We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Changed T

by Benjamin Mee

  But Melissa wouldn’t let it lie. She wouldn’t let it lie because she thought it was possible, and had her house valued, and kept dragging any conversation you had with her back to the zoo. Duncan was quickly enthused. Having spent a short stint as a reptile keeper at London Zoo, he was the closest thing we had to a zoo professional. Now an experienced business manager in London, he was also the prime candidate for overall manager of the project, if he, and almost certainly others, chose to trade their present lifestyles for an entirely different existence.

  Melissa set up a viewing for the family, minus Henry and Vincent, who had other engagements but were in favor of exploration. So it was agreed, and “Grandma” Amelia and a good proportion of her brood spanning three generations arrived in a small country hotel in the South Hams district of Devon. There was a wedding going on, steeping the place in bonhomie, and the gardens, chilly in the early-spring night air, occasionally echoed with stilettos on gravel as underdressed young ladies hurried to their hatchbacks and back for some essential commodity missing from the revelry inside.

  A full, or even reasonably comprehensive, family gathering outside Christmas or a wedding was unusual, and we were on a minor mission rather than a holiday, yet accompanied by a gaggle of children of assorted ages. Our party was definitely toward the comprehensive end of the spectrum, with all that that entails. Vomiting babies, pregnant people, toddlers at head-smash age, and children accidentally ripping curtains from the wall trying to impersonate Darth Vader. The night before the viewing, we were upbeat but realistic. We were serious contenders, but probably all convinced that we were giving it our best shot and that somebody with more money, or experience, or probably both, would come along and take it away.

  We arrived at the park on a crisp April morning in 2005, and met Ellis Daw for the first time. An energetic man in his late seventies with a full white beard and a beanie hat that he never removed, Ellis took us around the park and the house like a pro on autopilot. He’d clearly done this tour a few times before. On our quick trip around the labyrinthine twelve-bedroom mansion, we took in that the sitting room was half full of parrot cages, the general decor had about three decades of catching up to do, and the plumbing and electrical systems looked like they could absorb a few tens of thousands of pounds to be put right.

  Out in the park we were all blown away by the animals and Ellis’s innovative enclosure designs. Tiger Mountain, so called because three Siberian tigers prowl around a manmade mountain at the center of the park, was particularly impressive. Instead of chain-link or wire-mesh fence, Ellis had adopted a “ha-ha” system, which basically entails a deep ditch around the perimeter that in turn is surrounded by a wall more than six feet high on the animal side but only three or four feet on the visitor side. This creates the impression of extreme proximity to these most spectacular cats, who pad about the enclosure like massive flame-clad versions of the domestic cats we all know and love, making you completely reappraise your relationship with the diminutive predators many of us shelter indoors.

  There were lions behind wire, as stunning as the tigers, roaring in defiance of any other animal to challenge them for their territory, particularly other lions, apparently. And it has to be said that these bellowing outputs, projected by their hugely powerful diaphragms for a good three miles across the valley, have over the years proved 100 percent effective. Never once has this group of lions been challenged by any other group of lions, or anything else, for their turf. It’s easy to argue that this is due to lack of predators of this magnitude in the vicinity, but one lioness did apparently catch a heron at a reputed fifteen feet off the ground a few years before, confirming that this territorial defensiveness was no bluff.

  Peacocks strolled around the picnic area, from where you could see a pack of wolves prowling through the trees behind a wire fence. Three big European bears looked up at us from their woodland enclosure, and three jaguars, two pumas, a lynx, some flamingos, porcupines, raccoons, and a Brazilian tapir added to the eclectic mix of the collection.

  We were awestruck by the animals, and surprisingly not daunted at all. Even to our untutored eyes there was clearly a lot of work to be done. Everything wooden, from picnic benches to enclosure posts and stand-off barriers, was covered in algae that had clearly been there for some time. Some of it, worryingly, at the base of many of the enclosure posts, was obviously having a corrosive influence.

  We could see that the zoo needed work, but we could also see that it had until recently been a going concern, and one that would give us a unique opportunity to be near some of the most spectacular—and endangered—animals on the planet.

  As part of our official viewing of the property, we were asked by a film crew from Animal Planet to participate in a documentary about the sale. The journalist in me began to wonder whether this eccentric English venture might be sustainable through another source. Writing and the media had been my career for fifteen years, and, while not providing a huge amount of money, had given me a tremendous quality of life. If I could write about the things I liked doing, I could generally do them as well, and I was sometimes able to boost the activity itself with the media light that shone on it. Perhaps here was a similar model. A once thriving project now on the edge of extinction, functioning perfectly well in its day, but now needing a little nudge from the outside world to survive . . .

  Mum, Duncan, and I were asked to stand shoulder to shoulder amongst the parrots in the living room, to explain for the camera what we would do if we got the zoo. At the end of our burst of amateurish enthusiasm, the cameraman spontaneously said, “I want you guys to get it.” The other offers were from leisure industry professionals with a lot of money, against whom we felt we had an outside chance, but nothing more. My skepticism was still enormous, but I began to see a clear way through, if, somehow, chance delivered it to us. Though it still felt far-fetched, like looking around all those houses my parents seemed to drag us to when we were moving as kids: Don’t get too interested, because you know you will almost certainly not end up living there.

  On our tour around the park itself, Ellis finally switched out of his professional spiel and looked at me, my brother Duncan, and my brother-in-law Jim, all relatively strapping lads in our early to mid-forties, and said, “Well, you’re the right age for it anyway.” This vote of confidence registered with us, as clearly, Ellis had seen something in us that he liked. Our ambitions for the place were modest, which he also liked. He said he’d actually turned away several offers because they involved spending too much on the redevelopment. “What do you want to spend a million pounds on here?” he asked us, somewhat rhetorically. “What’s wrong with it? On your way, I said to them.” I can imagine the color draining from his bankers’ faces when they heard this good news. Luckily we didn’t have a million pounds to spend on redevelopment—or, at this stage, even on the zoo itself—so our modest, family-based plans seemed to strike a chord with Ellis.

  At about three thirty in the afternoon, our tour was over and we began to notice that the excited chattering of the adults in our group was interrupted increasingly frequently by minor, slightly overemotional outbursts from our children, who were milling around us like progressively more manic and fractious over-wound toys. In our enthusiasm for the park we had collectively made an elementary, rookie parenting mistake and missed lunch, leading to Parents’ Dread: low blood sugar in under-tens. We had to find food fast. We walked into the enormous Jaguar Restaurant, built by Ellis in 1987 to seat three hundred people. Then we walked out again. Rarely have I been in a working restaurant less conducive to the consumption of food. A thin film of grease from the prolific fat fryers in the kitchen coated the tired Formica tabletops, arranged in canteen rows and illuminated by harsh fluorescent strips mounted in the swirling mess of the grease-yellowed Artex ceiling. The heavy scent of the oil used to cook french fries gave a fairly accurate indication of the menu and mingled with the smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes rising from the group of staff clad in gray
kitchen whites sitting around the bar, eyeing their few customers with suspicion.

  Even at the risk of total mass blood-sugar implosion, we were not eating there, and asked for directions to the nearest supermarket for emergency provisions. And then, for me, the final piece of the Dartmoor puzzle fell into place, for that was when we discovered the Tesco at Lee Mill. Seven minutes away by car was not just a supermarket, but an übermarket. In the climax of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur finally reaches a rise that gives him a view of “Castle Aaargh,” thought to be the resting place of the Holy Grail, the culmination of his quest. As Arthur and Sir Bedevere are drawn across the water toward the castle by the pilotless dragon-crested ship, music of Wagnerian epic proportions plays to indicate that they are arriving at a place of true significance. This music started spontaneously in my head as we rounded a corner at the top of a small hill, and looked down into a man-made basin filled with what looked almost like a giant spaceship, secretly landed in this lush green landscape. It seemed the size of Stansted Airport, its lights beaming out their message of industrial-scale consumerism into the rapidly descending twilight of the late-spring afternoon. Hot chickens, fresh bread, salad, hummus, batteries, children’s clothes, newspapers, and many other provisions we were lacking were immediately provided. But more important, wandering around its cathedral-high aisles, I was hugely reassured that, if necessary, I could find here a television, a camera, an iron, a kettle, stationery, a DVD, or a child’s toy. And it was open twenty-four hours a day. As I watched the thirty-seven checkouts humming their lines of customers through, my final fear about relocating to the area was laid to rest. A Londoner for twenty years, I had become accustomed to the availability of things like flat-screen TVs, birthday cards, or sprouts at any time of the day or night, and one of the biggest culture shocks of living in southern France for the last three years had been their totally different take on this. For them, global consumerism stopped at 8 PM, and if you needed something urgently after that, you had to wait till the next day. This Tesco, for me, meant that the whole thing was doable, and we took our picnic to watch the sunset on a nearby beach in high spirits.

  Although my mum’s house was not yet even on the market, it had been valued at the same as the asking price for the park; so, with some trepidation, we put in an offer at that price in a four-way sealed-bid auction and waited keenly for the outcome. But two days later we were told that we were not successful. Our bid was rejected by Ellis’s advisors on the basis that we were in-experienced and had no real money. Which we had to admit were both fair points. We went back to our lives with the minimum of regrets, feeling that we had done what we could and had been prepared to follow through, but now it was out of our hands. Melissa went back to her family in Gloucestershire; Duncan was busy in London with his new business; Vincent, at fifty-four our eldest brother, had a new baby; Mum went back to the family home in Surrey, preparing to put it on the market. All relatively comfortable, successful, and rewarding. My life in particular, I felt, was compensation enough for missing out on this chance. Having spent nearly a decade maneuvering into a position of writing for a living with low overheads in a hot country, watching the children grow into this slightly strange niche, I was content with my lot and anxious to get back to it.

  But after all the excitement, I couldn’t help wondering about what might have been. Sitting in my makeshift Plexiglas office in the back of my beautiful derelict barn with the swallows dipping in and out during the day and the bats buzzing around my head at dusk, I couldn’t stop thinking about the life we could have built around that zoo.

  Katherine was getting stronger every day, wielding my French pickax/mattock in her vegetable garden with increasing vigor, and her muscle tone and body mass—wasted to its furthest extreme by the chemotherapy so that she went from looking like a catwalk model to an etiolated punk rocker, with her random tufts of hair—improved throughout the summer. Her neurologist, Madame Campello, a fiercely intelligent and slightly forbidding woman, was pleased with her progress and decided to shift her MRI scans from monthly to once every two months, which we saw as a good sign. It gave us longer between the inevitable anxiety of going into Nîmes to get the results, a process that both of us, particularly Katherine, found pretty daunting.

  Mme Campello was obviously compassionate, and I’m sure I saw her actually gasp when she first saw Katherine, the children, and myself for Katherine’s initial postoperative consultation. From that moment she fast-forwarded almost every part of the treatment, and I could see that this lady was going to do everything she could to make sure that Katherine survived. In her normal clinical consultations, however, Mme Campello was rather like a strict headmistress, which made Katherine, always the good girl, feel unable to question her too closely about treatment options. However, with one or two school expulsions under my belt, I have never been overly intimidated by school heads, and felt quite entitled to probe. Mme Campello turned out to be extremely receptive to this, and several times I called her after speaking with Katherine once we had got home, and we decided on an adjustment to her medication.

  My nighttime excursions with Leon continued to yield interesting creatures, like fireflies from impenetrable thickets that never produced the goods in daylight in front of the children, scorpions toward whom I was beginning to habituate but was still jittery, and probably the most surprising for me, a long horn beetle. Never before or since have I seen such a beetle in the wild, and I was convinced he was on the wrong continent. Long—perhaps three inches—with iridescent wing casings, a small head, and enormous antennae, from which, I assume, he got his name. I took great pleasure in identifying him with the children in our voluptuously illustrated French encyclopedia bought from a book fair in Avignon, and photographing him standing on the page next to his template self, though he was inordinately more impressive and colorful.

  Katherine was well and in capable hands, the children were blooming, and I was writing about home improvement for the Guardian and even occasionally doing some, and gradually making contact with professors around the world on topics like chimpanzee predation of monkeys for sexual rewards, elephant intelligence, and the dolphin’s capacity for syntax. It was close to heaven, with local friends popping in for mandatory glasses of chilled rosé from the vines on our doorstep, and me able to adjust my working hours around the demands of the village and family life relatively easily. Apart from all that rosé.

  But still I kept thinking about the zoo. The park sat on the edge of Dartmoor, surrounded by the lush woodland and beautiful beaches of South Hams. The two days I had spent in this region of Devon would not go away. Our family had enjoyed their stay, but it was more than that—somehow enchanting, something I could only very reluctantly let go of, even though I knew it was already lost.

  Standing in my French hayloft door, free of Health and Safety Commission interference, the barn’s ancient portals bleached like driftwood by the sun and sandblasted by the mistral, with its interior and exterior dripping rusted door furniture, some of it reputedly dating back to the Napoleonic era, it was the zoo that kept coming back to me.

  When Napoleon passed through our village of Arpaillargues in 1815, he famously killed two local dissenters, known (admittedly among a relatively select few local French historians) as the Arpaillargues Two. In 2005 the Tour de France passed through the village, causing no deaths but quite a lot of excitement (though not enough for the local shopkeeper, Sandrine, to forgo her three-hour lunch break to sell cold drinks to the hundreds of sweltering tourists lining the route). So, in two centuries, two quite big things had happened in the village. In between, it settled back into being baked by the sun and blasted by the mistral. And, only slightly wistfully, I settled back into that, too.

  A year passed, with the zoo as a mournful but ebbing distraction. Those big trees, so unlike the parched scrub of southern Europe, the nearby rivers and sea, and the ridiculously magnificent animals, so close to the house, so foolishly endan
gered by mankind and yet right there in a ready-made opportunity for keeping them alive for future generations.

  Partly because the whole family was in a bit of a daze about my father’s death, Mum’s house was still not on the market, so we were unprepared for what happened next. As an expat without satellite TV (that’s cheating), I nevertheless craved English news and probably visited the BBC News online two or three times a day. Suddenly, on 12 April 2006, there it was again. Ellis had released a statement saying that the sale had fallen through yet again, and that many of the animals would have to be shot if a buyer wasn’t found within the next eleven days.

  It didn’t give us long, but I knew exactly what I had to do. I called Melissa and Duncan, who had been the main drivers of the previous attempt, and told them that we had to try again. I was not entirely surprised, however, when neither of them seemed quite as excited as I was. Both had delved deeply into the machinations required for the purchase, and Duncan in particular had been alarmed at the time by a demand for a “non-refundable deposit” of £25,000 to secure a place at the head of the line. “If you can get it in writing that he will definitely sell it to us, and we can sell the house in time, I’ll back you up,” he said. He felt it was just an endless time-sink, but gladly gave me all the information he had. Brother-in-law Jim too had a list of contacts and offered his help preparing spreadsheets for a business plan should it get that far.

  Peter Wearden was the first call. As environmental health officer for the South Hams district, Peter was directly responsible for issuing the zoo license. “Can a bunch of amateurs like us really buy a zoo and run it?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said unequivocally, “providing you have the appropriate management structure in place.” This structure consists primarily of hiring a curator of animals, an experienced and qualified zoo professional with detailed knowledge of managing exotic animals who is responsible for looking after the animals on a day-to-day basis. Peter sent me a flowchart that showed the position of the curator beneath the zoo directors, which would be us, but still in a position to allocate funds for animal management at his/her discretion. “You can’t just decide to buy a new ice-cream kiosk if the curator thinks there is a need for, say, new fence posts in the lion enclosure,” said Peter. “If you haven’t got money for both, you have to listen to the curator.” That seemed fair enough. “There is, by the way,” he added, “a need for new fence posts in the lion enclosure.” And how much are those? “No idea,” said Peter. “That’s where you’ll have to get professional advice. But that’s just one of many, many things you’ll need to do before you can get your zoo license.” Peter explained a bit about the Zoo Licensing Act, and that Ellis was due to hand in his license to operate a zoo within a couple of weeks, hence the eleven-day deadline for the sale.