17: Ken Allen
Bornean Orangutan who Playfully Terrorized the San Diego Zoo
Born: 13 February 1971, San Diego Zoo, San Diego, California, United States of America
Died: 1 December 2000, San Diego Zoo, San Diego, California, United States of America
Even if you don’t like Count Dankula for his political views or other content, I have to say, his Absolute Mad Lads episode about Ken is hilarious! I linked the video here in the article and I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t seen it already.
Ken Allen is remembered today for being the world’s best escape artist—at least for an Orangutan anyway.
His first daring escape happened on 13 June 1985, when Ken climbed a retaining wall and escaped from his exhibit. But while this was technically his first real escape, Ken’s ability to outmaneuver his human handlers had started much earlier when he was just a baby in the nursery.
Ken Allen, named for two zookeepers named Ken and Allen who had saved the baby orangutan’s life, had had a unique story from the start. Ken Allen’s mother, named Maggie, was another captive orangutan, but she tried to smother her baby soon after he was born. The baby orangutan was moved into the zoo nursery in order to save his life. He was kept in the nursery until he was old enough to be returned to the adult exhibit.
While in the nursery, Ken Allen quickly learned how to take apart his baby pen at night when he was left alone in the building. Ken learned how to unscrew the bolts, letting him escape, and then re-screw the bolts back into place in the morning before the zookeepers returned, leaving them none the wiser…for a while at least. The zookeepers eventually caught on to what Ken was doing and made sure to reinforce his baby pen so that he couldn’t continue to wander around.
Apparently, the zookeepers didn’t think that his quests for freedom would continue once moved into the adult exhibit, but they were wrong.
When Ken climbed out of his exhibit for the first time in 1985, he did so largely because he was curious and bored. The human visitors of the zoo stood by in astonishment as the several hundred pound hairy ape wandered around and looked at the other animals. He wasn’t violent, he didn’t hurt anyone, or even cause a scene. He simply wandered around like any other visitor to the zoo. Eventually, zookeepers caught up to him and led him back to his enclosure—but by then it was too late, Ken had tasted freedom.
The general public immediately fell in love with Ken, and as he continued to escape again and again, he became something of a celebrity. The zoo began to sell t-shirts and other merchandise with Ken’s face on them, bumper stickers that read “Free Ken Allen!” began to appear on cars all across the country, a song was written in his honor, and more recently in the 2010s, a local brewery created a beer in his honor. A newspaper article published in the 1980s dubbed Ken the “Hairy Houdini”—a nickname that cemented itself in Ken’s story from there on out.
Ken even had his own fan club, called the “Orang Gang.”
A few weeks after Ken’s first escape from the adult exhibit, in July 1985, Ken managed to escape again. The zookeepers thought they had reinforced the enclosure, but clearly, they hadn’t done enough. Ken escaped his enclosure, and was found throwing rocks at another orangutan, named Otis, whom Ken clearly had beef with to say the least.
And then, a few weeks after that, Ken escaped again! In August 1985, workers had accidentally left a crowbar behind in the orangutan exhibit. Ken and another female orangutan named Vicki worked together to use the crowbar to pry apart a window, allowing Ken to escape.
After the window escapade, Ken was temporarily moved to an indoor exhibit while the zookeepers worked to reinforce his actual enclosure, to stop him from escaping again. While Ken was kept indoors, he was only given a black and white television with a single channel to watch, and no other enrichment. Poor guy.
The zoo was determined to prevent further escape attempts from Ken. They hired rock climbers to scale the walls of the exhibit to find potential escape routes, added electric wiring to the fence line outside the exhibit, and even began to post zookeepers in civilian clothes around the exhibit once Ken figured out what zookeeper uniforms looked like.
Around this time, security cameras caught Ken scaling the exterior wall of his enclosure, but when his paw brushed up against the electric wiring, he seemingly gave up and climbed back down.
For the next two years, Ken seemed to calm down. He had a harem of female orangutans in the enclosure with him and had multiple children with them. It seemed like Ken was a typical family man—er, orangutan that is, and zookeepers started to relax around the Hairy Houdini.
But just when the keepers started to think Ken’s escape artist days were over, the pump that worked in the enclosure’s moat clogged. The moat quickly dried up, and Ken, not one to waste an opportunity, simply walked across the dried-up moat, and hoisted himself up onto a pile of rocks outside the enclosure.
Once free, Ken posed for photos with tourists and wandered around, like he had other times before. Unfortunately, he was quickly spotted by staff, and after security and zoo veterinarians caught up to him, Ken was returned to his enclosure—grumpy but without further incident.
Zookeepers thought that maybe Ken was still jealous of his old rival Otis. Otis had three female companions in his enclosure. Ken was given four more, on top of the few he already had with him. Zookeepers hoped the new ladies would help keep Ken distracted.
Instead, Ken apparently taught his new friends all about the wonders of tools. Within months, two of the new orangutans were able to use a five-foot long squeegee, left behind by zookeepers, to scale the fence and escape. One of the orangutans had to be tranquilized in order to return her to the exhibit, while the other went much more peacefully.
The San Diego Zoo had no choice but to spend $45,000 to make improvements to the enclosure, and the escapes finally stopped. According to official reports, between all of the orangutans, there were nine escapes or escape attempts in a short period of time.
(The first time Ken attempted to escape, he built a ladder! Though the attempt was unsuccessful, its still incredible to think about how brilliant this orangutan actually was. A zoo employee described the ladder event thusly:
“He would carefully put the foot of the ladder on the ground, and pound it with his hand to be sure it was solid, and then he would climb to the top of the wall and climb back down.”)
Ken’s star faded, and eventually he was just another orangutan in the exhibit like all the rest—except for the fact that he apparently liked to give small human children the finger. Yeah, that finger!
Sadly, in 2000, zookeepers noticed that Ken began to act strangely, not like his normal self. Zoo veterinarians diagnosed him with B-Cell Lymphoma. There was no hope for a meaningful recovery, and so, Ken Allen was euthanized and cremated by staff on the first of December that year. He was twenty-nine years old.
He has a memorial plaque installed at the San Diego Zoo, which I photographed while visiting the zoo in 2023.
Badges Earned:
Find a Grave Marked
Sources:
https://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/24/orangutan-ken-allen-san-diego-zoo-escape-artist-469908.html
https://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-orangutans.html
https://tilln.com/season-4/ken-allens-incredible-escapes-from-the-san-diego-zoo-ep-257