The worst zoo I ever saw

I feel sorry for my Harari friends.

During my stay in Harar, Ethiopia, they were so hospitable, so eager to ensure I had a 100% positive impression of their city and country. For the most part I did, and I left for the capital Addis Ababa with lots of great things to say about Ethiopia.

They should have warned me not to visit the Lion Zoo in Addis Ababa.

It’s billed as a natural wonder, where you can see rare Ethiopian black-maned lions descended from the pride that was kept in Haile Selassie’s palace. In reality, it’s a sad display of animal cruelty and neglect.

The lions, primates, and other animals are kept in undersized cages with bare concrete floors. They look bored, flabby, resigned. Several of them look sick. Visitors shout at the listless animals or even throw pebbles to get them to move. Some toss packets of chocolate or potato chips to the monkeys and laugh as they tear the packages apart to get to the food inside.

The worst are the lions, proud carnivores, kings of the wilderness, reduced to trapped objects of amusement for bored city dwellers who don’t give a shit about nature. The lions lie around most of the time, doing nothing. Occasionally one will get its feet, shake its dirty mane, take a few steps before realizing there’s nowhere to go, and then sit down with an air of defeat.

The whole place made me feel ill, yet I can’t feel morally superior. I come from a country where people freak out if someone beats a dog but cheer when a Third World country gets carpet bombed. Where a zoo like this would be a national scandal but people eat meat raised on factory farms that make Ethiopia’s Lion Zoo look like a nature reserve. Only vegans can talk about animal cruelty from any moral high ground, and I’m not a vegan. Meat tastes too good.

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But a travesty like this zoo is totally unnecessary. Ethiopia is anxious to promote itself as a tourist destination, a friendly, civilized country where Westerners can feel at home. Well, if it wants to do that, it better do something about the Lion Zoo.

Like shut it down.

So to my Harari friends, I’m sorry. You came close to getting a 100% positive series (well, except for my bumbling around Ethiopia’s Somali region) but it was not to be. I understand Ethiopia has bigger priorities than a few animals in a zoo in Addis Ababa, but if you want to make a positive impression on Western visitors, this place has got to go.

Don’t miss the rest of my series: Harar, Ethiopia: Two months in Africa’s city of Saints.

Coming up next: Tomoca: the best little coffeehouse in Africa!

Dispatch from Sumatra’s nastiest swamp (part 1 of 2)


Forget for a moment the dreadful conditions in this miserable Sumatran swamp, which include being eaten by tigers (seven in the surrounding area last year). Just getting here is an ordeal in itself. Start by taking the 1,400-kilometer flight from the capital, Jakarta, to Sumatra‘s bustling northern port, Medan. Then it’s a grueling twelve-hour ride straight across the island’s dramatic mountains-and poorly maintained roads-to the Indian Ocean, where a puttering speedboat will be waiting to make the hour-long trip upriver.

If all goes well, you arrive at camp for the daily rationing of rice and canned mackerel. This is assuming you secured the four permits required for a visit to this hidden corner of Leuser National Park, a World Heritage Site.

Yet despite the remoteness or food or the fact the Suaq Balimbing field station is in the middle of a flooded swamp, the scientists here couldn’t be happier at their return. “We were all waiting for this place to reopen,” Andrea Gibson, a PhD candidate at University of Zurich who had to delay her orangutan fieldwork by three years because of the station’s hiatus, said to me.
There’s no question why so many researchers clamber to be here. The site rocketed to fame in the mid-1990s with the discovery of tool-use among orangutans, the only primate besides chimpanzees with such abilities; it remains the only location with widespread tool-use. Later work contributed to a landmark paper in Science that demonstrated the existence of orangutan culture. This modest patch of swamp, quite frankly, boasts some of the smartest apes in the world.

But an upsurge of violence from the long-running civil war at the end of the 1990s forced the Suaq primatologists, as well as wildlife researchers across Aceh, out of business. Only now, with a peace treaty in place, are they trickling back. Nowhere has the homecoming been more dramatic or anticipated than at Suaq Balimbing.

As the boat pulls into the dock-a rickety piece of plywood-the field station looms large, looking almost palatial against the backdrop of dense jungle foliage. But once on top of the riverbank, you realize the camp, which consists of three tiny rooms in two wooden shacks, is about to burst at the seams. Fifteen people, including three graduate students from Zurich, an Indonesian student, a cook, and several field assistants jostle for space alongside generators, laptops, food supplies, and an entire department store of wet field outfits hung out to dry.


None of this, however, was around a year ago, and with that in mind, Suaq’s transformation seems nothing short of miraculous. When the field staff evacuated in September 1999, hastened by the execution of the head assistant and violent skirmishes nearby, they left behind two sturdy buildings, one of which had six rooms. By the time they returned for a brief survey in 2006, everything had gone up in flames. “The rebels had been using our camp, so the military didn’t burn it down for nothing,” the camp’s principal investigator explained to me. Equally disheartening, the boardwalks used to traverse much of the 350-hectare swamp had rotted away.

After completely rebuilding the station last February, albeit on a smaller scale, the staff spent much of the summer blazing a new, 46-kilometer trail grid, an absolute necessity when tracking orangutans day in and out. They started collecting behavioral data last September.

The civil war’s impact on the Suaq jungle, on the other hand, was quite unexpected. When President Suharto fell from power in 1999, illegal loggers almost overran the station. “Then the civil war stemmed that,” explained Ian Singleton, a Medan-based orangutan researcher who oversees logistics at Suaq. “The illegal loggers and poachers didn’t want to risk being shot. So the civil war was extremely good for conservation.”

Continue to part 2.

A new brunt for eco-tourism: human viruses are killing apes

Humans and monkeys always seem to have had a love-hate relationship. On one side, eco-tourists spend fortunes to see and interact with great apes in their natural environment; on the other side, both monkeys and humans are responsible for giving each other deadly viruses. For example, monkeys gave the human race the fatal AIDS, and now scientists have found some of the most common human respiratory viruses are killing endangered apes. Is this nature’s demonstration of karma? Is there a solution?

Further to this discovery, eco-tourists visiting natural reserves to see apes will be obligated to show proof of vaccination, wear masks and disinfect all clothes and boots before setting foot in ape territory. It is also being recommended to keep a 7-10 meter distance from the apes, which kind of screws up any ape-tourist’s long held desire to take a photograph with the primates.

Eco-tourism has many advantages: the tourist dollar is essential and it helps maintain and protect animals and their environments in their natural surroundings. But, when the disadvantages include direct death of the animals, which may ultimately play a notable role in elimination of the entire species from planet earth, should it be permitted at all?