Great Escape
The Problem with Better Zoos
More humane zoos made for smarter, healthier animals — which have gotten really good at escaping from zoos.
One day in 1979, Jon Coe was perched at his drawing board inside the Seattle offices of Jones and Jones Architecture when the phone rang. Coe answered and was greeted by a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who wanted to know if Coe had designed the new gorilla exhibit at the city’s Woodland Park Zoo.
For decades, it was standard practice to house gorillas under lock and key, often in laboratory-like enclosures that were easy to clean. But at Woodland Park, gorillas were now roaming outdoors among vegetation on terrain that mimicked their native habitat. Strategically placed moats kept the exhibit free of imposing visual barriers, and there were burly trees for the gorillas to climb — an idea that for years had been written off as too risky.
Eager to extoll the many merits of the exhibit, Coe said that he and his associates were indeed the visionaries behind it.
“Then what do you think of the gorilla escape?” the reporter asked.
Unbeknownst to him, a 468-pound silverback gorilla named Kiki used a tree limb as a makeshift ladder to scale one of the dry moats and…
