Pet of the Month: Charles
FROM FEBRUARY 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Charles has been a resident of the Toronto Zoo since 1974. Here’s what he has for lunch.
It was a bitterly cold day when I arrived at the Toronto Zoo to meet Charles, a gorilla, now 51, who has been living there since 1974. He was two when he arrived from Gabon, and is the only gorilla at the zoo who was born in the wild.
“Is a silverback a type of gorilla?” I ask Francis Cabana, the nutritionist at the zoo, who meets me in the nutrition centre where the animals’ meals are prepared.
“A silverback,” Cabana says, “is a life stage.”
Several staff are weighing slender purple eggplants, cucumbers, onions and potatoes. The vegetables are very fresh. There’s a big white bin full of brown kibble chunks the size of your thumb. Every single day the animals receive a different menu so they don’t get bored.
Gorillas love sweet stuff – fruits. “But that is the old zoo diet,” Cabana tells me. Now they know that for better health 70 per cent of a gorilla’s diet should be leafy.
Fortunately, they also love silage, the leaves of willow and apple pressed into a bucket and sealed. This creates a natural pickle, like a less savoury kimchi. “The aerobic goes to sleep and the anaerobic produces lactic acid,” Cabana says. “You remove the mould cap and the silage smells like molasses.”
The zoo rents plots of land in Rouge Park to grow fruit trees that they’ll harvest leaves from in the fall to make the silage.
“In the wild, gorillas spend 60 per cent of the day eating, so we try to give them a voluminous diet to mimic that.”
Andrew Santos, the zoo’s social media coordinator and our guide, has arrived at the nutrition centre to walk us to the gorilla compound. “People think $14 for parking is a lot,” Santos says, “but every cent goes to pay for food to feed the animals.” We pass a medical building where Mazy, a 15-year-old Amur tiger, is anaesthetized to have a wellness exam – from behind the glass, visitors are watching her tooth getting pulled.
Outside, in an open compound, nine white wolves centre their strong shoulders upon us to give an intimidating stare. A 10-98, Santos tells me, is the call sign for animal escape or direct human contact. “We’ve never faced a 10-98, though we recently sent a red panda to the San Diego zoo and that panda climbed a tree there and hopped out of the habitat canopy.”
There’s a lion that favours Adidas cologne – scent enrichment is important for training. They spray perfumes in habitat, to give the animals an interest in life.
We also pass a polar bear pushing on a trampoline – this mimics the feeling they experience when they’re breaking up ice.
We are walking the long way to see Charles, Santos explains, because there is currently no connection between the African Savanna and the Americas Pavilion. This is due to construction of a new orangutan compound. It’ll be the first time the orangutans will be outside.
“Africa is at the top of the hill,” Santos says. When we get there, we open a door and the air is moist and funky. The gorilla enclosure is a large pyramidal structure with a sloping glass ceiling. We remove our coats and scarves. And there is Charles, a huge western lowland gorilla. He is sitting against a green wall in a diagonal slant of sunlight that streams in from the roof high above him. It’s like a religious portrait, or the final scenes in Kubrick’s 2001. He is making peace with his surroundings. There is a large mural next to him of logging. It is unclear if this is a statement on deforestation or the type of area where gorillas would naturally find lush new growth. Like 2001, there is poignancy, almost heartbreaking, about this enclosure, and I can’t tell if I’m staring at the astronaut Dave Bowman, or if I am Dave Bowman staring out at my new artificial world.
Charles is looking, across the way, at his two daughters, who are climbing a rope net dangling from a giant plaster replica of a massive tree’s root system. One daughter, Nneka, has been sleeping on a Safety and Security shirt. No one knows how she got it. The other, Charlie, his youngest, is slowly tearing the stuffing out of a teddy bear.
“The kids act up,” a volunteer guard tells me, “and then, when Charles has had enough, he claps his hands and everyone quiets down.”
Charles, for his age, is in remarkable health, though he has some dental issues, so they lightly steam his root vegetables. When it comes to things the gorillas enjoy (they regurgitate grapes, so they can taste their sweetness twice), the zoo has a point system. Peanut butter has a lot of points; juice is lower. This way you can control their calories. Toronto was the first zoo in the world to use this point system.
There is something silent and mysterious here, something old-fashioned yet ultra-modern about captivity, but the message is clear. In the enclosure, there is a collage of an ape bolted to the wall. It is made from old cellphones. This highlights a program to halt the mining of coltan in gorilla habitats. Coltan is used in our phones. I take a photo of Charles using the very technology that is causing his natural home to be destroyed.
As I drive away in the luxury of my heated car doing 90 on the 401, I find myself behind a cement truck, leading me back west. The cement truck is the gorilla of heavy equipment. A large semi passes me, temporarily blotting out the sun. Along its flank, Bison Transport. A sheet of melted snow slips off its roof and lands abruptly on my windshield. For a moment, the future of my Earth is obliterated, which feels like some kind of warning.