RAREST ANIMAL IN CAPTIVITY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4431, 29 August 1939, Page 4

RAREST ANIMAL IN CAPTIVITY

AFRICAN MAPI'S TWO YEARS AT LONDON ZOO The King’s okapi—strangest, rarest, shyest animal in captivity—still lives, writes a London correspondent of the Johannesburg ‘ Star.’ None of the antelope experts thought he would survive the ordeal of exile from his hot, dark Congo forest; but he has confounded them all by enduring one of the coldest English winters on record with the help of electric radiators in his “ bedroom ” at the Loudon Zoo.

For 21 months the okapi has lived in solitary confinement. Alone, silent, he chews the cud by day and by night —which are the same thing to him —in the darkness of his room.

On July 21 the okapi will have been two years in his black-painted room at the south gate of the Zoological Gardens. He is a present to His Majesy from the King of the Belgians, in whose Congo the okapi has his only habitat.

Five years ago the King of the Belgians presented an okapi to the Dulke of Windsor, then the Prince of Wales. Every care was taken of that okapi by the Zoo, whither he was gently conveyed; but he shrank from all who approached him, his spirit drooped, and he died after only three weeks.

They say he died of nostalgia, of England’s rigorous climate, of loneliness, of a broken heart. That he pined for the Ituri forest, where he had been captured, goes without saying, but a less romantic verdict on his death is that he died of tropical parasites making war on his innards. Grooming the okapi is quite out of the question, but fortunately he grooms himself meticulously. After a long drink of milk, he licks himself with his blue tongue (which is longer than a giraffe’s) with the fastidiousness of a cat.

Of milk the okapi drinks from four to five gallons a day; but he won’t touch water. His breakfast at 7 a.m., his lunch at 2 p.m., and his dinner at 5 p.m consist during these summer days of evergreen oak leaves, with occasionally a few tares. At first the okapi would never leave his dark room. He had all his meals there in the light shed by an electric globe. But more recently he has ventured through the door to the adjacent stable, where the evergreen oak branches are temptingly displayed high up on the surrounding iron railings.

From the branches, tied securely, he licks the leaves with swift deftness. On rare occasions he has even timidly ventured into his paddock, which runs down, unfortunately, to the much-used road leading from the Zoo’s south gate. In this paddock eight young poplars have been planted But the okapi, used to the dense itnri forest that shuts out the sun, must think these thin poplars a poor substitute for home. Til! the paddock is smothered over with trees and bushes, it is unlikely that he will roam there. In the meantime visitors may see him only by first ringing a bell for the keeper and then taking a glance through a narrow slit of glass let into the door The electric light is switched on—and there, chewing the cud with his long jaw, is the most beautifully marked animal in the whole Zoo

A thoroughbred, the okapi is a mysterious combination of deer, antelope, zebra, and giraffe. All that zoologists will say of him is that he is a cousin of the giraffe. The one at the Zoo is an unusually large bull—larger than any of the eight stuffed okapies at the South Kensington Museum.