COVER STORY : Enriching the Game Plan : The L.A. Zoo’s staff and volunteers are toying with stark environments in an attempt to recreate the animals’ experiences in the wilds.

Staffer Thaya du Bois has a mischievous smile on her face as she climbs into an electric tram at the Los Angeles Zoo.

“I have some disgusting things in the can, and I thought we might try those with the tigers,” she says.

Du Bois, the zoo’s assistant director of research, is a woman with a mission. She wants to enrich the lives of the zoo’s captive animals by making their habitats more natural and filling up their senses with more sights, smells and tactile experiences. Given the city’s bare-bones budget for the zoo, du Bois doesn’t have much money to work with. But she does have a vivid imagination and several dozen dedicated volunteers. And, on this particular morning, she has a coffee can filled with vials of scent, including a particularly pungent eau de wolverine.

Du Bois hands the feral perfumes over to Bertie Foster, veteran keeper of big cats. Like du Bois, Foster is a firm believer in something called behavioral or environmental enrichment, a practice at more and more zoos worldwide that seeks to better the lives of animals in captivity by giving them more things to do, especially things they do in the wild. Du Bois instituted the zoo’s behavioral enrichment program in 1990.

As du Bois explains, animals in older zoos such as Los Angeles’ often spend their days in stark, sterile environments, with concrete underneath and little to stimulate them. It’s no wonder, given the poverty of their daily lives, that the caged beasts pace or doze away the day.

Eventually, Los Angeles hopes to have a state-of-the-art zoo in which enrichment will be built into dynamic, naturalistic exhibits, including such amenities as a wave machine that will allow the polar bears to dive in the surf.

But, meanwhile, du Bois and her volunteers are practicing “remedial enrichment,” trying to better the animals’ experience now, by giving them things to play with, encouraging them to forage for at least some of their food and improvising other ways to keep them busy and engaged. As du Bois explains, her work is grounded in her scientific knowledge of animal behavior, but it also requires her to enter imaginatively into the minds of her charges. “I try to get into an animal’s head,” she says, “and see how it experiences the world, and we try to recreate that as much as we can.”

Which brings us to the tigers and the perfumes. As du Bois and tiger keeper Foster know, wild tigers live surrounded by the scents of hundreds of other animals. So when du Bois arrives with her cache of smells, Foster picks a perfume she likes--one that simulates the musk of a Siberian deer--and dabs it at various spots on the pile of logs that lie in the center of the tiger pit.

The pile of logs is itself an example of behavioral enrichment. For years, the zoo’s Siberian tigers--a pair of 11-year-old sisters--paced back and forth on an easy to clean but dull and forbidding expanse of concrete. But in 1993 the exhibit was renovated. A waterfall was added--with the wall behind it carefully pitched forward and built without paw-holds so the tigers couldn’t use it to escape. Dirt was trucked in to soften the surface beneath the cats, then planted with grass, bamboo and other vegetation that the cats can rub against, hide behind, dig up, or gnaw on.

After Foster applies the musk scent to the woodpile, she hides a couple of dead rabbits under the logs. A few minutes later, she releases the cats from the behind-the-scenes cages where they have spent the night. The first thing they do is sniff the logs, rubbing the scent glands in their own cheeks against the new smells they have discovered. Foster explains that the two cats will often mark the area as well. “They back up and urinate on it,” she says.

According to Foster, the presence of new scents in their habitat always seems to increase the interaction between the two animals.

“Sensory deprivation and lack of behavioral and social opportunities have been the basic deficits” for animals in older zoos, says Tim Desmond, an animal-behavior consultant based in Ventura. David Shepherdson, one of the founders of the behavioral enrichment movement and a research coordinator at the Metro Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Ore., agrees, arguing that smell and hearing are among the most neglected senses of zoo animals. Smell and hearing, he says, “tend to be ignored, because we know less about what those worlds mean to the animals.”

The tigers catch the scent of the perfume before they smell the rabbits. In the wild, the cats would spend part of every day hunting for food. Although they were fed their carefully balanced conventional diet the night before, they sniff around until they find the hidden prey. A group of schoolchildren watches from above as Indira digs up a clump of grass and hides her find under it before she settles down to devour the rabbit.

None of the mesmerized children or their teachers complains about the presence of the dead rabbits in the pit. Many animals eat live prey in the wild, and many biologists and others who care for captive animals think they would be better off if fed live animals, if only in behind-the-scenes areas. But few zoos are willing to gross visitors out by tossing Bambi into the lion exhibit, and live food in most public areas of zoos is limited to crickets, meal worms and the occasional goldfish. As animal consultant Desmond observes, “You don’t want your exhibit to be a snuff exhibit.”

Piqued by the new attractions in their exhibit, the tigers put on a fascinating show for the humans watching them, at one point snarling menacingly at each other over one of the rabbits. Behavioral enrichment makes for better drama from a visitor’s point of view, true, but it also has a positive impact on the animals themselves. Scientists have observed, for instance, that animals prefer to hunt for their food when given the option.

Given their belief in food as activity, zoo personnel are thrilled when the animals play with their food as the tigers do. Two mornings a week the polar bears are given giant fishsicles, which they bat around their pool even as they probe for the herring and other goodies frozen inside. As du Bois points out, polar bears seem to play in the wild, and they play in captivity as well. The fishsicle, says relief keeper Tami Goodson, “is just as much a toy as it is a treat.” Volunteers also hide figs and celery among the rocks in the polar bear exhibit. Volunteers are always drilling holes into tree limbs and other exhibit “furniture” throughout the zoo to provide hiding places for yogurt and other concealable foods.

*

Among the least natural of the bears’ playthings, but one they seem to love, is a beer keg. “Beer kegs are standard zoo toys everywhere because they are one of the few things that won’t fall apart in five minutes,” du Bois explains. The bears also pass their free time batting around a Boomer Ball, a commercial zoo toy whose selling points include being impervious to the attentions of elephants, gorillas and other animals of superhuman strength. At the L.A. Zoo everything from elands to meerkats, monkeys to rhinos, have Boomer Balls. Among their other virtues: They are hollow. You can drill holes in them, then fill them with crickets, raisins or other food that the animals must then figure out how to extract.

One of the great satisfactions of the behavioral enrichment program, participants say, is that even small, inexpensive changes can have a big payoff. For the last several weeks, keepers have been putting a few live goldfish in with the North American carnivores. According to keeper Molly Hogan, the fish have completely changed the routine of the zoo’s raccoons. Before the advent of the live fish, the pair were usually asleep in the morning when Hogan first entered their exhibit. Now the raccoons are wide awake, and they remain active for hours after they catch and devour their few fish, apparently looking for more.

The behavioral enrichment movement has burgeoned in the 1990s, encouraged by a new breed of specialists such as du Bois and by keepers, who routinely write into The Shape of Enrichment, the field’s quarterly newsletter, seeking practical advice on what to do for, say, a sluggish aardvark (Kitty Litter for it to dig in, peers advise). Keepers are in the trenches of this movement, and when they get into the spirit of behavioral enrichment, they tend to improvise much like first-time parents.

Once, Tami Goodson tried one thing after another to induce her penguins to get into a plastic kiddie pool of cool water. “Finally, I took off my shoes and got into the pool,” she recalls. “It was the only way I could get them to come in.”

The behavioral enrichment program couldn’t function if it weren’t for its volunteers, says du Bois. Earlier this month, 20 volunteers spent a weekend upgrading the exhibit that houses the zoo’s jaguars. With a grant from Yuban, the coffee company whose logo is a jaguar, and expertise and plants donated by a local nursery, the exhibit was turned into a mini-rain forest, complete with bromeliads and an overhead sprinkler system to insure that the tropical greenery stays lush.

Behavioral enrichment is obviously easier with some animals than with others. So far, the L.A. Zoo hasn’t done anything special to improve the quotidian routines of its snakes and lizards, but it has found ways to enhance the days of many of its animals.

After a volunteer observed the apparent pleasure a giant eland took in destroying a young pepper tree in its enclosure, the zoo’s research staff decided to see if it could create an artificial eland plaything. With the help of a local fabricator of zoo exhibits and equipment, the research staff devised a bucket with a spring inside that could be filled with acacia branches and other foliage. The bouncing bush that resulted seems to fascinate the zoo’s giant eland population, inducing it to spend twice as much time as it otherwise might in such characteristic eland behaviors as thrashing the simulated tree with twirled horns.

Du Bois emphasizes how important the 45 to 50 volunteers are to the zoo’s behavioral enrichment program. Her assistant, Marjorie Fuchs, an attorney by training, is in charge of the volunteer program and keeps track of who is doing which chores, such as cutting branches on which many animals like to browse.

*

Volunteers include Jill Blacher, a psychotherapist with a Beverly Hills practice that specializes in helping the bereaved. Blacher spends at least one morning a week at the zoo, spraying the Sumatran rhino with a hose as it frolics in its mud wallow, and hanging organic cornstalks from her own garden around its enclosure. “It’s very healing to come here and work with the animals,” says Blacher, who also tosses apples and whole heads of romaine into the maws of the hippos during her shift.

Suzanne Stern is another faithful volunteer. Every Wednesday night Stern’s family gets its own dinner while the Encino woman cooks up a storm for her animal friends. Recently she prepared giant pine cones for the orangutans, stuffing them with slices of yam and cantaloupe, peanuts, non-frosted shredded mini-wheats and dollops of her own recipe for oatmeal paste, a concoction of oatmeal, nonfat dry milk, canned pineapple and other nutritious stuff. Peanut butter is a favorite food of almost all the animals, but the volunteers try to avoid it because too much fat isn’t good for zoo creatures either.

“I do it to get away from work,” says Stern, who is a vice president at a local distribution company. She admits that it is sometimes difficult to keep her family from scarfing down the oatmeal paste, especially when she bakes it cookie-style. “Actually, my husband’s the one who will eat anything,” she says. “My daughter is a little more picky.”

Some zoos take a high-tech approach to behavioral enrichment, utilizing cricket launchers and mechanized dispensers that spit out treats when animals push the right button. In part because of lack of resources, Los Angeles tends to be low-tech. On a recent morning, the orangutans were poking into cardboard cones that had formerly held knitting wool and that volunteer Stern had filled with a mixture of granola and mustard. Many animals like spicy foods, du Bois explains. The chimps have a thing for salsa, and a number of animals like garlic and notoriously odoriferous durian fruit.

Volunteers raise goodies for the zoo’s great apes in a special Gorilla Garden in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, and du Bois makes sure that the animals’ exhibits are filled with such favorite playthings as ropes on swivels, some of which must be replaced weekly, and burlap sacks. It also seems that apes can’t resist a cardboard box any more than children can. Du Bois is thrilled that zoo higher-ups encourage her efforts to engage the animals with whatever she thinks will grab them, even if it means filling their exhibits with what sometimes looks like trash. “There was a time I wouldn’t have been allowed to do that.”

Behavioral enhancement is part art and part science, says du Bois. It reflects a view that animal needs are not so different from our own--that we both need things to do, as well as food and a safe place to live.

“What a lot of behavioral enrichment does is give the animal an increased degree of control over its destiny,” says Shepherdson. The result is a zoo where happier animals behave in more natural ways that the public often can’t take its eyes off.

For information about volunteering, call (213) 666-4650, Ext. 256.