AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF ZOOS' PRINT
Sally Walker
From Zoos Print January 1996 Pp. 75-80
The first issue of ZOOS' PRINT was posted on 21 December 1985; just as this one - God willing - will be in 1995.
The history of this publication is of course intimately tied up with the story of Zoo Outreach Organisation so this account will include something of both. Zoo Outreach Organisation or ZOO would not have come about without my experiences both good and bad at Mysore Zoo and with the Friends of Mysore Zoo, so a bit of that story will also come in these pages.
I would not have thought a ZOOS'PRINT could work had I not publishedanother zoo magazine for some time,called the GNU's (prounced "news")LETTER, which was the Newsletter ofthe infamous Friends of Mysore Zoo.The GNU's LETTER was intended toreport activities and news of MysoreZoo and the volunteer organisation mentioned above which Ifounded withsome animallovers ofMysore.
TheGNU'SLETTER was started originally as a quarterly publication butdue to the generosity of the late Mr. G.C. Jain, a real zoophilewho had owned an excellent aviary in the 60's and 70’s(where P. Kannon served as Curator, incidentally). Mr. Jainalso owned the Corona Sahu Shoe Company and from thiscompany he gave Friends of Mysore Zoo a generousadvertisement of Rs. 2000/-. He was willing to give thismonthly so the GNU's LETTER became a monthlypublication.Filling a monthlypublication with activities ofMysore Zoo and its Friends and making it interesting was not envisioned to be so easy, so from the first monthly issue (January 1984) I tried to keep articles from all over India in it. So some of the early issues of the GNU'S LETTER contain interviews with Valmik Thapar and Tejbir Singh just after they brought out their first tiger book and of Ramesh Bedi, articles against Indian zoos by Billy Arjun Singh, photo features of S. Paul of New Delhi and E. Hanumaniha Rao of Bangalore, news of the international scene, etc. Once I devoted a whole issue to the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust and the Indianswhohadstudiedthere.
There were opinion articles (mostly by me as I had a lot of opinions then) and lengthy reports of Mysore Zoo breeding programmesandotheractivities.
The GNU'S LETTER ran in traditional magazine format for about a year until Mr. Jain sold Carona Sahu and the ads stopped. Then, to make the publication more "zoo visitor friendly' and also to make it "fit" a grant from the Department of Environment in Karnataka, we changed to format to that ofa folded up newspaper. When the grant was over (four issues later) we changed the format to a smaller folded up newspaper and brought it out by collecting small amounts of money from Mysore industrialists and small businessmen. I found that I' could go around the famous Market at Mysore and sell one eighth of a page ads for about Rs. 100/ - each. By collecting 10 or 12 of these, we could publish the GNU'S LETTER. I used to publish about 1000 - 2000 copies and send about 100 to different zoos and forest officers in India and a few abroad. About 200 were sent to members of Friends of Mysore Zoo and the rest were given away to zoo visitors and to people who came for our FOZ programmes. This is how we could justify the ads. Changing the format so many times really weakened the publication, I feel, so that is why I am not interested in making substantial changes to ZOOS'PRINT.
When somebody from an outside zoo came to visit, frequently they would comment on the GNU'S LETTER and say some of the information in it was really helpful. This was the reason I felt that ZOOS'PRINT was needed and could work.
By this time Friends of Mysore Zoo had attracted some attention and I had been made a member of the National Zoo's Advisory Board so I could afford to travel to Delhi from time to time and collect information and ideas. On these visits I used to visit as many zoos close by in north India as possible, and of course I was visiting zoos in the south as they were close by Mysore. Also the Director of the Mysore Zoo, the brilliant and innovative but thoroughly tactless CD. Krishne Gowda, was my zoo mentor and friend and we used to converse endlessly about the many problems of zoos as we took twice daily rounds of Mysore Zoo. I could also observe the problems he and others had, and I also as I tried to promote scientific management and conservation education inMysore Zooas a volunteer.
Some people have mistakenly thought that I had worked in zoos before coming to India but it is not so. I think I had visited two zoos in my whole life before coming to India to study yoga in Mysore. It was by sheer coincidence or maybe fate that I landed up at the Mysore Zoo training tiger cubs. I was a complete novice but I was really fascinated. I used to sit with tiger cubs all day and then go home and read the International Zoo Yearbooks or Man and Animal in the Zoo or The Stationary Ark till the wee hours of the morning. I learned stuff from books and then tried it out in the zoo. Sometimes I made mistakes and Mr. Krishne Gowda had to set it right. Much of what we did in the Friends of Mysore Zoo projects was right and good however, I made a big mess there by jumpingrightinthemiddleofzooandforestdepartmentpolitics.That is another story.
I also had many discussions with Dr. J. H. Desai during this time and learned much from him about the difficulties of coordinating the zoos which was his responsibility at the time as Director of National Zoo.
Another mentor was Dr. T.N. Khoshoo, the eminent environmentalist who then was the Secretary of the then Department of Environment. Not realising how important a Secretary in Delhi was at the time, I used to visit him and waste his time telling him about the orangutan baby at Mysore Zoo and my ideas about zoos. After some time I got an idea that one of the very basic problems of Mysore Zoo and every other zoo in India was their image. People just didn't have a good opinion of zoos - people in general and people in the government where policy is made and funds are disbursed. This bad image leads to decisions by policy makers and behaviour by the public which had the effect of makingit impossibleforzoostoimprove.
I wanted to do something to help zoos improve their image, upgrade their management and enhance their educational potential. I felt that involving the public could be helpful if done in the right way, not the way I had done in Mysore with the Friends ofMysore Zoo, despitemy best intentions.
After discussing my ideas with Dr. Khoshoo and others it was, suggested that I put them together in a proposal and request funding from the Department of Environment. The proposal I gave to the Department was for office, staff and equipment and the activities included a two monthly magazine for all the zoos in India (ZOOS' PRINT and ZOO ZEN), a programme to encourage voluntary organisations in zoos, and two educational packets, one of which was an early version of ZOO SCHOOL and another which was more environmental oriented.
The Department officials in Delhi liked the proposal but said that as a national project it should not be done under Friends of Mysore Zoo. They began processing it but told me I should register another organisation with a national focus. This is how Zoo Outreach Organisation was born -- it was, in fact, a result of official guidance from the Department of Environment bureaucrats.I'll bet not many people know that!
Zoo Outreach Organisation was named as such because it made the acronym, ZOO. The "message" was that we were supportive of zoos, so supportive that we would make the name of ourorganisation as ZOO.-Also the word "outreach"was intended to convey the objective of the organisation to "reach out" to zoos, wildlife departments, universities, research institutes conservation NGO's, the public and orient them to the serious scientific purpose of zoos - conservation, research, education. The cheetah striding across the logo was intended to convey what "might have been" for the Indian cheetah if good, systematic, scientific captive breeding programmes had been in place. There were other logosuggestionswhich areprinted for thefirst timebelow.
ZOO was registered in January 1985 (18th I think ) in Mysoreunder the Karnataka Societies Registration Act. It took sometime to get our Newspaper Registration done. ZOO ZEN wasstarted in August 1985 but it took until January 1986 to getZOOS' PRINT ready for press. Part of the problem wasfinancial. We had received our grant from the Department ofEnvironment and set up an office, but as usual, I had notasked for enoughmoney for ZOOS'PRINT. It was partlydelayed while I raised money through advertisements. The industrialists of Coimbatore came to my rescue for the first issue and have done for every single issue since. That story is being told in another articleelsewhereinthis issue.
The design for the cover of ZOOS' PRINT was done by the Chamundi Academy of Visual Arts in Mysore who also did the logo. It was a three-colour cover on white art paper instead of the single colour on handmade paper that it is now. ZOO'S PRINT was black with a yellow cheetah and "Journal of Zoo Outreach Organisation' as it was called then was in bright red. Finally the first issue was ready. It was published without a volume number and an issue number by mistake. A tiger was on the cover.
There is a message from T.N. Seshan then Secretary to Government in it. Mr. Seshan commented "Zoos, which are visited by lakhs of people all over the country could be a source of education on nature conservation. Today, sadly, it is lacking in this very fundamental role and is wrongly understood as a place of entertainment. Zoos must become the savings banks or the public trust of endangered species and cease tobe a drain on wildliferesources."
The first article in ZOOS' PRINT was on the InternationalSpeciesInventorySystem. TherewasacolumncalledZOONOOZ -- NOOZOOS which was devoted to new zoos opening up in India. There was an opinion article, by me entitled "Are Zoos a Drain on Wildlife", an interview of Reuben David, an article on captive breeding of Great Indian Bustard in Jodhpur Zoo by Y.D. Singh, and an article on the century old Trivandrum Zoo, a review of -the Report"Management of Zoosin India" and - the most prized article a Report on the Silver Jubilee Celebration and Symposium at National Zoo which had takenplaceinNovember1984.
One of the reasons for delaying ZOOS' PRINT until January was so this event could be covered and it made up the backbone of the publication in January as well as papers from the symposium filling pages for several months. By that time my popularity in Delhi was at a very low ebb and I could cover this event only because Kama! Naidu. then Jt. Director. Wildlife in the Ministry insisted that I be invited. Naidu helped ZOO and ZOOS' PRINT quite a lot at time when others were not much supportive. He contributed articles and got others to do so.
Features in ZOOS' PRINT were SICK LINE, a monthly medical column, HERP HELP, a monthly column by Rom Whitaker on herpetiles, BIRTH AND HATCHING UPDATE, lists of new births in zoos, MATRIMONIAL COLUMN, lists of single animals, an idea inspired by Samar Singh, then Director,Wildlife.
During the first few months, I filled ZOOS' PRINT with features such as SICK LINE, articles I wrote myselfelf by going to different zoos, interviews of senior directors, information such as single animals and reprinted material from other publications. A few people began contributing, people from Mysore Zoo like Mr. Krishne Gowda, Kamal Naidu of National Zoo, the veterinarians such as Dr. Gairola of Kanpur Zoo. Mir Gowher AH Khan of Hyderabad and Dr. L.N. Acharjyo of Nandankanan.
You could trace my movements through India by the interviews and articles published in ZOOS' PRINT. During one visit to Nandankanan I heard about R.B. Sanyal from Dr. Archajyo, convinced A.K. Das of Calcutta Zoo to loan me his only copy and xeroxed five copies the whole book. I began publishing extracts from Sanyal in about the middle of the first year of ZOOS' PRINT.
Our circulation policy in the first year -- and for several years afterward as well - was to send ZOOS' PRINT free, not necessarily to the people who wanted it but to the people who NEEDED to see it -- for the good of the zoos. We sent ZOOS' PRINT free to all zoos, of course, and to all protected areas, to all Chief Wildlife Wardens, PCCFs, Forest Secretaries and even to officials in the Finance and Planning Departments. We knew that most of these people would not read it but at least they would see that zoos could have a respectably sized publicationandthateventuallytheywouldrealisethatzooswere not "just a children's playground", as one official who refused an early grant claimed. I was so particular about being able to supply ZOOS' PRINT free to zoos that I even wrote it into the By-laws of Zoo Outreach Organisation where it reads even today that a copy of every publication should go' free to every zoo. In those days the number of zoos was 44. Today it is over 350. This is something ZOOS' PRINT predicted when we published our survey of zoos in 1987 which included thenames ofnearly150zoos.
By the time ZOOS' PRINT was six months old it consisted ofabout 1/3articles from different people in Indian zoos, about 1/3 reprinted material and about 1/3 material that I wrotemyself,eitherarticles,interviewsornews. ThelengthofZOOS' PRINT ran from 24 - 36 pages, about one-third to half its length now. I had people contributing material for columns, such as Dr. Gairola's "Faunal Fact File". Ramesh Bedi sent many general articles with the famous Bedi photographs. Mir Gowher Ali Khan regularly was writing up his experiences for us in a lighter vein, a sort of "veterinary articles for the layman" because I didn't want ZOOS' PRINT to be so technical it couldn't be appreciated by the casual reader. Manoj Mishra, an A.C.F. in some national park then began his writing career in ZOOS' PRINT that first year and contributed a column called "Nature Tales" for a long time. Now Manoj has authored a book and is our Book Review editor.
Deciding the "identity" of ZOOS' PRINT was not easy. Zoo Outreach Organisation's special mandate was "to encourage public participation in zoos. However, from the experience I had in Mysore and what I had heard about in Delhi and other zoos, I knew that zoo directors had no confidence even in a conservation NGO much less the public in general to help them. On the contrary, many were dead against having volunteers, and some feel the same way today. My intention in making ZOOS' PRINT practical and technical was to gain the confidence of zoo personnel, to convince them that an NGOcouldhelpwithoutharming.
In filling up ZOOS' PRINT, sometimes in the first year a "special event" saved me, such as the Silver Jubilee articles helped fill the first few issues. The August issue was almost entirely devoted to articles from the Summer Institute on Wildlife Health organised at Indian Veterinary Research Institute by Dr. B.M. Arora. Another was the arrival of Snow leopards at Darjeeling Zoo which filled almost one issue along with an interview ofthe late Dr. R.K. Lahiri.
Our editorialpolicywasabout aslooseas it couldpossiblybe. We wanted more than anything just to encourage people to write. We got some pretty primitive articles, some of which were hardly comprehensible the English was so bad. We just patched them up as well as possible and published them with a conviction that if we did so, that zooman would probably write again. Had we refused and returned artcles at that stage, a number of our contributors would have become discouraged. Only if we got an article criticising a zoo did we refuse to publish it. ZOOS' PRINT was meant to be positive andconstructive.
Other features were - or were meant to be - humorous. ITS A WILD, WILD, WILD LIFE and CALLING DR. ZOO. CALLING DR. ZOO was a satirical bit which mimicked an agony column. I created ridiculous problems by naive or misguided fictional zoo personnel written to and answered by an egotistical and feckless Dr. I Zoolovit. All of it was written by me and it was very irreverent.
ITS A WILD WILD WILD LIFE was a cartoon strip whichsatirized the petty-minded jealousies and competitive andcritical spirit of some of my colleagues in the zoo and wildlifecommunity. Nearly all of the cartoons have some basis in factas is having been something which had happened either to meor to some other NGO as a result of the negativity of forestofficialsandNGO's. Thesecartoons,alongwithotherirreverent and sassy things I did (too numerous to list) so enraged some of the officials in my state that they complained about me to the Home Department in Karnataka. The Home Department dealt with the problem by refusing to extend my Visa and in about November of 1986, I had to leave thecountry.
I returned to the United States and without knowing whether I would be able to return to India or not, borrowed money and went on a marathon 3-month tour of the zoos of the United States. I saw 60 zoos in 90 days. I never stayed in a hotel. I usually boarded a bus at night, arrived at a city where there was a zoo in the morning, saw the zoo, and went back to the bus terminal for another trip. In some cities I had zoo friends who put me up and gave me an intensive experience of several days in their zoo. I spent any money I had on film and took hundreds of slides of every aspect of zoomanagement.