AARP members at the zoo

A life without predators, good medical attention and a healthy diet are causing zoo animals to live longer, according to this AP story.

I feel their pain

The Golden Years have arrived at the nation's zoos and aquariums, and that is taking veterinarians and keepers, along with their animals, into a zone of unknowns. Do female gorillas, now frequently living in to their 40s and 50s, experience menopause? Can an aging lemur suffer from dementia? How do you weigh the most difficult choice -- between prolonging pain and ending life -- when the patient is a venerable jaguar who's been around so long she's come to feel like a member of the family?

All of those questions hang on a larger one that, until recent years, has been left to educated guesswork based on limited evidence.

"How old is geriatric? How old do animals really live?" says Sharon Dewar, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Park Zoo, whose keepers have adjusted to Rollie's toothlessness by serving him a diet of soft-cooked veggies. "That's the million-dollar question."