C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2020“The animals are blissfully unaware of
what the rest of us have been going
through,” said Jim Breheny, the director of
the Bronx Zoo. “What I wouldn’t give for
that innocence.”
Unlike Broadway theaters or museums,
zoos cannot go dark. Chinchillas need
checkups. Penguin chicks might require
help after they hatch. Captive tigers, alliga-
tors and grizzly bears probably shouldn’t be
left to their own devices.
“The animals that we care for rely on us
for everything,” said Mr. Breheny, whose
first job at age 14 was staffing the zoo’s cam-
el rides.
So since it closed to the public on March
16, the Bronx Zoo has been tending to ani-
mals while keeping its human employees as
socially distant as possible. Roughly 300
workers of its 700-plus staff were deemed
“essential” to care for animals and maintain
the zoo’s operations. They are split in half
into two teams, which report on alternating
weeks.
A spokeswoman for District Council 37, a
union that represents zoo employees, said
there had been no reports of layoffs or
furloughs.
Workers who still report find themselves
following the routines they always have:
spreading hay out so the American bison
can graze; offering fish to Magellanic pen-
guins eagerly snapping their beaks; and re-
leasing the lions to laze around on exhibit.
Others, including maintenance workers,
electricians and plumbers, keep the sprawl-
ing campus operating.
Mr. Breheny said the zoo’s mission right
now was to keep the animals on a consistent
routine. But the zoo’s emptiness has not
gone unnoticed, he added, by some
primates.
Last month, he took a moment to stop at
one of the viewing spots for the baboon re-
serve, a two-acre space amid the 265-acre
zoo designed to simulate the Ethiopian
highlands. He said a group of geladas, mon-
keys with a crown of coffee-colored hair and
upper lips that often flip up, moved toward
him. He was most likely the first human ob-
server they had seen in a while, and they
stared curiously at him through the glass.
“They seemed to not understand why
people aren’t here right now,” he said.
The goats and alpacas in the children’s
seasonal zoo are particularly accustomed to
interacting with visitors, said Patrick
Thomas, the zoo’s associate director, in an
email. Now the only people those animals
see are employees.
“I don’t think our animals’ behavior has
changed all that much,” he said, “but I do
think that they’re aware that things are not
the same.”
The Central Park Zoo, Queens Zoo,
Prospect Park Zoo and New York Aquarium
are also shut indefinitely. The Wildlife Con-
servation Society, which runs these institu-
tions, paired its Instagram announcement
with the image of a somber sea lion who ap-
peared to be frowning under its whiskers.
While shuttered, the Bronx Zoo is assist-
ing health care workers on the front lines of
the pandemic. In its deserted parking lots
are white tents set up to test employees of
the nearby Montefiore Medical Center for
Covid-19 and 250 ambulances sent from
around the country to help in New York City,
the epicenter of America’s coronavirus
crisis.For veteran staff members, the eerie qui-
et that now pervades the park is reminis-
cent of the vacant feeling after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, when it also shut down tempo-
rarily. Other zoos across the country, which
are generally closed, can find parallels in
the aftermath of natural disasters, like the
Audubon Zoo in New Orleans after Hurri-
cane Katrina in 2005.
For many zoos, revenue has flatlined, and
there are concerns about their survival,
said Dan Ashe, the president of the Associa-
tion of Zoos and Aquariums. Layoffs in the
thousands are being announced. Zoos and
aquariums hope to qualify for emergency
loans from the Small Business Administra-
tion that were a part of the federal govern-
ment’s $2 trillion economic relief package.
“At a time when they have no revenue
coming in the gate, they have to operate the
facility at 100 percent,” Mr. Ashe said.
Another concern for zoos, which have
had to grapple with growing criticism of
keeping animals in captivity, is the connec-tion between wild animals and the novel co-
ronavirus, which experts say most likely
originated in bats. According to a fact sheet
the Centers for Disease Control and Pre-
vention sent to scientists who study
zoonotic diseases, the agency has not re-
ceived reports of wildlife or other animals
becoming sick with Covid-19 in the United
States, and there is no reason to think ani-
mals might be a source of infection here.
Because humans and other primates
share genetic material and can potentially
pass diseases between them, some zoos
across the country had taken precautions
before they closed, canceling behind-the-
scenes tours where humans might be closer
than usual to the animals, Mr. Ashe said.
Even in the best of times, zookeepers in the
Bronx have maintained a strict protocol of
wearing masks and face shields around
primates.
The Bronx Zoo, which has long empha-
sized its ties to wildlife conservation, sees
another purpose for itself during the pan-
demic: It is lobbying for a worldwide ban of
the commercial trade of wildlife intended
for human consumption. The Wildlife Con-
servation Society says the practice puts hu-
mans at risk of contracting diseases while
trading live animals or eating fresh meat.
According to a policy statement from the
organization, such a ban would “signifi-
cantly reduce the risk of a future zoonotic
pandemic” and potentially prevent pan-
demics like Covid-19. Experts are investi-
gating if the coronavirus passed from a bat
to another animal that came into close con-
tact with humans.
On a lighter note, zoos and aquariums
across the country have been trying to meet
the demand of a housebound public enam-
ored of animal videos.
In Chicago, the Shedd Aquarium posted a
series of viral videos showing their pen-
guins wandering around the empty aquar-
ium, coming face to face with beluga whales
and colorful fish. In San Antonio, Texas, the
city’s zoo has launched live streams of tree
kangaroos lounging on tree branches and
moon jellyfish floating in their fluorescent
tanks.
For its part, the Bronx Zoo has posted
footage of a newly hatched blue penguin
chick in the cupped hands of a zookeeper
and a Malayan tiger splashing around in its
watering hole.
For now, trips to the zoo will have to re-
main virtual.Working From Home, but Now Without a Crowd
JIM BREHENYGREGG VIGLIOTTI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
An eerie quiet now pervades
the Bronx Zoo, top. But it
has turned one of its parking
lots into a Covid-19 test site,
above, reserved for
employees of Montefiore
Medical Center. The lots are
also being used by 250
ambulances sent from
around the country to help
in New York City.observed with quiet uncertainty (Cold or
Covid-19? Flu or the first signs of worse?),
panic attacks are menaces in their own
right, leaving sufferers to wonder how, ex-
actly, their unreliable physiology is failing
them.
My first panic attacks happened at 21, af-
ter I had smoked some formidable weed.
But it was later that they came on me in un-
relenting waves, after I resigned from an
imploding magazine in 2014 (while on my
honeymoon in the Namibian desert, no
less) and then found myself idle at home,
stuck inside long empty days, lonely for the
colleagues with whom I’d spent years es-
tablishing my bona fides as a book critic.
These attacks reduced me to an inert little
mouse, so fearful that I once slathered my
legs in layer after layer of alcohol after dip-
ping my toes into a creek — what if, my
mind asked in an undying chant, that water
is home to a flesh-eating bacteria?Now,
tucked away in our house for all but the es-
sential trips outside, days are starting to
take on the same tenor.
Five years ago, at my therapist’s urging, I
kept track of every panic attack that
washed over me: my record for a single day
was 132. Soon I was diagnosed with agora-
phobia and panic disorder, which is essen-
tially a preoccupation with recurring panic
attacks. An uptick in my SSRIs was the first
wave of combat infantry, backed up by close
work with the therapist. But it was a gray,
mass-market paperback called “Hope and
Help for Your Nerves,” with a front-cover
blurb from Ann Landers, that became my
talisman. Yes, I know what you’re thinking:
A book critic shouldn’t fall for that.
Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass. That’s
the recipe that Dr. Claire Weekes, the Aus-
tralian clinician and relatively underrecog-
nized pioneer of modern anxiety treatment,
established in a series of books (including
“Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” her first)
published from 1962 to 1989, the year before
she died. This advice, when you encounter
it in the midst of a cycle of breath-short-
ening attacks, may sound cruel.
First, Weekes says, you must decide to
truly experience the panic, to let it burst out
into your fingers, your gut, your skull. Then,
sink into it like a warm pool. Finally, rather
than mentally kicking your legs to keep
your nose out of the water, flip onto your
back. “Stop holding tensely onto yourself,”
she writes, “trying to control your fear, try-
ing ‘to do something about it’ while subject-
ing yourself to constant self-analysis.” Just
float through it, observing that it’s happen-
ing and recognizing that it will end.
Weekes promises that “every unwelcome
sensation can be banished, and you can re-
gain peace of mind and body.” That’s a guar-
antee that, even in our cure-all-saturated
world (Sex dust for orgasms! Crystals for...
everything!), is hard to square. But her ad-
vice, hard-earned through her own lifelong
anxiety, which would wake her out of sleep
to torment her, is so simple that “Hope and
Help” essentially turns into a soothing repe-
tition of two points. First, that what we’re
mostly afraid of is fear. And second, that “by
your own anxiety you are producing the
very feelings you dislike so much.” Page af-
ter page offers the reassuring reminder
that you can best fight your panic by refus-
ing to fight the panic.
And in short: It works.
Weekes’s tactics have trickled out indrabs to influence much of cognitive behav-
ioral therapy’s approach to panic. She was
no lightweight — first an evolutionary biolo-
gist, then a general practitioner and made a
fellow of the Royal Australasian College of
Physicians in 1973. Psychiatrists pooh-
poohed her theories in her day — her biog-
rapher Judith Hoare writes that as the
guest speaker at a prominent psychother-
apy conference in 1977, fellow doctors belit-
tled her lack of formal training and “looked
at their watches and talked among them-
selves” — but her work was propelled by
word of mouth (“Hope and Help” had sold
more than 400,000 copies by 1978), and a
cultish devotion to her simple and direct ad-
vice means that today the book is prized by
the readers, including me, whom it has
guided out of emotional suffocation. A scroll
through its Amazon reviews turns up one
gushing convert after another.
The language of self-help, especially of
the mental health variety, often emphasizes
resilience and grit, like we’re mixed martial
artists who ought to stand firm after every
wallop. (“Badass Ways to End Anxiety &
Stop Panic Attacks!,” exclamation point in-
cluded, is one of the sponsored books Ama-
zon shows above Weekes’s books.) But
“Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” which
walks us through every possible physical
symptom of panic — from “giddiness” to
“sore scalp” — sounds practically Victorian
to our modern ears, in both its lingo and its
prescription. Weekes refers to panic as
“nervous illness,” and illustrates it with im-
ages like the shaking hands of a vicar’s wife
as she struggles with “cups of tea rattling in
their saucers.”
Perhaps it was that strange step back intime that turned me into a Claire Weekes ac-
olyte — I could imagine her walking in to
soothe the “hysterical” captive of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic “The Yel-
low Wallpaper” and pull her back out of the
walls. I started recommending the book to
friends who admitted to their own secret
panic. I kept it at hand for hourly reminders
that I needn’t activate some dormant in-
trepid fighter inside me who could claw my
brain back to stability like a member of
Roald Amundsen’s Antarctic crew.
Stuck inside again these days, I’ve been
paging through “Hope and Help,” rereading
the portions I underlined five years ago,
when my fingers dulled the ink’s crispness
with their fervor. If this book is my amulet, it
isn’t the only one — for one angst-filled year,
I carried Fernando Pessoa everywhere;
and though I’m an atheist, I travel with my
grandmother’s novena book as if its pages
could flap hard enough to keep a plane aloft.
But Weekes’s work has the particular effect
of pushing me to see that something lies be-
yond the moments of slip-sliding terror I
find myself in every few hours, or minutes.
This isn’t how book critics behave, or so
I’ve been led to believe. Books are supposed
to meet higher standards than just the emo-
tional release they incite. Which is true. But
they can also be ballast, and in a time like
this I refuse to cede an essential value of
books just to maintain some irrelevant dedi-
cation to an intellectual credo.
Especially since this one has potent ad-
vice for the present moment, when many of
us feel we must push back our disquiet more
tenaciously than ever. If you’re afraid, then
be afraid. You might float through to the
other side.Calm Your Disquiet by Embracing It
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Right now, as coughs
around the world are
observed with quiet
uncertainty, panic
attacks are menaces
in their own right.