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Foreign doctor's love enriches Beijing Zoo
(China Daily)
Updated: 2004-06-29 08:35

Carin Harrington has held down two jobs ever since she moved to Beijing four years ago.

She is a doctor at the International SOS Beijing Clinic in Beijing, but she also works as a "behaviour enrichment consultant" at the Beijing Zoo.

In her first job she deals with people, while in her second job she spends a great deal of time with animals.

She says that "enrichment" is a quite new and modern concept in zoology. Inspired by this new concept, keepers in many zoos worldwide are trying new ways to improve the lives of zoo animals.

Dr Harrington knows almost every tiny corner of the Beijing Zoo, as she works there several days a week inspecting the animal enclosures.

Improving lives of animals

The zoo has set up an Enrichment Zone for Harrington's team.

It is a large room of nearly 30 square metres near the zoo's old panda house.

There Harrington stores many devices she and the zookeepers as well as many volunteers have made to help bring interest into the lives of animals. Most of them are toys of various types.

There is a straw ball with nuts stuck all over it. She explained that it was for gorillas. It can be hung from the ceiling, and the gorillas like playing with it, hitting it and making it sway like a pendulum. They also have fun trying to get the nuts.

Last Thursday, she inspected the enclosures for the squirrels, bears and otters.

The squirrels are kept in small concrete houses. To simulate a natural environment, Harrington and the keepers cover the enclosures' concrete floors with branches and leaves. They painted the walls blue to make the squirrels "feel peaceful."

"I painted that wall myself, and that one," she said, pointing with pride, "and some of my friends did the other ones."

In the bear enclosure, they put honey on the trees and spray fish oil in the air.

"The bears get excited when they smell it," she explained.

The otter enclosure is like a small Chinese style courtyard. There is a wide stretch of grass, a brook and some stones.

From her first day at the zoo, Harrington was drawn to one particular otter that likes lying in the grass in the sunshine.

"Xin Xing is one of my favourite animals in the zoo," she said, her eyes glowing with the same kind of love and kindness as the eyes of doting parents watching their beloved children.

"The first time I saw him, he was living in a small cage," she said. Her heart was broken. Deciding that she would help the otter, she immediately set out to rebuild the otter's old enclosure to make it accord with the species' natural habitat, feeding behaviour, dietary requirements and its social life in the wild.

"I started the day on my hands and knees with a small knife and some stones," she recalled. "Then the keepers one by one arrived to help, which moved me deeply."

To make the small area as natural as possible, they added some rocks and vegetation.

At the end of the day when the area was finished they opened the gate.

"The otter sniffed suspiciously at the door. Then he boldly entered. We all watched as his behaviour changed. At first he was his old inactive self, but soon he started to explore his new home with delight," Harrington recalled.

Harrington's colleagues at the Beijing Zoo very much appreciate her work.

"She has put forward a lot of very good suggestions and devoted a lot of her spare time to improving the living conditions of the animals," said Zhang Jinguo, the zoo's deputy director.

"She is really a pusher and a doer," Zhang said. "We share a lot of similar ideas, but she has helped push to put ideas into action."

Deep affection

When you talk with Harrington you can feel her deep love for animals.

"I always raise small animals at home," she said. Now in China, she and her husband Philip have five rabbits, a dog and two goldfish.

Born and brought up in Northern Ireland, Harrington says she has loved animals since she was very young.

As a child she was not allowed to raise pets at home, but she secretly collected crickets and spiders in her bedroom. She spent a lot of time observing their behaviour.

"I believe I have the ability to talk to animals. I understand what they need. It is a very special gift I have been given," she proudly said.

She always talked to the condors in the local zoo in the morning and evening.

"I tried to work out what they needed, and I combined my own findings with the information I had picked up in my zoological studies. So I did research to find out about their natural habitat," she said.

Harrington said she showed her talent for biology in high school. But, for some reason, she studied medicine at university, instead of biology.

After graduation in 1984, she began her medical career concentrating on emergency work, until a car crash she was involved in 1997 almost took her life.

She was in intensive care for two weeks and stayed in hospital for more than five months. It was when she was lying on her hospital bed that she suddenly realized that she really wanted to be a zoologist.

"I have only one life, I must use my talent. I wasn't using my gift of understanding for animals. I was a very good doctor, but I thought I wanted to do more. I wanted to use everything I had been given. That is the reason you are on the earth - to be yourself," she said.

Then she decided to go back to university and study zoology from the ground up and become a first-rate zoologist.

In the following years she went to university in Edinburgh, Cambridge, Glasgow and Australia to study animal behaviour.

In 2000 she fell in love with a man, who later became her husband. She loved him so much that when he came to China to teach English at an international school, she decided to follow him.

The decision was somewhat emotional. At that time she was not thinking too much about her career.

After she cooled down she found herself puzzling over what she might do in a country so strange to her and an ocean away from her home.

She tentatively phoned the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and fortunately the Party secretary there was willing to help.

Later she became a student of professor Jiang Zhigang. She was to study tiger ethology and hormone analysis related to stress, and her field research was conducted at the Beijing Zoo.

After she completed her research, the zoo offered her the job, and she happily took the post.

After spending four years in the largest zoo in China, she has developed strong feelings for both the zoo and the country.

She admits that before coming to China, she knew nothing about the country. The only impression that she had of China was the same general misunderstanding of many foreigners - that the Chinese are cruel to animals.

She had been wrong, she said. "The people here really love animals," she said. "I feel humble. My ears are open, my eyes are open. I am humble because I was wrong. "China changes every day, for the better. If you go away on holiday for a week, the pace of change is so fast, that things are different when you come back, and you feel you have missed something. There is nothing that makes me feel I do not want to stay."

Currently she is working hard to prevent the possible closure of the Beijing Zoo.

She said the 900 people working at the zoo have become her family and if it is closed, it would break her heart. She wrote a letter to the municipal government appealing to them not to close the zoo.

She thinks the international community's claims that the animals at the Beijing Zoo are treated badly is unfair.

Like many older zoos, the Beijing Zoo still has many concrete and steel cages.

"Ten years ago, the London Zoo was even worse than the Beijing Zoo. And the Beijing Zoo has already improved greatly. They should give it a chance to change," she said.

Most Western zoos have a person whose sole job is to oversee all the enrichment projects in the zoo. This person is called the Enrichment Officer.

"My dream," Harrington said, "is to see an Enrichment Officer in every zoo in China and to have annual meetings when people from all the zoos in the country gather together to exchange views on what types of enrichment are working best for the animals in China."



 
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