The carnival pony spooked, rearing up. Clutching the reins tighter, 4-year-old Cheryl Asa thought, Wow! This is the greatest thing in the world! Flooded with delight, she barely heard her mother screaming.
Cheryl was an only child, and she was allowed no pets—they shed, tracked in filth, and destroyed domestic order. So she sought out snakes and frogs in the green tangle of woods around Herrin, Illinois. And after a conventional start to adult life—studying psychology at Northwestern University, marrying young, and having two sons—she divorced her business-minded husband and combined psychology with a degree in zoology at the University of Wisconsin.
She also found sexual reproduction interesting. “I was raised to be very uptight, ” she’d say later. “In the ’50s? My God. Sex was clearly something really important, yet nobody wanted to talk about it.” By the ’70s, though—“the height of the hippie era”—love was free and discussion was frank. Finally she could explore whatever she was curious about, from the ovulatory cycle of the rhesus monkey to the embryology of the African clawed toad.
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She earned a doctorate in endocrinology and reproductive physiology while living with a woodsy wildlife biologist on a rented farm. When they went canoeing, she discovered the only creature on earth that she loathed: the leech. “Get it off of me!” she shrieked, all girly, this woman who’d go on to crush baby cockroaches with her thumb in Manhattan and discover a rattlesnake inches from her face in the Nevada desert.
Her dissertation was on the reproductive behavior of horses, but she was also developing a deep respect for carnivores, especially canids (foxes, wolves, dogs). They were—had to be—cleverer than their prey. So she did postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota with L. David Mech, who studied wolves in the wild.
Asa brought her work home with her, volunteering to hand-raise a litter of wolf pups. With a bit of early cuddling and care, they wouldn’t stress out later, when the researchers did blood draws. There was just one problem: Wolf pups won’t urinate or defecate until their mother gently licks them. That’s because she consumes their waste (which, thanks to a certain secretion, she actually finds tasty) to keep it from contaminating the den.
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Asa’s solution was going to be a cloth dipped in warm water. But when she brought the wriggling pups home, she watched her German shepherd, Mariah, try to nurse them—then stiffen at the feel of their needle-sharp teeth. “I’ll make a deal with you, ” Asa proposed. “I’ll feed them if you’ll lick their bottoms.” She cradled each pup in turn, bottle-fed him, then held him up to Mariah, who knew, with instinct’s magic, exactly what to do.
Years later, Asa returned to the research center for a visit. Would her litter of wolves remember her? She slipped on somebody else’s coveralls, so when she entered the pen of one of the wolves she’d raised, she didn’t even smell like herself. He and his mate and children ran to the opposite end of the pen. But when she called to him, recognition lit his eyes, and he came straight to her and flipped over so she could scratch his tummy. Meanwhile, she recalls “his wife and kids were running back and forth in the back of the pen, freaked out: ‘Dad’s lost his mind!’”
At the time, Asa was studying sperm cell abnormalities at Rockefeller University. Manhattan was exciting at first, an entirely different ecosystem. But its looping playlist of honks, screeching tires, and yells had frayed her nerves. Just as she’d begun to understand why big, loud, dense cities made people violent, the phone rang. The Bureau of Land Management was looking for someone to do vasectomies on wild horses in the high desert of Nevada—and Asa was the only reproductive physiologist they could find who’d vasectomized stallions.
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She grinned and accepted the job. Her first time out, the cowboys who were going to round up the horses asked her to check a water hole and see whether she could spot any tracks. She drove a truck up to the spot they’d indicated, looked around, and saw no horses. More important, she saw not one single person—just a long solitary vista, a purple haze of mountains in the distance, the only sound a bit of breeze catching in the sagebrush. Arms straight out like Maria’s in
When she returned to do follow-up tracking, she camped in the desert with Mariah, who learned a complex array of hand signals so they could creep up in silence on the wild horses. Every morning they left camp at first light, Mariah keeping an eye on every move that Asa made, as though they were hunting together. Before they came over the top of a rise, she’d instinctively flatten those big German shepherd ears so the horses didn’t see them pricking up. Then Asa would look for the horses she’d vasectomized, grateful for the varying blazes and stockings and coat colors that made individuals easier to pick out of the herd.
The project was a success: The overall number of foals dropped, the bands of mares that traveled with the stallions didn’t desert them, and new stallions didn’t break into the herds to usurp the now-sterile stallions’ roles.
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Asa pulled into a gas station restaurant between two field sites and plunked coins into the pay phone. It was 1988, and she was trying to call the Saint Louis Zoo. In the background, slot machines rang and spilled clattering coins. Would somebody in St. Louis realize that every restaurant in Nevada had these things, or would her possible future boss decide that she was a gambler and rescind the offer?
As research coordinator, Asa was first officially charged with better managing the reproduction of the banteng, a rare breed of cattle from Southeast Asia. As part of that effort, she collected sperm from a 1, 500-pound bull named Herschel and only later realized that she’d hit the mother lode: In count, shape, vigor, and motility, his sperm was incomparable. “Herschel the Great, ” she dubbed him. The zoo would be using his frozen sperm long after he died, starting with the world’s first artificial insemination of a banteng. The baby bull was named McGwire; Mark had just broken a record, too.
In 1990, the wolves found Asa again. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service needed her to bank semen for endangered Mexican grays. For a century, their population had been steadily reduced with rifles, traps, and poison. In 1977, the Fish and Wildlife Service hired Roy McBride to capture the remaining Mexican grays. In three years of tracking, he found only five.
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The McBride lineage became the foundation for a captive breeding program. The first attempt failed, but in 1981, after a female was moved to more spacious quarters at the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center in Eureka, the first Mexican wolf pups were born in captivity. More litters followed. The next goal was to collect and preserve enough genetic diversity to guarantee the species’s future survival.
So every February, Asa hits the frozen road, armed with stacks of clear party cups and an electro-ejaculator developed for paralyzed veterans who wanted to father children. Over the years, she’s faced down giggly students and prurient reporters demanding details of what’s actually a routine, coolly clinical procedure. She’ll endure any silliness, if it gives the wolves a future.
Early on, at conferences, Asa met a kindred spirit: Devra Kleiman, who worked for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Both young and irreverent, they’d go out dancing while their colleagues pontificated. When Asa went to California to set up a captive breeding program for Channel Island foxes, Kleiman gave her good advice and later went there herself to help with the foxes’ reintroduction. Today the population’s so healthy, it’s about to be eased off the endangered species list.
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In 1999, Asa co-founded the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Wildlife Contraception Center, a precedent-setting national program anchored at the Saint Louis Zoo. It would educate zoos across the country, keep a database of breeding rates and infertility problems for different species, and monitor the use of various contraceptives with captive wildlife.
Birth control had entered the zoo world in the 1970s, just as the birth control pill launched the Sexual Revolution. Before then, zoos sold or gave away animals they didn’t need to breed and couldn’t afford to shelter. But zoos couldn’t track every subsequent transaction, and animals wound up shot as trophies, drafted for roadside or private celebrity zoos, or bred for the exotic animal trade. Birth control could help collapse that industry, and U.S. zoos welcomed it.
European zoos did not; to this day, many see it as unnatural. Instead, they euthanize healthy young animals, often at adolescence, when they’d be vulnerable in the wild anyway because they’d be striking out on their own. When three tiger cubs at Zoo Magdeburg, in Germany, were found to be genetically useless (their father was a hybrid of two species) they were killed immediately. At the Copenhagen Zoo, a 2-year-old giraffe, Marius, was shot with
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