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19/7/11

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= The wandering ways of L.A.'s zoo animals =

35 escapes in 5 years -- figure catches attention of federal animal welfare officials
Matea Gold, Los Angeles Times Thursday, July 10, 2003



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**(07-10) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles** -- First some zebras broke the lock on their gate and sneaked out onto the zoo grounds after hours. A few months later, a chimpanzee scaled the wall of her exhibit. Then a kangaroo hopped out of her holding area, and an antelope dashed out of the zoo altogether, finding her way to a nearby golf course, where she holed up for two days. In all, at least 35 animals have wriggled, climbed and crawled out of their exhibits at the Los Angeles Zoo in the last five years. That escape rate, documented by officials trying to demonstrate improvements at the zoo, drew the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which enforces the federal Animal Welfare Act. The department first filed a complaint in court and then two weeks ago struck a deal with the city, agreeing to back off its threat of legal action in return for assurances that Los Angeles will do a better job of keeping its animals under lock and key. The wayward animals have not caused the public any harm, zoo officials stressed, and half of the escapees never got beyond their main enclosures. "These weren't elephants running down the streets of Honolulu," said zoo consultant David Towne, referring to a well-publicized 1994 incident in which a circus elephant broke out and led authorities on a chase of several blocks. Still, the animals in the Los Angeles Zoo are a canny bunch and have demonstrated their wiles repeatedly.

EVELYN THE GORILLA
Take the case of Evelyn, a gorilla who used overgrown vines to pull herself out of her exhibit in October 2000. She wandered around the zoo for about an hour, prompting the evacuation of all patrons and attracting the attention of television news helicopters before she was tranquilized. Gracie, a chimpanzee, showed similar ingenuity in September 1999, when she took a running start and scaled the sheer walls of her enclosure -- for the second time. Some of the breakouts have been flukes. Last December, a musical group performing in the zoo startled a baby red-flanked duiker, an African antelope, which leaped over a 4-foot wall and darted outside. She was recaptured two days later on a nearby golf course. Escapes are part of the life of any zoo, but most zoos do not keep a log that records each time an animal slips away from its keepers. The Los Angeles Zoo began doing so in the late 1990s, shortly after the zoo almost lost its accreditation because of complaints about facilities so poor that they threatened the health of the animals. Since then, the 80-acre complex has been widely praised for improvements. Because of its past problems, the Los Angeles Zoo reports every escape, no matter how minor, to the USDA. Now, zoo officials complain that their diligence in reporting escapes has made the problem seem more serious than it is. Half the cases in recent years involved animals that slipped out of a pen for just a few minutes in a back area of an exhibit and were never exposed to the public, said John Lewis, the new zoo director.

'PRETTY MARGINAL' INCIDENTS
"I would have to say a lot of the incidents that were cited were pretty marginal," said Lewis, the former president of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, who has been on the job for two weeks. "What the zoo's done . . . is shown what I would call exceptional due diligence in reporting everything. So in a lot of cases, things are over-reported." USDA spokesman Jim Rogers confirmed that the agency does not require zoos to report animal escapes. Members of the public or employees sometimes call about the most egregious ones, but not all trigger a complaint by the department, he added. "It just depends on how they happened," Rogers said. He would not comment on the specifics of the complaint filed against Los Angeles, calling it an ongoing legal procedure, but said that the department took such action only if investigators believed problems were frequent or severe. "We don't file a complaint unless we believe you violated the (Animal Welfare) Act," he said. In the complaint it filed against the zoo in 2001, the USDA cited 13 animal escapes and fined the zoo $25,000. As part of the settlement agreement, which the Los Angeles City Council approved June 25, the fine will be waived if the zoo provides additional training for its staff and develops a quality-assurance program, said Eric Moses, a spokesman for the city attorney's office. The zoo hired Towne, former director of the Seattle zoo, to oversee compliance with the agreement.

LICENSE AT STAKE
If the zoo fails to fulfill its obligations under the deal, it could end up in front of a USDA administrative law judge, who could impose fines or suspend the zoo's license. Zoo officials are confident that won't happen. The zoo has posted additional signs reminding keepers to double-check all locks and has altered some exhibits to prevent escapes, Lewis said. "I don't want to underplay the escapes, because every one of them is important and we need to address them," he added. "There is a welfare issue, so we don't take it lightly." The most frequent escape culprits have been the primates. Jim, a western lowland gorilla, broke out of his night stall once when it was not secured. Another time, he jumped across a moat wall into a waterfall area between the two gorilla exhibits, apparently to investigate noises the nearby gorillas were making. Keepers used a water hose to get him back into the enclosure. Although the primates are leading offenders, some of their less-heralded colleagues also have slipped away. One Nubian ibex -- a type of goat -- slipped past its keeper out of a holding area, not once but twice. One of those times, the ibex spent the night in a service area before she was discovered. This article appeared on page **A - 6** of the San Francisco Chronicle

Questions:

Find and strange words, and words that you do not understand. Explain in your own words what the article was about. Give 3 reasons why an electronic paper is better than a newspaper. Describe the structure of the article and why it was a good piece of writing.