S.F. Zoo's history of mismanagement - director is a despot

[kurth]

S.F. Zoo's history of mismanagement; morale down under new director
Patricia Yollin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, December 29, 2007

A koala is kidnapped. Sheep are molested by a human intruder. An elephant does a headstand on a technician, breaking her pelvis. A tiger ravages its keeper's arm. A year later, on Christmas Day, the same feline escapes, kills and gets killed. This is what life can be like at the San Francisco Zoo, a 78-year-old institution saddled with a history of mismanagement and scores of injuries to animals, employees and visitors alike... Tuesday's attack by Tatiana, a Siberian tiger that broke out of her yard, fatally mauled a teenager and injured two of his friends before being shot to death by police, has captured international attention. "For the next 50 years, it's what the San Francisco Zoo will be remembered for," said one high-ranking former employee.

The very public tragedy overshadows decades of problems - and the troubles of the current zoo administration, which began in February 2004 when Manuel Mollinedo became director of the 100-acre facility... The director's tenure has been highly eventful. Three of the zoo's four elephants have died since March 2004 - two at the zoo, a third at a Calaveras County sanctuary where it was sent, broken-down and ailing. The lone survivor still lives there. The fight over the pachyderms' fate, taken up by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and animal rights activists, enraged the national Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which tabled the zoo's accreditation for a year. Puddles, a venerable 44-year-old hippopotamus, died in May, a day after a move that some employees say was bungled and others say should never have been made...

Since Mollinedo took over, there has been a steady exodus of employees, including the deputy director, education director, two successive public relations managers, development director, curator of birds, marketing manager, events director, human resources manager, general manager of concessions and a number of veteran keepers. Michele Rudovsky, associate curator of hoofstock and pachyderms, starting working at the zoo as a teenager but quit in August after more than a quarter-century. Head veterinarian Freeland Dunker also resigned and will depart in early January for the California Academy of Sciences. Most of those who left, sources say, were fed up or pushed out. "What walked out the door was 200-plus years of incredible animal experience - and you can't afford that," said former penguin keeper Jane Tollini, who quit in 2005 after 24 years...

Employees characterize the current regime as arrogant, autocratic and dismissive of those with experience and institutional knowledge. Keepers, who know the animals and their habitats inside and out, say they have little input and are not listened to by Mollinedo and Bob Jenkins, the zoo's director of animal care and conservation. Workers of every variety fear they're being spied upon and will not speak publicly, afraid of reprisals. Even before the Christmas rampage, information was tightly controlled...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/29/MNNQU63KP.DTL

[silverojo]

1. Wow....

Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, it's not. :(

[Ladyhawk]

5. I might get harassed for saying this...

...but I miss Steve Irwin terribly. :( :( :( :( :( :(

[shanti]

8. no harassment here!

i miss him too - he was a true free spirit, he took a chance and lost:(

[roguevalley]

15. steve would never have allowed this. did you hear that his wife is

going to sponsor studying whales in antarctica to expose Japan as a fraud in their whaling programs?
Go, Irwins!

[judaspriestess]

2. they are the bush administration of the zoo world

talk about fuckup central

[troubleinwinter]

3. Thank you for posting this very interesting article. Worth reading.

[EFerrari]

4. I can't believe I wheeled my nieces all around that place in their

buggies. :scared:

Someone in my family has always lived close enough to walk to the zoo. Between us all, we probably have enough zoo keys to make a necklace. I hope some bureaucratic @ss gets kicked but good and soon.

[troubleinwinter]

6. My grandfather was the Director of the Morrison Planetarium at the Academy of Sciences

when I grew up. My father moonlighted as a planetarium lecturer. My grandmother ran the office and sold planetarium tickets. I spent my childhood setting up the pendulum pegs after-hours, picking up lost change in the planetarium, and walking on the cat-walks over the smelly behind-the-scenes aquarium tanks to feed the fish. I have a photo of myself asleep on the cat-walk over the tank of my very favorite pals, the octopi.

Between planetarium shows, my grandmother & I had to kill a lot of time, and tons of it was spent at the zoo.

The zoo was my 'backyard' growing up in the 50s. This situation really hurts.

[BrotherBuzz]

9. CAS in the fifties was a pretty dynamic place...

Did you ever meet Benjamin Draper and watch CAS's TV program 'Science in Action'? I loved that program and got to meet Draper a few times as a kid.

I suspect I didn't cross paths with your grandfather or father as I didn't get involved with CAS until the late seventies. I worked with a small construction company that did lots of the smaller remodeling jobs in the seventies and early eighties. I worked all over the place including time spent in the planetarium installing projection booths for the laser shows. That was a bizarre job because I was working on opposite side of the room and often got disorientated working in the circular room; I never knew for sure where I would end up when I exited to room it. Sometimes I would spill out into North America hall, other times, right at the pendulum. It wasn't until I studied Ansel Adams panorama that I become better orientated.

I was a little saddened to see CAS torn down and a lot of my work lost, but I know firsthand how flawed that structure really was; beach sand makes lousy concrete! I did visit the temporary location down on Howard Street, and enjoyed it. Considering their space limitation, they did a bag-up job. I look forward to the new opening for the California Academy of Science back in the park next year.

I'm a mechanic at heart, so its understandable my favorite location in the whole complex was instrumentation, located in the basement directly below the planetarium. Things that were made down there were, well sometimes, out of this world, like the Jupiter and her moons projector. My friend designed and built that one. Heck, even the Foucault pendulum was made down there! Many other science institutions purchased their pendulum from CAS.

[EFerrari]

12. I know. When I was little, the family was poor so they were always

looking for free or inexpensive entertainment. We used to picnic on the lawn and I played in that playground for hours on Sunday afternoons. :(

[shanti]

7. hmmmm

wonder what kind of severence package mollinodo got? :eyes: gross mismanagement.

[Luminous Animal]

10. I'm too despondent to read the whole article...

because I was one of many who fought the privatization of the zoo's management when the city handed it over for $1. But I doubt the article mentioned that fact at all.

[bklyncowgirl]

11. What I can't understand...

What I can't understand, is why they didn't have the means onsite to deal with an escaped big cat or other dangerous animal? Bad things can happen when you're dealing with animals and you have to be prepared.

I've never worked at a zoo but I've always assumed that they have tranquilizer guns and probably high powered rifles as well, ready in case they need to subdue or destroy an animal quickly.

According to the news reports, the cops, and I'm assuming the EMS workers, were kept waiting at the gate while supposedly zoo security was trying to deal with the escaped animal. In the meantime they have a guy bleeding to death, two guys seriously injured and a seriously pissed of 300 pound Siberian tiger on the loose.

Wasn't anyone in charge there?

[EFerrari]

14. If something is going to go wrong, Christmas Day is probably

the worst day of the year for it to happen. I wonder how many people were hungover or off for the day or hurrying to get home. :(

[TZ]

13. The national zoo went through the same thing a few years back

Although they had no large animal escapes, they had many animal deaths including have their two red pandas die after eating rat poison left in their cages. It was mismanagement by the head of the zoo at the time. Since she was forced out awhile back things have gotten better.
And fyi SF zoo..You should look to the design of the National Zoo's big cat display..Their wall is actually shorter..at 9 feet....BUT they have a nine and foot deep water filled moat between display and wall.And a tiger can't jump out of the water and over the wall....