From nursing a baby gorilla back to health at his home to rounding up escaped lions, Gerry Creighton, senior curator at Dublin Zoo who retires next month after 51 years, has seen it all, writes MAL ROGERS
ANGUS WILSON'S novel The Old Men at the Zoobegins with a cancerous giraffe kicking its zookeeper in the testicles – which surely gives it very high marks in the cliche avoidance stakes.
One suspects any zoo book written by Gerry Creighton would have a similarly original opening – although not quite so vividly painful.
Creighton – who retires as senior curator at Dublin Zoo after 51 years in April – got into zoo-keeping because, quite simply, he suspected the Phoenix Park ponies were being fed to the lions. At the age of 14 he’d got hold of this lurid rumour and went up to the zoo investigate.
“I lived just beside the Park, and from about the age of 12 I’d go up and feed the ponies, give them bits of bread and so on. Then I heard this story so crept into the part of the zoo where the ponies were kept.”
Creighton was caught by one of the zookeepers. But on hearing what was behind the young lad’s errand the keeper assured him that the ponies were strictly for children’s rides, and formed no part of the lions’ diets. Not wishing to have a wasted journey, however, the 14-year-old Creighton asked if he could have a job. And the rest, as they say, is natural history.
“Those ponies – May Blossom, Black Berry, Bubbles, Daisy and so on” – Gerry can still remember all their names – “taught me that animals have their own distinct characters, their own personalities.”
Over the next 51 years he put this knowledge into practice, becoming senior curator at Dublin Zoo, and a key figure in its development into what is today a world class institution.
The lions have always been Creighton's special interest. "As a kid I was transfixed by a book called The Man Eaters of Tsavo. It's about a couple of man-eating lions that terrorised the workers trying to build the Kenya Uganda railway. I used to think, if I have to die, that's the way I want it – eaten by a lion."
Fortunately for all concerned, he managed to avoid that particular fate. “I had a couple of hairy moments, alright. I remember once being surprised by one of our male lions, Rusty. I was cleaning his cage when one of the other keepers let him in beside me by mistake. I think Rusty was as surprised as I was.”
So exactly what is the best thing to do if you find yourself cornered by a fully grown, African male lion? Well, you shout at him in a strong Dublin accent, it would seem. “I’ve always just acted the same with the animals no matter which side of the barrier I was on. So I just screamed ‘Rusty!’ at him, and he slouched back into the other cage.”
Another time five young lions escaped their enclosure, last seen heading for Dublin city centre. Presumably wanting to be the Pride of the Coombe. But once again Creighton came to the rescue – without the need for tranquilliser guns, rifles or nets. “I just rattled the keys of the gate. They were used to that, and slunk back into their home.”
Dublin Zoo is proud of its long association with lions – the roaring MGM lion is a Dub. But today there’s only one left, a 22-year-old lioness called Sheila. “She’s a terrific natured girl, very friendly. Likes having the backs of her ears scratched. But zoos are about conservation now, and the animals at risk are the Asian lions. So when Sheila pops her claws, we’ll be doing our best to bolster their numbers.”
CREIGHTON IS 65,and is leaving the zoo on April 9th. For a man about to retire he has remarkably few grey strands in his thick black hair, or lines on his face. And only one scar.
“Ah, it was a black panther,” he says, spreading his left hand out. “It just caught me there one day when I was feeding it. Just a lapse of concentration.”
Despite the ever-present possibility of danger, Creighton loves his job. He even admits taking his work home with him. Now to some of us, that might entail opening the laptop. To a zoo curator, however, it can mean playing host to orang-utans, leopards, lions – or even the largest of the world’s primates.
“Grace was the first gorilla born in Ireland. The very first,” he says. “But she had a bit of a lesion on her forehead. So we took her down to Harcourt Children’s Hospital. A consultant there diagnosed a fractured skull.”
There was no question of Grace returning to the gorilla enclosure, so for the next year she was hand-reared, spending every night at the Creightons’ home. Creighton’s wife Catherine bottle-fed her, and she slept in a little cot. “She just wouldn’t have survived otherwise,” says Creighton. Reading my mind – and probably yours too – about the whole thing sounding a little bit too anthropomorphic, he added: “The thing about Dublin Zoo nowadays is it’s all about conservation and education. It’s what most zoos are about, in fact.”
Improbable though it may sound, Grace was eventually taken to Stuttgart – that’s where gorillas are taught to live in the wild again. In the meantime the gene pool has been bolstered up.
But keeping a gorilla in a city can have its own special rewards. “It’s a full time job keeping a wild animal at home,” explains Gerry, “and you just can’t leave the animal on its own.”
That certainly seems a reasonable position to adopt, even if you have to go down to the shops. And so it was.
“We had to get our electric cooker repaired,” says Gerry. “So we had to bring the gorilla with us. It was wrapped up like a baby.”
The possibilities for mishap seem endless in this scenario, but as it happens it probably only traumatised two people for a couple of months.
In the shop a little girl came over. Gerry said: “Would you like to see the baby? She’s very like her mother.”
When she saw it she screamed and ran back to her mother, shouting: “Mammy, mammy, that man’s baby looks like a monkey!” The mother was mortified and told her not to be saying things like that. But when she came over to have a look she nearly collapsed.
THE CREIGHTONhousehold also played host to a snow leopard. One of the rarest of the big cats, this particular one was abandoned by her mother and had to be reared in an incubator.
“I brought her home and before long she was chasing round the house with our German shepherd. But when it came to sleeping, she had to have the washing machine on. She slept beside it. She loved the vibrations.”
In between turning on the washing machine for leopards, bottle feeding gorillas and sticking baby orang-utans in the hot press, Creighton and his wife Catherine found time to bring up five children. The two boys – Gerry jnr and James – have followed in their father’s footsteps and both are senior keepers at the zoo. So the Creighton name will live on.
But how will Creighton spend his retirement? “Well, I have a few dogs,” he explains, “a couple of Jack Russells and Yorkshire terriers, and a Rottweiler – all of them need a bit of training.”
Presumably for a man with a panther scar on his hand, used to bawling out fully-grown male lions, handling a terrier or a Rottweiler will be easy peasy.
