The New Noah (7 page)

I gave him two sharp cuts with this silly little twig and followed it up with a serious scolding. He sat there picking bits of leaf off his fur and looking very guilty. With the aid of the
Africans, I set to work and cleared away all the rocks and stones near his box, and, giving him another scolding went back to my work. I hoped that this telling-off might have some effect on him,
but when I looked out of the marquee some time later, I saw him digging in the earth, presumably in search of more ammunition.

Not long after his arrival at the camp, Cholmondely, to my alarm, fell ill. For nearly two weeks he went off his food, refusing even the most tempting fruit and other delicacies, and even
rejecting his daily ration of tea, a most unheard-of occurrence. All he had was a few sips of water every day, and gradually he grew thinner and thinner, his eyes sank into their sockets, and I
really thought he was going to die. He lost all interest in life and sat hunched up in his box all day, with his eyes closed. It was very bad for him to spend all day moping in this fashion, so in
the evenings, just before the sun went down, when it was cool, I used to make him come out for walks with me. These walks were only short, and we had to rest every few yards, for Cholmondely was
weak with lack of food.

One evening, just before I took him out for a walk, I filled my pockets with a special kind of biscuit that he had been very fond of. We went slowly up to the top of a small hill just beyond the
camp and then sat there to admire the view. As we rested, I took a biscuit out of my pocket and ate it, smacking my lips with enjoyment, but not offering any to Cholmondely. He looked very
surprised, for he knew that I always shared my food with him when we were out together. I ate a second biscuit and he watched me closely to see if I enjoyed it as much as the first. When he saw
that I did, he dipped his hand into my pocket, pulled out a biscuit, smelled it suspiciously, and then, to my delight, ate it up and started looking for another. I knew then that he was going to
get better.

The next morning he drank a mugful of sweet tea and ate seventeen biscuits, and for three days lived entirely on this diet. After this his appetite returned with a rush, and for the next
fortnight he ate twice as much as he had ever done before, and cost me a small fortune in bananas.

There were only two things that Cholmondely disliked. One of them was the Africans and the other, snakes. I think that when he was a baby some Africans must have teased him. Whatever the reason,
however, he certainly got his own back on more than one occasion. He would hide inside the box and wait until an African passed close by and then he would rush out with all his hair standing on
end, swinging his long arms and screaming in the most terrifying manner. Many a fat African woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head would chance to pass too closely to Cholmondely’s box,
and would have to drop her basket, pick up her skirts, and run for dear life, while Cholmondely danced victoriously at the end of his chain, hooting and showing all his teeth in a grin of
delight.

With snakes, of course, he was not nearly so brave. If he saw me handling one, he would get very agitated, wringing his hands and moaning with fear, and if I put the reptile on the ground and it
started to crawl towards him, he would run to the very end of his chain and scream loudly for help, throwing bits of stick and grass at the snake to try and stop it coming any closer.

One night, I went to shut him up in his box, as usual, and, to my surprise, he flatly refused to go into it. His bed of banana leaves was nicely made, and so I thought he was simply being
naughty, but when I started to scold him, he took me by the hand, led me up to his box and left me there while he retreated to the safety of the end of his chain, and stood watching me anxiously. I
realized there must be something inside, of which he was frightened, and when I cautiously investigated I found a very small snake coiled up in the centre of his bed. After I had captured it, I
found that it was a harmless type; Cholmondely, of course, could not tell the differ­ence, and he was taking no chances.

Cholmondely was so quick at learning tricks and so willing to show off that when he returned to England he became quite famous and even made several appearances on television, delighting the
audiences by sitting on a chair, with a hat on, taking a cigarette and lighting it for himself, pouring out and drinking a glass of beer, and many other things.

I think he must have become rather swollen-headed with his success, for not long after this he managed to escape from the zoo and went wandering off by himself through Regent’s Park, much
to the horror of everyone he met. On reaching the main road, he found a bus standing there and promptly climbed aboard, for he loved being taken for a ride. The passengers, however, decided they
would rather not travel by that particular bus if Cholmondely was going to use it as well, and they were all struggling to get out when some keepers arrived from the zoo and took Cholmondely in
charge.

He was marched back to his cage in disgrace, but if I know Cholmondely, he must have thought it worth any amount of scoldings just for the sight of all those people trying to get off the bus
together, and getting stuck in the door. Cholmondely had a great sense of humour.

Catching your animals is generally, but not always, the easiest part of a collecting trip. Once you have caught them, your job is to keep them alive and well in captivity, and
this is not always so easy. Animals react in various ways to captivity, and you will even get individuals of the same species that seem to have totally different outlooks. Sometimes they will
differ in quite small things and at other times their reactions will be so dissimilar that you would think they might be two separate species.

I once bought two baby drills from a hunter. Drills are those large, grey-coloured baboons with pink behinds that you can see in most zoological gardens. These two babies settled down very well
but they differed in a lot of small habits. For example, when they were given bananas, one of them would carefully peel the fruit and eat it, throwing away the skin, while the other would peel his
banana just as carefully, eat the skin, and throw away the fruit.

With the monkey collection one of the most important items of their diet was the milk that they got every night. This was dried milk that I would mix up in a big kerosene tin full of hot water;
then I would stir in several calcium tablets and a number of spoonfuls of malt and cod-liver oil mixture, so the resulting drink looked not unlike weak coffee. Most of the babies I had took this
drink immediately and would go absolutely mad when they saw the pots arriving at feeding time. They would shake the bars and scream and shout, and stamp on the floor of their cages with excitement
as they saw me pouring out the milk. The adult monkeys, however, took quite a long time to become used to this curious pale brown liquid. They seemed to be extremely suspicious of it, for some
reason.

Sometimes I managed to get a newly-arrived monkey to drink this mixture by turning its cage round so that it could see all the other monkeys busily guzzling and hiccupping over their milk pots.
The new arrival would then become curious and decide that perhaps the stuff in his pot was worth investigating. Once he had tasted it, he would very soon grow just as enthusiastic over it as the
rest of the monkeys.

Occasionally, however, I would get an extremely stubborn animal that would refuse even to taste his milk, in spite of watching all the others drinking theirs. I found the only thing to do in
this case was to take a cupful of milk and throw it over the monkey’s hands and feet. As they are extremely clean creatures, he would get to work to remove the sticky liquid from his fur by
licking it, and once he had got the taste and smell of the milk he would then drink it readily out of a pot.

With most animals, feeding is fairly straightforward if you know what they eat in the wild state. The meat-eating animals, for example, such as the mongooses or the wild cats, can be fed on goat
or cow meat, raw egg and a certain amount of milk. The important thing with these animals is to make sure that they have plenty of roughage. When they kill their prey in the wild state, they will
eat the skin, bones, and all; so if they are used to having this roughage, they soon sicken and die should it be withheld from them in captivity. I used to keep a big basketful of feathers and fur,
and I would drop pieces of goat or cow meat into it and get them all covered with feathers and bits of fur before giving them to the mongooses.

I came across this same problem of supplying roughage to birds of prey. Owls, for example, will eat a mouse, and then some time later sick up the bones and the skin, in the form of an oval
pellet. When you keep owls in captivity, you always have to make sure they are regularly producing these pellets, which are called castings, as this is a sure sign the bird is in good health.

Once, when I was hand-rearing some baby owls, I could get no roughage that I thought was suitable for them, and so I was forced to wrap small pieces of meat in cotton-wool and push them down
their ever-open beaks. This worked very well, somewhat to my surprise, and the little owls produced pellets composed entirely of cotton-wool, for a number of weeks. Their cage looked rather as
though they had been having a snowball fight, with all these little white castings lying about on the floor.

The animals which cause the collector most trouble are those species which have a restricted diet in the wild state. For example, in West Africa live the pangolins or scaly ant-eaters, great
creatures that have long pointed noses and long tails, with which they can hang from the branches of trees. They are covered with large, strong-overlapping scales so that they look like
strangely-shaped fir cones. In the wilds these animals feed solely on the ants’ nests which are built among the branches.

While I was keeping these animals in Africa, I could quite easily have given them an endless supply of their natural food, but, unfortunately, you cannot do this when the animal is in England.
So you have to teach the animal to eat a substitute food, something that will be easily obtainable in the zoo to which it is going. It is no use landing in England an ant-eater that will only eat
ants, as there is no zoo that would be able to supply them.

My scaly ant-eater had to be taught to eat a mixture of unsweetened condensed milk, finely shredded raw meat, and raw egg, mixed up together in a sloppy paste. They are extremely stupid animals
and it generally took them several weeks to learn to feed on this mixture properly. For the first few days of their capture, they would generally overturn their pot of food, unless you tied it in
place.

One of the most difficult creatures I had to deal with was a very rare animal known as the giant water shrew. This is a long black beast with a mass of white whiskers and a curious leathery tail
like a tadpole’s, that lives in the fast-running streams of the West African forest. Like ant-eaters, it had an extremely restricted diet in the wild state, feeding only upon the big brown
fresh-water crabs which are so plentiful in its natural habitat. When I obtained my first giant water shrew, I fed him on crabs for two or three days until he had settled down and got used to his
cage. Then I set about the task of trying to teach him to eat a substitute food on which he could live in England.

From a local market, I obtained a large number of dried shrimps which the natives use in their food. These I crumbled up and mixed with a little raw egg and finely-chopped meat. Then I got the
body of a large crab, cut it in half, scooped out the inside and stuffed it full of the mixture. I joined the two halves together again and, waiting until the giant water shrew was really hungry,
threw this false crab into his cage. He jumped for it, gave two swift bites, which was his normal method of dispatching a crab, and stopped and sniffed suspiciously: obviously, this crab did not
taste like the ones to which he was used. He sniffed again and thought about it for a bit, and must then have decided the taste was quite pleasant, so he set to work and had soon eaten it up. For
several weeks after this he had a number of real crabs and a number of specially stuffed ones every day until he got quite used to the taste of the new food. Then I started to put my substitute
food mixture in a pot, with the body of a crab on top. While he was biting the crab, he discovered the food underneath, and, after repeating this experiment for a couple of days, he was taking the
mixture out of the pot without any trouble at all.

When an animal was brought in, I could usually tell, more or less, what type of food it was going to require, but I always asked the native hunter, who made the capture, if he knew what the
animal ate, in case it had been noticed eating some particular food in the forest, which would help me to vary its diet in captivity. As a rule, however, the hunters had not even the faintest idea
what half their captives ate, and, if they did not know, they would just simply say the beast ate banga, the nut of the palm-oil tree. Sometimes this would be quite correct, as in the case of the
rats, mice, and squirrels. But on more than one occasion I had been assured by the native hunter that such unlikely things as snakes or small birds lived on this diet. I became so used to this that
whenever a hunter told me the animal he had brought in lived entirely on palm nuts, I disbelieved him automatically.

One day I obtained four lovely forest tortoises which were in the best of health and which settled down very well in a little fenced yard that I built for them. Now, as a rule, tortoises are one
of the simplest creatures to feed. They will eat almost any form of leaf or vegetable that you give them, together with fruit, and, in some cases, a small piece of raw meat occasionally. However,
these tortoises proved to be the exception to the rule. They refused all the delicacies that I showered on them, turned up their noses at all the ripe fruit and tender leaves which I took such
pains to get for them. I could not understand it and began to worry quite a bit about them.