Nature Can Be Cruel, But It's The Rule At The Detroit Zoo -- Its Director's Philosophy Has Proved Controversial

ROYAL OAK, Mich. - Nobody pets the animals at Steve Graham's zoo.

Baby chimps are left to die if their mothers can't care for them. Snakes on exhibit eat live mice and rabbits. Healthy mammals are sometimes killed outright, their corpses fed whole to the zoo's carnivores in view of visitors.

And none of the animals has a name.

``I am known in the profession as the purist,'' boasts Graham, ruler of this singular kingdom called the Detroit Zoo. ``My views are probably the most different of any major zoo director in the country.''

Since he arrived from Baltimore in 1982, Graham, 45, has revolutionized Detroit's municipal animal park, reviving an institution that had been close to collapse. Budgets are up. Attendance is soaring. Membership in the Detroit Zoo Society has increased tenfold.

At the same time, Graham has become easily the most controversial zoo director in America, infuriating animal-rights advocates, humane societies and some peers who say his ideas about animals are closer to George Orwell than Marlin Perkins.

``Steve Graham is a very intelligent person. Hitler was also an intelligent person,'' says Jack Hanna, director of the Columbus, Ohio, zoo.

``He's a kind of zoo efficiency expert; there's a coldness to him,'' says Cleveland Amory, head of the New York-based Fund for Animals. ``A zoo should be a warm place. Animals should be happy. I don't think he buys happiness the way we do.''

Graham's reputation as a thorn in the paw of American zoodom was sharpened this year, when he appeared in a ``60 Minutes'' report and lambasted other zoos for placing surplus animals with commercial dealers. Some of those animals are eventually auctioned to private hunting ranches, Graham asserted, damning the practice as ``immoral and unacceptable.''

Graham himself refuses to give or sell animals to any institution not accredited by the American Association of Zoos, Parks and Aquariums, something that endears him to many humane societies and animal-rights groups. But his own practice, unmentioned by ``60 Minutes,'' enrages many of those same groups.

``Euthanasia is a reasonable, ethical management tool,'' he said. ``Probably 70 percent of the directors of zoos in this country would tell you that they would never do that, that they don't think it is ethical. . . . My opinion is that the alternatives are far worse.''

In January, Detroit zoo keepers shot four scimitar-horned oryxes, African antelopes classed as an endangered species in the wild. Graham said there was no room for them in Detroit or at any other acceptable zoo. But the action outraged his critics and revived a debate begun in 1983 when Amory's group sued - unsuccessfully - to keep him from euthanizing four Siberian tigers.

``I think you're sending a double message to the public when you shoot animals because you don't have room for them,'' Hanna said.

``Would you rather be shot on the spot or take your chances at an (animal) auction?'' Hanna said. ``A lot of those animals at auctions end up in pretty good homes.''

Graham says that even endangered species produce surplus animals, which can't safely be used to breed with existing zoo populations. When that happens, it's better to simply eliminate them, he said, either with lethal injections or, if they can be used for feed, by shooting them.

``What right to life does a surplus endangered species have over the 19 million puppies and kittens that are put to death in this country every year, or the millions of feed animals that are slaughtered?'' Graham said.

Philadelphia Zoo director William Donaldson sees Graham's point - sort of.

His own preferred option, he said, is to give them away to smaller zoos - not always accredited by the American Association of Zoos, Parks and Aquariums - but even that's not always possible. Currently, the Philadelphia Zoo has three Siberian tigers it doesn't know what to do with.

``In my head I agree with Steve,'' Donaldson said. ``In my heart I fall in love with all the damn animals.''

Graham's philosophy, nurtured during his youth on a Waynesboro, Pa., farm and later as head of the humane society in Salisbury, Md., is that animals should receive less love and more respect.

``I'm not sure that love is something you can truly do to an animal; that's a human emotion,'' he said. ``Every creature on Earth was born to die; I believe that animals that are produced in zoos have a right to die with dignity.''

That attitude extends to the Detroit Zoo's exhibits, where Graham tries hard to encourage natural behavior - and to discourage bonding with humans.

The grounds are kept deliberately wild-looking. ``Those are not weeds . . . it's nature!'' proclaims a sign by one of the enclosures.

His first act as director was to stop the zoo's popular chimpanzee shows, in which animals in clothes rode around on motorcycles and ponies.

Now the chimps live in a complex designed as much as possible to replicate the African wild. Inside, they stay behind one-way glass that blocks their view of visitors.

``The public can come in there and watch chimps being chimps, and that's what it's really all about,'' Graham said.