The Brilliance and Sadness of Zoos: Animal Mothers Walk Away From Their Young

People wonder about mothers, human and animal, who walk away from their babies…

who refuse and do not nurture their young, who literally walk away, stray out late, leave the child in the bush, in the car, at home alone unable to reach the doorknob and without food…

the children cry themselves to sleep, furry or human child, matters not…

each needs a mother, her warmth, her regard, her watching over them while they are yet so vulnerable, not knowing up from down, not knowing predator from friend.

Alone in the world, even though this is not Creator’s mind about what is meant to be.

This week, two little red pandas were born in a zoo in China. The mother, fresh from the agonistas of labor, and half delivered of placentas, took one look and walked away.

Away away.

Did not come back to her little mewing babies. Couldn’t be coaxed. No. She was having none of whatever those things were.
She had lost her instincts to recognize her own.

Red pandas grow up to be pint-sized versions of the Great Pandas who can outweigh these little guys by hundreds of pounds. The red pandas nibble at tender bamboo shoots once they are weaned. They have lovely red fur and in a way look like little red foxes.

They are protected in China as a treasured species, as are their larger kin.

Yet, people scratch their heads, including some zoologists. How can a mother who just gave birth and who is hard wired to care for her children, just walk away?

Some speculate: There must just be ‘bad mothers’ in the animal kingdom… not just human mothers who abandon their young for a night of crack and pot-metal earrings that infect her earlobes by morning, but animals too… must have some strain of bad bad moon and even worse mothering in them.

Except, we know why mothers abandon their babies, even if other more educated people have forgotten why and how, or maybe they have just been educated beyond their intelligences and can no longer add simple integers of deuce plus deuce equals, you know, four. Or maybe they just aren’t observing the signs.

All of us who ever spend more than ten minutes in the woods or desert or on the mountain know why mothers abandon their young…

when they have no exemplars to show them, model for them, how… how to stay near, for their own mothers did not stay near they themselves…

Thus, as adults, they no longer know how to nurture their young, for their own mother was hunted and killed, or their own mother died too early on of disease, or their mother had no mother, no grandmother either…

and so the latent ‘mothering gene’ in the young was never switched to a sheltering ‘staying with one’s child’ “on” by example, by seeing and hearing, by pack and herd communication, by hormones released by touch, and nurture… by being part of a cohesive whole of elders, parents, children and babies.

And in zoos? There are no herds of elephants to show the day to day of child bearing and childrearing. There are often only one or two elephants, especially in small zoos, and one male and one female at that. But a female is unlikely to learn nurture from a male, and a male is unlikely to learn protection of the herd from a non-bull only.

So that all each have left to them, is rather mindless reproduction for the female and angry aggression for the male who has no group to protect as he would help to do in a herd. And/ or depression.

Too in zoos, there are no packs of wolves that roam and thereby heighten their own hormonal processes and instincts through hunting, feasts and famines– together. In one way, zoos provide consistent and some say better nutrition than a wolf would have in the wild. But no long runs, explorations to strengthen the bones. No broad, unexpected alerts to sharpen the mind. Few problems to solve. No ‘enemies to overcome’ and all that brings an animal in sense of powers of defense and success.

We humans know any stressful event that we manage to come through ‘together’ bonds us deeply to one another for life, changes our hearts toward one another, creates memories that when recalled release powerful agents within our bodies and minds; we register these and feel these changes.

In zoos, there are no flocks of storks nor white pelicans nor cormorants, turning south because the molecules have changed in the air… signally a compass point, turn, turn turn, you must go, you must….

for often the zoo is in a city where there are not seasons native to the creature normally…

and all the creatures, sans example, sans being allowed to be surrounded by vivacious like-kind, sans being allowed to follow the instinctual cycles and seasons made up as ‘serious knowing’ in their very souls, sand freedom of movement, sans enough turf…. walk away from their children and leave them to die.

Just as some adult human beings do. Not surrounded by tribe, with no leaning against the warm thighs of the old women, not held in the motherly embrace so one can hear her heartbeat, not soothed of head and chest and back, not shown, not taught. Skin hungry. Mind anxious. In constant alert, same as persons or creatures traumatized. Same.

Same, same, same.

It is not a surprise. We know it, we see it, and we note too that it is not just the negligence of the children, but amongst the animals, eventually, even comes the inability to reproduce. It may be so in human beings too, who move too far from those of life-kind in family and thus have no generations’ of examples nearby and perhaps too, no mother/father warmth that relaxes and can deepen the calm of the young so.

It is said that the medical specialty re endangered pregnancies has increased in vocation dramatically as the number of miscarriages and difficulty in conceiving amongst humans has become higher and higher as a result of oddities in ovum production in some females, and significantly lower sperm counts in some men.

For creatures, the hormonal seasons of the tribe influence each creature, and without the group in estrus together, the endocrinology, and therefore the desire, the imagination is made pale and dim in creatures.

There may be something similar afoot amongst humans as well with the dulling of the senses daily by being surrounded by images and influences that used to hyper-arouse, changing the body chemistry entirely, and now for many of childbearing age in their 20s and 30s, much of the stimulus is no longer stimulating.

But back to the zoos. Most try hard to help the fragile penguins to reproduce and more so, keep the offspring alive once they are born… but often enough they cannot keep those feathered young alive… and then, the zoo keeps weep. They do.

For all the grumpy ballyhoo about anthropomorphizing animals aside, most of the zoo keeps love the creatures they care for, and are in some deep ways attempting to keep the animals behind bars and in ‘plazas’ to try to save them …

Save them utterly from other humans who would destroy the creatures for slight profit, or to gain a rack or a skull, or a pelt… or an imagined medicine.

And so the zoo keeps take on the heroic. And the everyday.

But at what price to all, both creatures and humans?

Long ago, zoos were Barnum Bailey affairs, ‘Let’s show the rubes for a few pennies the creatures they will never otherwise see in their lifetimes. And, maybe throw in a few dancing girls past their primes in raveling satin panties, and may a taxidermist’s opus of glue and needle and thread faking a two-headed calf.

But there are other kinds of zoos now, that bespeak ethics and care… and, as mentioned, love.

Yet… the animal mothers walk away.

The mothers still walk away from their precious and darling young. The mothers’ hearts are no longer even aroused by this one specific sound that every mother, human and animal, feels as shooting pains deep in her bones and breasts ….

that is, when her child cries in hunger or distress and thus the mother must, MUST come running to the child to nurse the child, to comfort the child’s skin, to spread mother-calm over the child, to chase away the dark.

And so, the walk-away mother it is not all the mystery some pretend it to be. Not a mystery at all, rather a tragedy… a ‘between rock and a hard spot’ tragedy…. building zoos as protection, yet still too often breaking the instincts of the very animals protected.

We are, many of us, living proof in our own ways that having deeply imperfect circumstances when young no doubt makes it hard to thrive…

but too, we realize that if we can find just one person, even an eccentric one to nourish us, even a non-blood relative-like person to care about whether we live or die, to even bond with strangers who come serially to our lives, never staying long…

only long enough to say a kind word to us that is somehow memorable for life, to drop a dollar on us for rent perilously overdue, or to say though they cannot stay with us, they believe in just one thing about us… that we are meant to be…

then we can not only go on, but rise up in maturity– looking pretty tattered and ragged perhaps, never looking/ acting quite right, never completely ‘fitting in’– but in many ways stronger than strong, enduring, thriving even… not despite our early travails, but almost because of them….

because of the immense experience of gratitude we learned in the most odd ways from often, the most odd kinds of people—and creatures– imaginable.

And so too the two little red pandas in China were saved by a stranger too. This week, the zoo keep there, with the wonderful first name of Ha, brought in three dogs who’d just given birth…

and one of them, a white pup that sort of looks like the Taco Bell chihuahua with those big kind of bulgy eyes and big pointed mouse ears, sharp pointed muzzle, and sort of nervous looking no matter what… this little dog is nursing the two tiny red panda newborns. Took right to them. And it is very sweet.

And no doubt the little guys will live now. And well.

The rest of the story: It is only that Ha, the good zookeeper now reports with sadness, that the little white dog, in bonding to the two panda-babies, not just as wet nurse, but something more too that no one can really name….has herself now abandoned her own litter, refusing to nurse her own pups that came from her own blood and bones and body…

Almost as though she has, with the little pandas, filled her entire instinctual reservoir for mothering.

And so it goes, that ‘only nourishing this many and no more,’ being a mystery of another kind altogether.

Thus, the zoo remains a place of such brilliance, such desire to protect, which includes too remaining alive in endowment… but overarching, for the creatures, and many of the humans, there is sadness also…

a melancholy ongoing that comes to us any time we see great beauty

held and hobbled in too small a space,

and not able to run, race, fly free.