Gus the neurotic bear - polar bear in New York City Central Park Zoo

E: The Environmental Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Will Nixon

During the dog days of last summer, when the New York City tabloids needed a breather from O.J. Simpson, Newsday discovered Gus the Neurotic Bear. He wasn't hard to find. A 700-pound polar bear, he lives in the Central Park Zoo, sharing a large slate-gray quarry of rock, both real and fake, with Lily and Ida. The females do what you might expect of bears in sticky 97-degree heat: roll on their backs to scratch fleas, pee in the stream, sit and watch the passing crowd in the windows of their habitat. But, in a deep pool, Gus swims short laps like a bear possessed. He surfaces with a neck like a giant fur buoy and falls into a back stroke to the other side, pauses, and dives back along the bottom with bubbles trailing by his whiskers. He repeats the same motions for hours on end, down to the way his tongue flicks across his black lips.

"He doesn't want to be here anymore. He wants to be set free," says a mother to her child as they watch in an aquarium window. The Wildlife Conservation Society, however, which runs the zoo, suspects that Gus' problem is more complicated than that. So for $25,000 it hired Tim Desmond, an animal behaviorist who trained the whale in Free Willy, to spend a year analyzing him. But when Newsday put Gus on the cover, he became the most famous patient in the world. Letterman cracked jokes, The New York Times wrote an editorial, radio stations called from Europe, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) urged the public to boycott zoos. "Animals will pace, chew their bars, sway back and forth in place, even regurgitate and eat their vomit. You see the same sort of thing among people in mental institutions," says PETA's Kathy Guillermo. She doesn't want Gus to be released, since he was born at the Toledo Zoo and would die in the wild, but she also doesn't want him or any captive animal to breed another generation to suffer the same fate.

In 1988, the Wildlife Conservation Society spent $38 million to tear down old zoo cages and build more natural habitats. Desmond calls this step "changing the hardware," and adds that zoos are now "changing the software" of how they manage their animals. To him, Gus is bored and hot, not crazy. The answer is to let Gus live out more of his natural behavior, foraging and hunting. Rather than serving him peanut butter smeared on a rock, the keepers dump it into a bucket which gets tossed in the pool to make Gus dive for his lunch. Or they leave him a 25-pound block of ice containing some frozen fish. No zoo is perfect, Desmond admits, but it can be a laboratory to develop better software for managing animals, which, sadly, humans now do in the wild as well as in zoos. Contact: Central Park Wildlife Center, 64th Street and 5th Avenue, New York, NY/(212)861-6030; PETA, P.O. Box 42516, Washington, DC 20015/(301)770-PETA.