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Somewhere in southern Baghdad, the American military suspects, there is a giraffe living in someone's house. The soldiers, along with zookeepers here, want to track down the giraffe quickly, for this is a nation where people are poor and hungry, though not absolutely starving.
"They've eaten one of the giraffes already," said Capt. William Sumner, 31, whose Army unit is stationed at the Baghdad Zoo. "We need to find the other one before it gets consumed."
In many ways it seems a very good sign that conditions have improved enough here that the American military has time to worry about the fate of zoo animals. Today, American officials invited reporters to tour a refurbished zoo, reduced during the war to an expanse of nearly empty cages, as one small sign of progress.
The water came on Sunday -- good for the grass and for cleaning cages, as well as for the few animals that remain. The workers were paid US$20 each, something officials made sure was recorded on camera.
Soon, officials said, there will be actual animal food, so fewer donkeys will have to be hacked up.
In a small separate zoo, once the personal menagerie of Uday Hussein, the eldest son of Saddam Hussein, six lion cubs were born 10 days ago under the care of United States Special Forces. At the zoo today, the mother, named Xena by the soldiers here, crouched protectively next to her snoozing litter, while the father, Brutus, shot a spray of urine at reporters.
"No one knew that she was pregnant," said Stephan Bognar, an official with Wild Aid, a conservation group from San Francisco that is helping to manage the animals here. "One morning they came in. It was dark and they didn't know what was going on. They heard some sounds, and there in a corner were six cubs."
Today, the lions were a few hours away from mealtime, which amounts to an ad hoc rotation of beef and donkey.
"Today is donkey day," Mr. Bognar said, explaining that the donkeys were easily obtainable in local markets.
The American civil administration has been criticized for moving slowly in getting Iraq back to functioning even minimally. But today, Timothy Carney, a deputy to Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who leads the civil administration here, called the work at the zoo "a metaphor for the kind of effort we are hoping to succeed in."
Working alongside American soldiers, nearly all of the 35 or so zoo employees are back, today with part of their salaries paid by the civil administration from Iraqi assets frozen in the United States. The looting of animals has stopped. Mr. Carney said there might be no animals left at all if it were not for the soldiers here, who fed and cared for the animals even as they were dusting off from a battle inside the zoo itself.
Mr. Carney contended that there was much hope for the rest of Iraq's devastated official infrastructure "if we can get the zoo going in such a short time, with such small resources."
He was quick to add, however: "I don't want to get too cosmic. It's a modest metaphor."
It is, indeed, a modest zoo, a shadow of its former self. Of the 650 animals in residence before the war, only about 10 remain: two Bengal tigers, three lions, three wild Iraqi pigs, one porcupine and two brown bears. More recently, seven lions, three ostriches and two cheetahs were transferred from Uday Hussein's private zoo at one of his palaces, the one where the lion cubs were recently born.
The rest of the animals were looted or killed: camel, deer, ponies, horses, monkeys, hundreds of birds. Some of them have been showing up at a market held every Friday in Baghdad. Military officials say that many, especially birds like ducks, were eaten, and they strongly suspect that some of Uday Hussein's thoroughbred horses also ended up on Iraqi tables.
Most of the animals were gone by the time the American soldiers arrived in the second week in April, after a battle in the upscale neighborhood of Mansur, where the zoo was established in 1971.
Soldiers found about 5,000 weapons and 40 tons of military equipment, but only a few skinny animals.
"It was pretty bad," said Cpl. Matthew St. Pierre, 22. "About 90 percent of the cages were open."
The fighting caused an immediate quandary: an explosive -- the Americans say it was an Iraqi mortar -- blasted a hole in the fence of a large outdoor enclosure for the lions. Corporal St. Pierre said that looters made the hole bigger and that several lions escaped. With so many looters around, he said, the soldiers had to make a difficult decision.
"It was either keep the civilians out, which was impossible, or kill the lions," he said. "So we killed the lions."
But after killing four lions, the soldiers fed the rest of the animals, butchering a few wild pigs and a donkey with a blasted-off leg and even using some unappetizing portions of their military rations.
The zoo's director, Adelzap Salman Mousa, came back to work and a wildlife expert from South Africa, Lawrence Anthony, was recruited, as was Mr. Bognar from Wild Aid. With the zoo's employees, they cleaned the grounds and the cages, got the water working and arranged to secure 1,650 pounds of buffalo meat from a zoo in Kuwait with the help of a British donor. The difference, Corporal St. Pierre said, is remarkable.
"It actually looks like a brand-new zoo," he said. "The cages are clean. The grass is getting watered. It's been swept. It's actually very nice."
The major remaining task is recovering the animals. Mr. Mousa, the director, said workers would try to locate whatever is still alive at markets or in private homes and bring the animals back (though several animals, including a peacock and a monkey, were taken by looters a second time after being recovered, Mr. Anthony said).
Then there is the matter of the giraffe. In an unfortunate bit of timing, two giraffes and two ostriches from Sudan were being trucked north to the zoo just as the war was starting. The truckers decided at some point that the journey had become too dangerous to continue, Mr. Anthony said, and now the zoo is receiving reports about their condition and whereabouts, in the southern part of the city.
All that remains, Captain Sumner said, is to locate the missing animals and pick them up.
"If you guys see a lynx, could you let us know?" he asked. "It's around here. We have to find it."
(China Daily May 6, 2003)
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