Lunch at the zoo

Appetisers

● Twelve-odd people cook and serve over 1,500 animals at the Delhi zoo.

● The total spend on rations per month is anywhere between ₹25 and ₹30 lakh — a sum that can buy up to 12 Maruti Altos or 75,000 entry tickets to the zoo (₹40 for adults).

● All animals eat but once a day.

Entrée

● Tree fodder, green fodder, vegetables, fruits, fish, beef, chicken and chicks make up the basket of supplies, arriving bright and early at 6.00 am. Most animals are also fed a concentrate or a kind of khichdi made of wheat bran, germinated Bengal gram, barley, oats, mace, groundnut oil cake, turmeric and crucially, salt. They are a discerning lot, after all.

● Distribution is staggered in four lots, starting at 9.00am and ending at 2.00pm. The pelicans (in flight) are the chief town criers this season. They announce the arrival of the sunshine yellow delivery truck long before it starts its slow march around the 176-acre zoo.

● For the big cats, food is placed at a designated spot and cages are rattled twice or thrice — think Pavlov’s bell — before they pounce on lunch. Caretakers who put the food on their plates get a risk allowance — just in case. The tigers may be getting a lot of bad press lately, but the ones raised in captivity rarely, if ever, attack other animals or humans without provocation, and even if they do go for a ‘kill’, they don’t really know how to tear it apart and eat it like their kin in the wild.

● To aid digestion, meat-eating animals observe a weekly fast on Fridays. A day when they may be at their grumpiest, so the zoo is shut.

Or wait, is it the other way round?

Main course

● On an average day, 95kg of bananas are bought for the animals.

● The haul of fish is larger still at 150kg. As the skies clear up and the autumn clouds roll in, however, an additional 50kg is ordered — this time for the zoo’s annual visitors, which include a large flock of sassy, long-legged Siberian cranes.

● At 250kg, buffalo meat makes up for the lion’s share (literally too!) of the daily victuals.

● Store in-charge, Veena Chandra, the first woman to man the post, supervises the delivery and distribution of vegetables, fruits and the large saddles of meat. Sometimes she also oversees the slaughtering of fresh chicken. Chandra is a vegetarian.

● No meat or poultry leaves the store until a certificate of quality is issued every morning by veterinary officer Dr N Panneerselvam.

● The biggest eater at the zoo is also its largest inhabitant. At about 2,700kg, a full-grown Asian or Asiatic elephant can wolf down 300kg of green fodder, 150kg of tree fodder, plenty of khichdi and at least two dozen bananas at a time.

Side dishes

● Like any other household, the zoo changes its menu every season — because nothing tastes as good (or is as cheap) in the season it’s traditionally grown in. The bears are not complaining. They can hardly wait for the beets to arrive in the markets this winter.

● There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Shiva, the 34-year-old celibate rhino who was brought in from Mumbai to spawn a crash of calves, loved his ganna (sugarcane). So much so, that even when there was nary a cane to be spotted last winter, a special team was despatched to procure a bunch from a few farsighted ganne ke juicewaley ; all for a king’s ransom, of course. Sadly, Shiva died of cancer earlier this year, so there won’t be no scouting for ganna anymore.

● A lavish spread was also laid out apparently, for the two ostriches that were rescued from a house in central Delhi three years ago. Plied with everything from almonds to spinach to apples (even in the off season). But the story of the big birds also ended in disappointment for the zoo staff. Just when they had begun to get used to their special status, the family that 'owned’ the birds won a case in court and took them away.

● Animals that are shifted from elsewhere also need a lot of TLC in the beginning, and food is a crucial tool to make them feel at home. The Hoolock gibbons that arrived a couple of weeks ago from Mizoram, for instance, were hosted at the zoo’s hospital and fed water and food at midnight — 10 hours after the kitchen fires usually die out. The Bengal tiger cub when it first arrived got a steady supply of goat’s milk. Ostriches from Chennai (not related to their rescued friends in Delhi) were weaned away gradually from the food pellets they were raised on.

Dessert

● Sugar is to animals what narcotics are to humans. But the chimpanzees won’t hear of it. The only two residents of the zoo to get (and demand) a sugar fix, they prefer theirs stirred into milk. Milk drunk every morning out of special chimp mugs, mind you.

● The monkeys, however, are allergic to sugar. Their idea of dessert is sugar-free kheer; the natural sweetness of milk is enough to start family feuds. Served through the monsoons in lieu of bread, which tends to attract fungus, even interloping crows join the melee. For a free lunch is a sweet lunch.

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