We tried every method to rid him of this insanitary garment, but without success. Fred seemed rather proud of it, and would become very annoyed if we tried to take it off him. We began to wonder how long it would take the wool to disintegrate naturally and fall off, but whoever had knitted the jumper had chosen really tough wool, and it was obvious that it would be several years before it fell to pieces. Then fate played into our hands. We had a heat wave, and the temperature in the mammal house, where Fred lived, soared. At first he enjoyed it, but soon it became too much even for him, and we noticed that he was pulling meditatively at his jumper. The next morning we found the offending garment hanging neatly over a branch in Fred’s cage and managed to hook it out with the aid of a long stick. From that day onwards, Fred grew increasingly placid; he will never be really trustworthy, but at least he is now less inclined to treat human beings as his enemy.
Still another creature that gave us a certain amount of trouble in the early stages was Millicent, the Malabar squirrel. Malabars, the largest members of the squirrel family, hail from India. They measure about two feet in length, with sturdy bodies and long, bushy tails. Their undersides are saffron yellow, their upper parts rich mahogany red, and they have very large ear-tufts that are like a couple of black sporrans perched on their heads. They are, like all squirrels, alert, quick-moving and inquisitive, but, unlike most squirrels, they do not have that nervous desire to gnaw everything with which they come into contact. Her view was that nature had provided her with a pair of prominent, bright orange teeth for the sole purpose of demolishing any cage in which she was confined. This was not from any desire to escape, because having gnawed a large hole in one side of the cage she would then move over to the other side and start all over again. She cost us a small fortune in repairs until we had a cage specially lined with sheet metal, and thus put a stop to her activities. However, feeling that she would miss her occupational therapy, we gave her large logs of wood, and she proceeded to gnaw her way through these like a buzz-saw.
At first Millicent was anything but tame, and would not hesitate to bury her teeth in your finger, should you be foolish enough to give her the chance. No amount of bribery on our part, with the aid of such things as mushrooms and acorns, would make her any the less savage, and we came to the conclusion that she was just one of those animals which never become tame. But then a peculiar thing happened; Millicent was found one day lying in the bottom of her cage in a state of collapse. She had no obvious symptoms, and it was a little difficult to tell exactly what was wrong with her. When I find an animal suffering from some mysterious complaint like this, I do two things: I give it an antibiotic and keep it very warm. So Millicent had an injection and was moved down to the reptile house, for this is the only place where the heat is kept on throughout the summer months.
Within a few days Millicent was recovering satisfactorily, but was still languid. The extraordinary fact was the change in her character. From being acutely anti-human, she had suddenly become so pro-Homo sapiens that it was almost embarrassing. You had only to open her cage door and she would rush out into your arms, nibbling your fingers gently and peering earnestly into your face, her long whiskers quivering with emotion. She liked nothing better than to lie along your arm, as though it were the branch of a tree, and doze in this position for hours if you let her. Since she was now such a reformed character, she was allowed out of her cage first thing each morning, to potter round the reptile house. Millicent soon discovered that the tortoise pen provided her with everything a self-respecting Malabar could want: there was an infra-red lamp that cast a pleasant, concentrated heat; there were the backs of the giant tortoises, which made ideal perches; and there was an abundance of fruit and vegetables. So the giant tortoises would move ponderously round their pen, while Millicent perched on their shells. Occasionally, when one of them found a succulent piece of fruit and was just stretching out his neck to engulf it, she would hop down from his back, pick up the fruit, and jump back on to the shell again before the tortoise really knew what was happening. When the time came that Millicent was well enough to return to the small mammal house, I think the giant tortoises were glad to see the back of her, for not only had she been an additional weight on their shells, but the constant disappearance of titbits from under their very noses was having a distressing effect on their nerves.
It is amazing how wild-caught animals (as opposed to hand-reared ones) differ in settling down in captivity. Some take a considerable time to adjust themselves, while others, from the moment of arrival, carry on as if they had been born in the zoo. A dealer sent us a pair of brown woolly monkeys which he had just received direct from Brazil. We found that the male was a magnificent specimen, fully adult, and must have been about twelve or fourteen years old. We were not very pleased with this, for an adult monkey of that age would, we felt, take a long time to adjust itself to captivity, and might even pine and die. We released him into his cage with his mate, and brought them some fruit and milk. As soon as he saw these, he became very excited, and when the door of the cage was opened, to our complete astonishment, he came straight down and ate and drank while we were still holding the dishes, as if he had been with us for years instead of a matter of minutes. Right from the start he was perfectly tame, and ate well and seemed thoroughly to enjoy his new life.
There are many creatures which, on being settled in, make determined attempts to escape from their cages, not because they want their freedom but simply because they miss their old territory—the travelling crate to which they have grown used and which they look upon as their home. I have known an animal that was removed from its tiny travelling crate and placed in a spacious, well-appointed cage. It spent three days endeavouring to break out, and when it was finally successful it made a beeline to its old travelling box and was found sitting inside it. The only answer to this problem was to place the travelling crate inside the new cage. This we did, and the animal used it thereafter as its bedroom and settled down quite happily.
There are again some creatures, of course, which, when they manage to escape, present you with considerable problems. For instance, there was the night I shall never forget, when Claudius, the South American tapir, contrived to find a way out of his paddock. The person who had been in to give him his night feed had padlocked the gate carefully but without sliding the bolt into position. Claudius, having a nocturnal perambulation round his territory, found to his delight that the gate which he had hitherto presumed to be invulnerable now responded to his gentle nosings. He decided that this was a very suitable night to have a short incursion into the neighbouring countryside. It was a suitable night from Claudius’ point of view, because the skies were as black as pitch and the rain was streaming down in torrents that I have rarely seen equalled outside the tropics. It was about quarter past eleven, and we were all on the point of going to bed, when a rather harassed and extremely wet motorist appeared and beat upon the front door. Above the roar of the rain, he said that he had just seen a big animal in the headlights of his car, which he felt sure must be one of ours. I asked him what it looked like, and he said it looked to him like a misshapen Shetland pony with an elephant’s trunk.
My heart sank, for I knew just how far and how fast Claudius could gallop if given half a chance. I was in my shirtsleeves and only wearing slippers, but there was no time to change into more suitable attire against the weather, for the motorist had spotted Claudius in a field adjoining our property and I wanted to catch up with him before he ventured too far. I rushed round to the cottage and harried all those members of the staff who lived in. In various stages of night attire they tumbled out into the rain, and we headed for the field into which the motorist assured us our tapir had disappeared. This was a large field which belonged to our nearest neighbour, Leonard du Feu. Leonard had proved himself to be the most long-suffering and sympathetic of neighbours, and so I was determined that Claudius was not going to do any damage to his property if we could possibly avoid it. Having made this mental resolve, I remembered to my horror that the field in which Claudius was reputedly lurking had just recently been carefully planted out by Leonard with anemones. I could imagine what Claudius’ four hundred pounds could do to those carefully planted rows of delicate plants, particularly as, owing to his short-sightedness, his sense of direction was never very good at the best of times,