlocked with the appropriate key. On the other side of that door a flight of steps led up to a small furnace room, in one wall of which was a door that opened onto the zoo grounds.
Step one of Fu Manchu’s plan involved climbing down into the moat, which he easily accomplished via the seams in the cement. Confronted by the maintenance door at the bottom, Fu Manchu would take hold of the doorknob and pull the door outward, slightly bending the frame, until the latch assembly was visible. Orangutans are easily strong enough to maltreat a door in such a fashion. Fully grown males have been observed ripping steel belted radial tires into pieces.
With the door now in position, Fu Manchu would take a piece of wire – which he kept hidden in his cheek – and use it to pry back the latch assembly until the door popped open. After that, rounding up the family and heading for the trees became the work of a moment.
Interestingly (or alarmingly, depending on your point of view) one or more of the orangutans stopped on their way to freedom to screw around with, and in fact break, the dials and visible wiring of the furnace unit. Who knows if Fu Manchu or any of his compatriots were familiar with the concept of giving someone the finger, but it doesn’t really matter. They got their point across.
I know of at least two humans who couldn’t puzzle out the steps of such an escape, and one of them was elected president.
Mind-Boggling
Pause for a moment and consider the amount of forethought and invention Fu Manchu employed for his escapes. Especially the length of wire. Why did he want it? Where did he get it? Why did he keep it? Amazingly, it seems that Fu Manchu bartered for the wire with a female orangutan in a separate enclosure, trading pieces of banana for it. The female orangutan seems to have obtained the wire by stripping one of the lighting fixtures in her paddock.
Had Fu Manchu, on a previous escape attempt, been stymied by the maintenance door, and then set about finding a tool with which to open it? Or had he simply thought the wire was a novelty, and thus worth keeping? But if that’s the case, why did he spend yummy bananas to get his fingers on the thing? Unfortunately, we are unlikely to know the answers to these fascinating questions. One thing is certain, however:
Fu Manchu’s facility at lock picking did not go unnoticed. Zookeepers took away the wire and he never escaped again. And later, Fu Manchu was made an honorary member of the American Association of Locksmiths.
And so, until next time…
the United States. www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/dangerous_incidents_bears_bigcats_primates_110119.pdf
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