Senior primate keeper Christine Tintinger is retiring after 44 years at Auckland Zoo. Photo / Michael Craig
She’s known Charlie the orangutan since he was 6, and had a 34-year friendship with Janie the tea-party chimp. A long-serving primate keeper on a lifetime of looking after animals — and why she’s calling it a day.
Pygmy marmosets weigh less than a large banana. Their bodies are smaller than a mobile phone and, when they slip behind a tree branch, they will make even the most experienced zookeeper late for lunch.
Sometimes, says Auckland Zoo senior primate keeper Christine Tintinger, she’d be stuck inside the monkey’s habitat for 20 minutes or more.
“You’d go in and shut the door to clean and feed and before you could go out, you’d have to sight them again, just in case they jumped into the service area.
“But they’d go behind a branch, and then a little pair of eyes would look out, and then you’d never find them ... I’d have to get on the radio: ‘Can somebody come to the pygmies? Can you spot them? Because I can’t get out of here until I see them’. That was frustrating.”
Tintinger has worked at Auckland Zoo for 44 years. For more than three decades, she has specialised in primate care, looking after everything from enormous adult orangutans to marmosets — officially the world’s smallest monkey.
She’s seen Charlie the orangutan grow from a 6-year-old in quarantine (“all legs and nothingness”) to the 43-year-old orange-cloaked patriarch who rules the ropeways today.
And she still cries when she recalls Janie, the last of the four chimpanzees first brought to the zoo in 1956 to perform as a “tea party” troupe. The parties were stopped in 1963, but Janie lived another 50 years. Tintinger became her special companion and, in a recent book celebrating the zoo’s centenary, described their relationship as “a 34-year-long conversation that strengthened into a deep friendship”.
Today, Tintinger is contemplating the end of another era. Zookeeping is a physically demanding job and the 66-year-old has already had one knee replacement.
“My body’s got to the point where things are starting to hurt. You’re lifting and stretching and scrubbing. Going up and down ladders. Winching things. Forty-four years of all that, my joints are going, ‘right, we’ve had enough’.”
On April 19, one of Auckland Zoo’s longest-serving keepers will retire from the career that was inspired by the books of British naturalist and zookeeper Gerald Durrell.
“No disrespect to vets, but I didn’t want to work with domestic animals like cats and dogs and sheep and farm animals. I wanted to work with exotic animals. The primates and animals I had read about.
“I haven’t been to any of the countries that he wrote about, like South America and Africa, but I’d be going ‘those animals sound amazing’.”
It’s 1977. Tintinger is in her final year at Epsom Girls’ Grammar when she spots her dream job advertised in the New Zealand Herald. She cringes remembering that she walked into Auckland Zoo wearing her school uniform. Miraculously, she’d scored an interview. Even more miraculously, curator Graham Meadows didn’t laugh her off the property.
“He was so nice. He basically said ‘I applaud your enthusiasm and I can see this is your passion’. And then, rather than telling me I was too young, he asked me what I was thinking of doing when I left school.”
Plan B was to work with babies or children. She spent a year as a Karitane nurse, but also enrolled in an animal care course set up by Meadows and Richard Elliott that, eventually, led to a job offer at Auckland Zoo.
“[Graham] said nursing would give me some life experience and he was totally right. When you’ve got a creature in front of you that cannot articulate ‘I’m tired’ or whatever, and you have to be able to work out what they want from their body language or behaviour .... and the practicalities of dealing with vomit and poo and all the basic bodily functions and just getting on with it — well, that held me in very good stead.”
When Tintinger joined the Auckland Zoo team in October 1979, there were just a handful of women on staff.
“I was glad I was not one of the three or four who came first. I think they would have had a really hard time. Society was changing and so was the zoo, but there were some old-timers who went ‘what are these women doing here’?
“Obviously, women are built differently. You perhaps don’t have as much upper-body strength to lift a 10kg bag of pellets above your head to put in a hopper to feed a giraffe.”
She recalls keepers who would ask for help, only to be told by male colleagues, “we’re all paid the same” as they walked away.
“So the women would decant the bag. It would take a bit longer, but you work around the problems. It’s not about strength, it’s just about figuring out ways of getting the job done. And not all of the men were like that.”
On her first day, she wore jeans, a T-shirt and zoo-issued gumboots.
“And then, at some point, they organised a uniform. For women, that was all-in-one dungarees. If you needed to go to the toilet, you had to strip off the bib, undo the thing and take the whole thing down. And it was quite figure-hugging. It didn’t suit all body shapes.”
Men, she recalls, just wore shirts and shorts or longs. “And then we got a female version — but it was just a ‘small’ men’s instead of a ‘large’. As time went by, they actually designed a women’s uniform. There was a bit more of a cut to the blouse.”
Trainee keepers rotated among the various animal departments. Tintinger started in the ungulate section, working with deer, antelopes and giraffes (rhinoceros arrived later).
“It was quite physical — the weight of a giraffe poo — and you don’t just have one, you have a whole lot in your wheelbarrow. And you don’t analyse what you’re doing, you’re just going ‘oh my God, it’s just so amazing that I’m working here and picking up all this heavy poo’.”
She smiles. “I don’t know whether the keepers today are out there saying that? I don’t think they are.” But there is not, she insists, a single aspect of the job she got tired of.
“You might be pruning trees and digging in a habitat or doing a bit of plumbing or painting, or taking out weeds. Or doing behaviour enrichment for animals, thinking up something they have to work at to elicit the natural behaviours they’d have in the wild ... I’ve got to fit 12 hours into an eight-hour day, without compromising too much. You do so many things in a day and I don’t think you do anything so often that you get fed up. There is nothing that I do that makes me go ‘oh, not that again’.”
Worst zoo poo?
“Otters are quite bad because they are totally carnivorous. With any carnivorous animal, what comes out the other end is not pleasant.”
Tintinger spent almost a decade working with carnivores, including several species that are no longer kept at the zoo — brown bears, sun bears and polar bears. The latter, she confesses, were scary. Their enclosure was a deep pit, complete with fake ice floes surrounded by water.
“They hadn’t factored how people were going to get in. They’d put the animals away inside, but there wasn’t a big door that you could just walk in from human level with your rake and shovel and bags and hose.
“We’d have to put the hose up over the railing where the public stood, and attach a huge long ladder — that now, with health and safety regulations, would not be allowed — at the top. You’d throw your leg over and climb down into the habitat.”
She knew the polar bears were safely inside, but, always in the back of her mind: “What if something happens? I’m not going to run fast enough to get up the ladder before I’m polar bear lunch.”
Today, she says, you wouldn’t build a habitat that deep.
“Back the bus up. You wouldn’t keep polar bears, full stop.”
Animal management is an ever-evolving science. In 2006, the television show Zoo Babies followed Tintinger’s work with Iwani, a siamang rejected and injured by his mother at 6 weeks. His twin sister died from her injuries, but Iwani was hand-reared for the next 12 months. He was eventually returned to his family, but never really settled. The frequently agitated and unhappy siamang was euthanised, aged 11.
“When the decision was made to raise him, that was with the best intentions, the best research and consultation with other zoos. As years go by, you always do better than you did in the past. You always get more information, more research,” says Tintinger.
“We start at A and sometimes we get to Z. Sometimes you might go off on a tangent and try things and reassess things, but sometimes you can see you are heading to Z. To the end. Even though, on the day, it is awful, you can put your hand on your heart and go ‘we did everything and beyond and outside the square to not get to Z’. Nowadays — yeah, we’d be doing things very differently than we did 20-odd years ago.”
The truth of that statement is, literally, about to step out in front of her. In 2021, 2km of aerial pathways opened at Auckland Zoo. From the cafe deck where Tintinger is sitting sipping a hot chocolate, she can see the thick ropes start to sway. Two siamang are stepping out, 25m off the ground, directly overhead the public.
“Look at him, he’s a bloody tightrope walker.”
Tintinger has witnessed these big primates in the wild, travelling to Indonesia to visit the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, which is supported by Auckland Zoo’s conservation fund.
In Bukit Tigapuluh National Park, she thought: “You’re not in Westmere now, Christine Tintinger. It was so out of my remit of anything I’ve ever, ever, ever done. And it was sort of scary and exciting. We’d get up at the crack of dawn so we could see the siamangs waking up at sunrise and hear them in the dark. And you’re walking in the middle of the jungle, knowing on either side there could be snakes, there could be orangutans, there could be all these big spiders going about their business ... it feels as if it was yesterday.”
She saw first hand the vast scale of demand for palm oil — a globally traded commodity that has contributed to the destruction of rainforest habitat.
“I was so ignorant. I thought palm oil — because it’s almost a dirty word here — I thought it was growing in the middle of the jungle where nobody knew. And you’re driving down a major road and there are palm oil plantations all the way along it, and all these signs saying ‘if you’ve got palm, we’ll buy it, we can process it, this is the number to ring’. I was appalled.”
Last year, Auckland Zoo signed up to a global app initiative that allows consumers to check the palm oil content and sustainability of groceries and household items. Zookeepers still feed, clean and care for animals — but they also educate, advocate and constantly plan for the future of a species.
“I’m one little cog in that journey,” says Tintinger. “This is life. Births, deaths, marriages. All the animals here, be it a fish or a bird or an orangutan, are all part of breeding programmes. They’re not my animal. I am part of a bigger thing. They’re going to other zoos, they’re going to be paired up with a different genetic male or female. They’re going to be perpetuating that species and, depending on that species, maybe reintroduced to the wild.
“You don’t get hardened to bad things that happen. But you deal with them. You can’t be a blithering crying idiot for the animal that is, perhaps, not well, or being transferred out. You’ve got a job to do.”
Over the decades, that job has involved more interaction with the public via talks and animal encounters. At the same time, says Tintinger, animal welfare has been prioritised over people’s entertainment. Decades ago, she says, a keeper who put a sack in a chimpanzee habitat would be told to take it out because the public couldn’t see the animal.
“Sacks are brilliant. They can be used as bedding, something to sit on, something to hide under. It could be shelter if it’s raining or too sunny, an animal could get under it to get out of the sight line of another animal to feel a bit more secure. If you’ve got young in the group, they can get in the sack and do roly-polies. You get interaction between animals, all choreographed around a simple sack.”
Today, visitors have to work to see the animals.
“There are little eye points. It’s not like the whole front of a habitat is full of people looking at the animal that has no way to get away from the public. The public can still see them, but they have to go on a little bit of an adventure.
“As we’ve progressed, we’ve allowed the animals free thought. What do they want to do? We’ve got so many different options and ways we can use different areas ... but if they choose not to use any of them, that’s their choice.”
Tintinger had interviewed to become a senior carnivore keeper when she was offered the job she really wanted.
“They said ‘we think you’d be a perfect fit for the senior primate keeper’. And I went: ‘I’m in’.”
Primates, she believes, respond to her straight-up approach.
“They pick up on nuances. If you are not genuine, they’ll go ‘no, I’m not going to co-operate with you’. I’m up front. I’ll ask you to do something and there’s no ambiguity.”
Auckland Zoo’s primate team cares for 54 animals — siamangs, orangutans, spider and squirrel monkeys, baboons, ring-tailed lemurs and emperor, golden lion and cotton-top tamarins.
The day after our interview, and Tintinger is chopping up capsicum and kumara for the latter. She wears gloves and a mask into their rainforest habitat (primates are susceptible to some human illnesses) and piles food into little lidded buckets. Ten tamarins whizz between branches, squeaking and grabbing and very definitely preferring kumara to capsicum. They look cute — until they bare their needle-sharp teeth.
“Every animal has the capacity to bite you,” says Tintinger. “A goldfish will bite you.”
The bigger the primate, the bigger the canines: “If they got a blood vessel, that’s you gone .. you just, you know, don’t put yourself in that situation.”
Does Tintinger have a favourite?
“Really, you tend to go back to the ones you’ve known the most. And so it’s the orangs ... I’ve known Charlie for many, many years. But he’s not my pet. He’s not my animal. You’ve got to put some sort of distance between you, but not so much that they’ll pick up on that.”
In the orangutan habitat, Tintinger winches down feed stations and stuffs them with broccoli, leeks and palm fronds. Each bucket is securely padlocked and the winding device removed from the enclosure — if the great apes got hold of it, they’d definitely figure out how it worked, she says.
“I don’t think people realise just how intelligent they are,” she says. “And that the emotions you have as a human, they have too. Just because we talk doesn’t mean that we’re any more intelligent than an animal that doesn’t physically use words. They probably communicate better than we do. The subtle nuances of their body language — there’s always a reason for whatever they do.”
Yes, she says, 35 years of primate care has made her view humans through a different lens. Sometimes, she imagines us as an orangutan might.
“And you see, ah, this one is posturing ... some of the behaviours are almost just the same. Flirting, solicitation. If you work with primates, and then you people-watch — yeah, we’re all the same under our skins.”
Kim Knight is a senior lifestyle journalist who has been with the New Zealand Herald since 2016.
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