Jerusalem (special) -- Beverly Burge grew up in Anaheim, in the shadow of Disneyland, but nothing at the "Magic Kingdom" was as fascinating for her as what could be found in the "animal kingdom."

Today the former Orange County resident is a citizen of Israel and
supervisor of the quarantine unit for sick and baby animals at the
Jerusalem Zoo.

"Being a veterinary technician is my primary job, but I do anything that
comes up," she told HERITAGE recently. "Most of us here do many jobs. I do medical histories and English translations, for example."

She also nurses animals at her home, the source of constant amazement
and enjoyment for her neighbors. She recalled a time when "a lady
knocked on my door and said that she was having terrible problems with
her son telling lies, and that the therapist had recommended that
whenever they caught him in a lie they should confront him and show him
this isn't the truth.

"I said 'okay, but how does this concern me?' She said 'my son said you
have a tiger in your living room.' And I did. So I brought her in and
showed her the tiger (cub) and she was completely flabbergasted."

In addition to such occasional visitors from the zoo, "I have ferrets and
cats, which is one reason I would never go back to California because (pet) ferrets are illegal in California. Ferrets really are domestic animals but California Fish and Game has them listed as wild, which is crazy. Ferrets are domestic. They don't survive more than a few days in the wild...They have a very specialized diet., They have been bred to be nice and sweet and they don't have that instinct to hunt anymore."

Burge and a friend recently began the Israel Ferret Association, which is a
rescue and rehabilitation center for the ferret, a small mammal that is
also known as a polecat. "Early last spring when it started warming up
and people started opening their windows, there were a number of
escapes. In a week's time we picked up five ferrets, and I kept two of
them," she said.

"My boss, Shai Doron -- the director of the zoo here -- has been paying
attention when we talk about rescuing ferrets and he came running down
the hall with this thing in a box one morning, and he was so proud of
himself and plopped it on my desk. I hear this scritch scritch inside the
box, and I opened it up and he had found a ferret running loose in his
neighborhood."

The ferrets and Burge's cats get along nicely. "But then again my cats are
used to me doing hand raising of lots of weird of animals. They have had
everything at home from tigers to chimps. I've also had wallabies,
assorted moneys, birds, wolf cubs."

Burge also enjoys adventures with animals at the Jerusalem Zoo itself 
There was the time an elephant mother at the Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan
Zoological Center rejected her baby, so the baby, Chipati, "was brought
here and nearly the entire staff was suddenly involved in handraising. The
little guy needed company and needed to be fed every couple of hours. You have never lived until you have 'shliffed' in six liters of milk into an
elephant.

"We used two-liter soda bottles with a special nipple, and I just
swooshed it in and he just sucked away. There was a special formula
originally formulated by a zoo in Holland, and the Materna Company, which makes Materna Baby Milk made enough for us -- in sacks -- and we just mixed it with water. ....

"It was good fun because we saw the stages that he goes through. You may
not realize that baby elephants don't know how to use their trunks at
birth; they have to learn. So it was absolutely delightful watching this
baby with its floppy trunk. As he turned his head it kind of hit him. He
stayed in my section of the zoo until he was a little before a year old."

Occasionally, Chipati is taken for strolls outside the elephant enclosure,
and "he came down here and he tried to get through the little door (of the
quarantine area) and he was too big to get through."

On another occasion Burge took charge of three baby chimpanzees which
had been smuggled into Israel and were later confiscated by authorities. 
"They were brought to my section and they were infested with umpteen
different kinds of parasites and they were sick and scared, and they
stayed with me quite a while until we got them stabilized and cleaned up. 
Then we transferred them out to the primate section where they could be
introduced to other chimpanzees. Eventually they went to a chimp
sanctuary in England."

Obviously a woman who loves her work, Burge says "zoo-keeping is not a
job, it is a lifetime obsession."