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

  “He does seem very difficult to deal with,” I said. “Is there anyone else it might be possible to talk to there?” His lawyer? Rob?

  “Try Maureen, his sister,” advised Peter. “She talks sense.”

  And so another vital piece fell into place for the acquisition of the park. Maureen was devoted to her brother, and on both tours of the house we had been shown a picture of her as a teenager falling out of the back of a stock car during a jump Ellis was performing (among other things he had been a stuntcar driver). She had worked outside the park in a hotel all her life, and understood the pressures of the outside world perhaps better than he did. I spoke to Maureen two or three times a day as we tried to piece together a plan that would save the park.

  Another key person, without whom we would never have succeeded, was Mike Thomas. To get backing we needed a site survey, which would cost about three thousand pounds. But I knew that several (nine, in fact) such surveys had been commissioned recently, and was reluctant to pay for another. I asked Maureen if she knew of anyone of the recent potential buyers who might be prepared to sell us their survey. “Try Mike Thomas,” she said. So I ended up pitching on the phone to a complete stranger that we were trying to buy the park and had heard he had commissioned a full site survey recently. “Go on,” said a gravelly voice. I told him everything about our inexperience and lack of funds, surprised as I continued that he didn’t put the phone down. “You can have the survey,” he said at the end. “Where shall I send it?” This was the first of many generosities from Mike, whose reassuring voice often saw me through difficult times in the months ahead.

  Mike was the former owner of Newquay Zoo, which he had turned from a run-down operation with 40,000 visitors a year to a thriving center of excellence with about 250,000 visitors, in the space of nine years. He knew what he was doing. His bid had foundered on the twin rocks of Ellis and Mike’s business partner, but he wished the park well. More important, he had been appointed by Peter Wearden to oversee the dispersal of the animal collection to other zoos, should it be necessary. He was in daily contact with Rob, the holder of the DWA license, and Peter, and as a man on the inside could not have been better placed. His unswerving support and sound advice were absolutely pivotal for us in securing the park.

  Weeks dragged on, and the main positive development— apart from the arrival of Nick Lindsay’s report from ZSL, which gave a ringing endorsement to the park as a future enterprise— was that a cash buyer was found for my mum’s house. But he was a cautious man, in no hurry, and any inclination that we desperately needed the money right now would have almost certainly reduced his bid. Bridging loans—those expensive, dangerous arrangements offered by commercial banks in the hope of snaffling all your assets in a year—were arranged, and fell through. Commercial mortgages, likewise, were offered and withdrawn. Several high-end banks let us down badly. Lloyds three times extended the hand of friendship and then, just as we were shaking it, pulled it away, put their thumb up to their nose, and gave it the full hand waggle. Very funny, guys. Private banks were similarly fickle. Perhaps eight banks altogether promised support in protracted negotiations on which we relied, and then we passed the good news on to the naturally keenly interested other side, and committed more funds on the basis of that. Then the offer would be withdrawn. Corporate managers were generally persuadable and good at giving you a 100 percent verbal agreement and a physical shake of the hand. But the backroom boys with the calculators and gray suits who constituted what were known as risk teams, invariably balked. Lawyers were also busy. At one point a six-acre paddock disappeared from the map of what was included in the price, which I made clear to Maureen was a deal breaker, and it reemerged.

  For light relief at the end of a twelve-hour day of circular phone calls, we would watch the series 24, boxed sets of which were making the rounds of the English mums in France. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack Bauer, a maverick CTU (counterterrorism unit) agent who, over several episodes, always has to save the world in twenty-four hours, shown in real time an hour at a time. The ground shifts under his feet as he pursues, with total commitment, leads that turn out to be blind alleys. He is betrayed by his superiors, double agents, and miscellaneous villains, and faces new disasters with every tick of the clock. Allies become enemies, enemies become friends but then get killed; yet he somehow adapts and finds a new line to go for. I knew exactly how he felt. Every day there were impossible obstacles, which by the afternoon had been resolved and forgotten, in preparation for the next.

  But the situation at the other end seemed far more desperate. Running costs—seven tigers, three lions, and six keepers to feed—continued without ticket sales to cover them, interest on debts stacked up, and creditors brushed up close with increasing frequency. Then, just as the buyer for my mum’s house agreed to sign sooner rather than later, Maureen told me we had to begin paying running costs for the zoo in order to stop it going to the nursing-home developer. By now we were pretty committed, so Duncan and I melted credit cards to pay, by whatever means possible, £3,000 a week to keep our bid open. This was way beyond our means and could not last long, particularly for something that might not pay off. Luckily, Duncan conjured a donor—who wants to remain anonymous—who lent us £50,000, to use as a “semi-refundable deposit.” This was good news, but obviously it needed to be paid back, win or lose, and the “lose” scenario didn’t really have that contingency.

  By agreeing to pay the semi-refundable deposit (we got half back if the sale fell through), we were now one of Ellis’s creditors. We were going upriver to see Kurtz. We’d done the reconnaissance. Now we had to see if we could go all the way. All we had to remember was not to get out of the boat. Then, just as the sale of my mum’s house was finally agreed, we had our worst moment. My brother Henry, who had been supportive of the venture at the beginning, suddenly lost his nerve and mounted a costly legal battle against the rest of the family. Henry was executor for my dad’s half of the estate, so could delay the release of funds as he saw fit. He refused to be contacted except by letter sent through the post, which in a situation changing hourly was simply untenable for such a key player. Mum, Duncan, and I tried to go around and discuss it with him several times, but he wouldn’t answer the door or phone. It was looking bad. We felt for Henry with whatever it was he was going through, but there was a bigger picture that every single other member of the family was in agreement on.

  Finally, the whole family ended up on the doorstep of his expensive lawyers (paid for out of the estate), and after being kept waiting for three hours, persuaded them that this was Mum’s wish and the wish of all the beneficiaries of my dad’s will. We all wanted to buy the zoo.

  Eventually Henry agreed, as long as we all signed a clause that we wouldn’t sue him when it all went wrong, and each sibling took the full £50,000 they were entitled to under the Nil Rate Band legislation (the value of an estate that is not subject to inheritance tax). This meant that there wouldn’t be enough to buy the zoo unless at least four of us gave the money straight back, which everyone but Henry instantly agreed to, though in order to do so we each had to seek independent legal advice first. This meant each of us finding another lawyer and paying for written evidence to show that we had been made aware of the risks, which was fun.

  Also, instead of the zoo being bought in the name of a limited company, a business- and tax-efficient vehicle and the basis of all our months of negotiations, it had to be bought in Mum’s name. And no one lends a seventy-six-year-old lady half a million pounds, however spry and adventurous she may be. Back of the envelope calculations revealed that if everything went according to plan, there would be enough money to buy the zoo, pay all the legal fees, and have £4,000 left over, equivalent to about ten days’ running costs.

  We leaped at it. Well, my two brothers, sister, and Mum did. Katherine had remained slightly bemused by the idea through-out the negotiations, partly because of the inherent uncertainty about whether we would get the zoo, but also becau
se running a zoo had never featured very high on her to-do list. However, she thought about how much the children would enjoy it, she observed my enthusiasm, and investigated a role for herself doing graphics and money management. These were both well-honed skills from her days as an art director on glossy magazines, and once she was able to equate the whole thing to organizing a large, complicated ongoing photo shoot, she gave her cautious support. Now that it was becoming a reality, she knew what she had to do, and she was ready. The children, as you can imagine, were very enthusiastic, jumping up and down, clapping and squealing. I’m not sure they really believed it—but it was true.

  3

  The First Days

  From the outset, we knew that it was going to be tough. Employ twenty staff members, when we had never employed staff before? Take care of two hundred wild and exotic animals? The house we had moved into was as run-down as the zoo over which it looked. Though once a grand, twelve-bedroom mansion, now its plumbing groaned, its paper peeled, its floor-boards creaked—but it was home. Most people, especially at Mum’s age, are looking to downsize their lives, but we were upsizing dramatically, into an utterly unfamiliar avenue of work, and the stakes were high. Everything, frankly, that my mum and dad had worked for over fifty years together was on the table. And still we needed more—half a million more—just to be able to take the chance that the zoo might be able to reopen, and that when it did, it would work. Normally this level of uncertainty over something so important would seem impossibly crazy, but the late legal challenge from our own side had forced our hand, leaving us uncertain, penniless, and paddling like mad to find some money. Yet, in the context of the last six months of negotiations, it simply seemed like just another bad but probably weatherable development.

  We were also comforted by the fact that although we hadn’t done anything like this before—and we didn’t have a license to trade nor even a particular curator in mind (Suzy in Australia was having health problems, which put her out of the picture)—at least we owned the entire place outright. This, surely, stood us in good stead with creditors. Plus we had a whole £4,000 left over.

  The meticulously researched business plan I had evolved with Jim—or, more accurately, Jim had put into spreadsheets based on his business knowledge and rumors I’d picked up from the twenty or so leading attractions in Devon—was now very much hypothetical. The urgent spending that was due to commence as we arrived was now delayed as we searched for new lenders, who circled again, sniffing with renewed interest, since, as holders of actual assets, we had lurched to a new status with their backroom boys.

  As it turned out, the backroom boys remained less than impressed. We could hear their collective eyebrows creak up, releasing small puffs of dust, but the calculators were quickly deployed, and though some offers were tentatively made, all were swiftly withdrawn. This problem was going to catch up with us fast, so with phones glued to our ears, we set about trying to solve immediate crises on the ground without actually spending any money. In those first few days we walked in wonder around the park, meeting the animals, gathering information, marveling at the bears, wolves, lions, and tigers, getting to know the keepers, and grinning wildly over our new life.

  The first time I met Kelly I got a surprise. As with Hannah, she was one of the two dedicated cat keepers who had stayed on against the odds to look after the animals, sometimes not being paid, and having to pay for vitamin supplements for the animals (and rudimentary sundries—like flashlight batteries and toilet paper) out of their own pockets. “Are you the new owner?” she asked, wide-eyed and intense, to which I replied I was one of them. “Can you please do something about the situation with these tigers?” I had no idea what situation Kelly was talking about, but she soon filled me in.

  The top tiger enclosure is a moated range of 2,100 square meters called Tiger Rock, after the enormous Stonehenge-like boulder construction that is its centerpiece. It contained three tigers: Spar, at nineteen the elderly patriarch of the park; and two sisters, Tammy and Tasmin, ten and eleven. But only two tigers were ever out in the enclosure at any one time. This was because Spar, though old, was still a red-blooded male, and occasionally tried to mate with the two girls, even though his back legs were arthritic and wobbly and they were his granddaughters. Five years earlier, Tammy and Tasmin were given contraceptive injections to prevent inbreeding (and because Ellis was not allowed to breed tigers anymore, having recently been prosecuted for thirty-two counts of illegal tiger breeding). The unfortunate result of this hormonal change in the two sisters was that they suddenly hated each other and began to fight, and fighting tigers are very difficult to separate; it could only end in death. So, one of the sisters was always locked in the tiger house for twenty-four hours at a time while the other played fondly with her granddad. Then the other tiger would be locked away for twenty-four hours, allowing her sister a daylong taste of freedom. As Kelly explained this to me, she drew my attention to the arrhythmic banging coming from the tiger house, which I had assumed was some maintenance work. In fact it was Tammy, frustrated by her confinement in a two-by-three-meter (six-by-twelve-foot) cell, banging on the metal door to get out. Kelly was on the brink of tears as she told me that this had been going on for five years, causing enormous suffering to the tigers (and keepers), and making them much more dangerous to handle. “It’s unacceptable in a modern zoo,” Kelly ended, somewhat unnecessarily, as even an amateur like me could appreciate this. I immediately promised her that we would do whatever was necessary to rectify the situation, which turned out to be finding one of the warring sisters a new home. A new tiger enclosure was expensive and unfeasible (we already had two), and would have meant permanent isolation for one of the girls. I asked Kelly to research new homes for whichever tiger was most suitable to pass on, and walked away from the encounter amazed that such an ongoing systemic problem had not arisen in the negotiations to buy the zoo. On the bright side, it was a big improvement we could make for almost no cost, but it was one we hadn’t been expecting, and it was worrying that we hadn’t known about it before we bought the zoo. Why had Peter Wearden or Mike Thomas not told me about this? What else would emerge?

  It was all the more surprising given that Peter and Mike had not been shy about throwing me in at the deep end with difficult animal-management decisions already. On the phone from France, probably about three months before we bought the park, Peter sprang something on me as the last bidder planning to run the place as a zoo. “What are you going to do about the two female jaguars?” he asked. Er, they’re lovely. What’s the problem? “The house fails to meet with industry standards and there is a serious concern about the possibility of an escape.” Can’t it be rebuilt, or refurbished? “It’s been patched up too many times already, and rebuilding it with the animals in the enclosure is unfeasible. They have to be moved. If you’re going to be the new owner, you have to decide now what you are going to do.”

  Standing barefoot in my hot, dusty, French barn office, looking out over sun-drenched vineyards throbbing with cicada song seven hundred miles away from this unfamiliar problem, I was taken aback. I wriggled for a bit, suggesting we rehouse them in the puma enclosure and move the less dangerous pumas elsewhere, desperately searching for a way of keeping these two gorgeous big cats on the site. Hand-reared from cubs, they were particularly responsive to humans, answered to their names and rubbed up against the wire like epic versions of domestic house cats. Sovereign, the male jaguar housed separately, only got on with one of the females, who could be tried with him, but the sister cats were inseparable from birth and would pine for each other. As a keeper of cats (albeit domestic ones) since childhood, I understood the very real suffering this would cause, and instinctively shied away from that option.

  In the end I realized that this was a test, and the correct response was to roll with it, however uncomfortable it felt. For the good of the animals, and in the interests of demonstrating a break from the past to the council, I asked Peter what he recommended. “D
onate them permanently to another zoo as soon as you take over,” he said. “Mike Thomas will organize it for you.” I canvassed Mike and Rob, the head keeper currently responsible for the jags, and they both said the same thing: To prevent the very real risk of an escape, we should donate them as soon as possible. With a very deep sigh, I eventually agreed. “That’s the right answer,” said Mike. “For that, you can probably get a couple of those zebras you’ve been on about, some way down the line, when you’re ready to receive them. And probably a breeding female for Sovereign later on.” This I liked—spots for stripes—and it made me feel a little closer to the zoo world, knowing I had made a tough decision everyone approved of and was building credibility.