Zoo’s orangutans know the buttons to push
They’ll return items dropped into their exhibits - if the price is right
By Lamor Williams
Thursday, May 15, 2008
LITTLE ROCK — Rok the orangutan is smart. He knows that sooner or later, someone will drop something into his enclosure at the Little Rock Zoo. And, he really understands that it will likely be something the visitor wants back.
So Rok waits. And he watches. A few times a month, he or one of the other great apes is rewarded. As cell phone technology has advanced, zookeepers have found more and more ofthe devices accidentally dropped into exhibits by people - usually those leaning over railings - trying to take photos with their camera phones.
So how does one get a cell phone back from a large male orangutan that can be as strong as eight adult men?
Bribe him. But choose the offering carefully.
Rok (pronounced Rock), the zoo’s dominant orangutan, knows that the phones are valuable. He won’t give them up for peanuts - not unless the peanuts are covered in chocolate and caramel.
“One day Rok brought a cell phone in intact. The people were waiting to get it back,” said Daphne Pfeiffer, a great ape keeper at the zoo. “He took the rubber faceplate off first. I got a frozen candy bar out of the freezer, but I couldn’t break it to trade a piece for the faceplate. So I tried to reason with him. I told him if he gave me the whole phone, I’d give him the whole candy bar.”
The outcome wasn’t good.
“He got mad. He looked right at me, put it in his mouth and crunched it,” Pfeiffer said. “And that’s exactly what it sounded like - crunch!”
Ann Rademacher, another ape keeper at the zoo, noted that the increase in dropped cell phones hasn’t led to a corresponding decrease in the usual items found in the exhibits, such as cameras, prescription glasses, sunglasses,babies’ shoes and car keys.
“We found a battery just this morning,” she said Wednesday about 10 a.m. “It has teeth marks all over it. Somebody had to have dropped it yesterday. It was probably in a device, we just couldn’t find it.”
Zoo spokesman Susan Altrui, said she wants zoo visitors to be aware that beyond the health risk to animals that swallow such dropped items, people should be more careful.
“It’s never a good idea to hold your child over an exhibit. That’s usually how the shoes get into the exhibits,” Altrui said.
Transmitting germs is also a major health concern, Rademacher said.
“All the things we put in there are disinfected and veterinarian-approved,” she said. “Even something as benign as an ice cube from your cup can cause problems. They can get all the things that humans can get, like chickenpox or measles.”
Fortunately, the crafty orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees in the three great ape exhibits aren’t particularly interested in eating what they find. But they fight among themselves for the bargaining power the items hold, Rademacher said.
To illustrate the point, Pfeiffer recalled the time she lost her keys in the chimpanzee exhibit.
“One of the little boy chimps had them,” she said. “Dad saw him and took the keys from him. He knew I had grapes. He knew the keys had value.”
The orangutans and chimpanzees are most aware of the bargaining power of foreign objects, the keepers noted. So much so that sometimes the animals try to use simple objects like rocks and sticks to barter with keepers for a few pieces of cereal.
The keepers said they will often trade the orangutans for the sticks because the animals have figured out how to use the objects to poke out light bulbs in their enclosure. The lighting is covered by a grate, but the animals know how to find slim sticks to hit the bulbs.
“Chiquita [a female orangutan] brought in a stick once and the keeper wasn’t paying much attention,” Rademacher said. “Then she [Chiquita] threatened to poke the bulb out. She stood there with the stick pointed at the bulb, and the keeper figured out: ‘Oh, you want a treat.’”
By far though, keepers say, Rok is the shrewdest bargainer.
He often dismantles items and trades one piece at a time for one whole treat at a time. He recognizes the red-and-white Coca Cola label and won’t trade items such as cell phones and cameras for “regular” food, the keepers said. Soft drinks and candy bars are the top-tier treats, followed by frozen fruit such as grapes and strawberries, they said.
“If an all-out camera with all the fittings and things went in there, the price would go way up,” Rademacher said, laughing at the thought.
Pfeiffer agreed, admitting that on “Some days, we’re definitely not the smartest primates in the building.”
