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 with two prime big cats going, the Tammy/Tasmin question loomed large. In the first few days it also came out that a wolf and three of the seven vervet monkeys had also been ostracized by their groups and needed rehousing. Would we have any animals left by the time we reopened? One well-meaning relative called to helpfully explain that I had made an elementary blunder with the jaguars. “If you’re going to run a zoo, it has to have animals in it,” she said. The sense of siege from all sides was tightening, but I was sure that I’d made the right decision with all the information available to me on the ground, and it only made me more determined.

  In these very early days a lot of time was spent clearing out the house and grounds of junk, and burning it on a huge fire in the yard. This was cathartic for us and the park as a whole, but must have been hard for relatives of Ellis, like Rob, his grandson, who had to help haul the now dilapidated furniture that he had grown up with onto the pyre. I’d already agreed that Rob could stay in the run-down cottage on site, and offered him anything he wanted to salvage, but generally, he seemed relieved by the process. Rob was extremely positive and helpful toward us.

  But then, four days after we took over Dartmoor Wildlife Park, while chatting with Rob about what to do with our surplus stock, the unthinkable happened. In a catastrophic blunder, a junior keeper accidentally let one of the most dangerous animals on the park, Sovereign, out of his enclosure. At about 5:30 PM I was sitting with Rob in the kitchen when Duncan burst in, shouted, “ONE OF THE BIG CATS IS OUT! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” and then ran off again. Now, Duncan doesn’t normally shout or get agitated, but here he was, clearly doing both. Rob disappeared like a puff of smoke, and I knew he’d gone to get the guns and organize the staff’s response. I sat for an increasingly surreal moment and then decided that, as a director of a zoo, I probably ought to go and see exactly what was going on. I started making my way toward the part of the park where the big cats are kept. This was one of the strangest moments of my life. All I knew was that a big cat—a lion, a tiger?—was out, somewhere, and might be about to come bounding around the corner like an energetic Tigger but not nearly so much fun. I saw a shovel and picked it up, but it felt like an anvil in my hand. What was the point? I thought, and dropped it, and began walking toward the sound of screaming. Was I about to see someone being eaten alive? I had images of someone still alive but fatally mauled, rib cage asunder, being consumed before a horrified audience. Then a car pulled up with Duncan and Rob in it. “GET IN THE CAR!” I was told, and gladly complied.

  At the top tiger enclosure it was clear that the jaguar, Sovereign, was inside with a tiger, Tammy. Both animals were agitated and the keepers were shouting to discourage them from fighting. My first thought was relief that the animals were contained and no one was injured. I conferred with Rob, now backed up by his brother John armed with a high-powered rifle, and we began to build up a picture of what had happened. If the animals began fighting he would have to shoot one of them, and we decided it should be the tiger, because she was more dangerous and also the less-endangered animal, but he would fire a warning shot first to try to separate them. I asked that he only do this as an absolute last resort, as letting guns off would seriously up the ante for the assembled personnel, who at the moment were all tense but calm.

  Suddenly the jaguar lunged at the tiger’s hindquarters, and the tiger turned and swiped the jaguar’s head, spinning him like a doll. At half her weight, Sovereign was instantly discouraged. From that point both animals stayed apart, encouraged by the coaxing of the keepers. But the tiger was reluctant to surrender her territory. Sovereign paced purposefully along the right-hand perimeter, tracking a keeper who was moving up and down the fence to keep his attention. Tammy took up a position on top of a rock and scowled and bellowed at Sovereign. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been having a nice cup of tea, and now I was witnessing an intense standoff that could only be ended by a dart from a gun. Unfortunately, the one in our gun room didn’t work, and had never worked, despite being on the inventory as a working safety tool. We were only equipped to shoot to kill.

  Soon the cat keeper Kelly ordered all available men to assemble along the bottom perimeter, and on command we shouted as loudly as we could at Tammy (she doesn’t like men or shouting), while the cat keepers Kelly and Hannah called her to her house. All keepers, maintenance and ground staff, and even an IT expert, Tom, who’d been on a site visit to give us a quote and had been with Duncan up at the lion house, got caught up in the escape. Tom had a good bellow, as depicted on the TV series being filmed at this early time. A camera crew shadowing your every move can be a worrying thing, but we felt we had nothing to hide and, just to raise the stakes, I negotiated with Rob that the crew could leave the safety of their car and join us at the wall. The men commenced bellowing and the effect was immediate, like spraying Tammy with cold water. Her tail twitched, her ears flattened, and after a couple of minutes she cracked, jumped off the rock, and went into her house. There was an enormous sense of relief, but I called Mike Thomas and told him of my concerns. Although he was contained, Sovereign was not 100 percent secure because he was in an unfamiliar enclosure, and agitated enough to try something desperate. Mike agreed. “I’ve seen an ape jump forty feet when it was stressed,” said Mike. “Which it’s not supposed to be able to do. Luckily we caught her in the ladies’ toilets.” If Sovereign got out again, we were unlikely to be so lucky.

  With all three tigers in, we decided the next obvious course of action was to try to lure Sovereign into the fourth tiger-house chamber, so that he really was contained. Unfortunately, this spare chamber was in disrepair, and was not secure. It needed lining with steel sheets and repairs to the slats on the floor, both tasks that could be carried out in-house in a few hours with materials and personnel on site, but the light was fading fast. And there was no light in the tiger house. Duncan stayed to oversee the refurbishment of the chamber, and I went off to try to buy some emergency lighting, with directions from the keepers to the nearest lighting emporium, in nearby Plympton. As I drove off into the dusk, I noticed some workmen on the main access road unloading transits with tools, but they waved me through and I thought little of it as I sped on in my quest.

  After a couple of emergency U-turns I found a large garden center–cum–bric-a-brac emporium, selling myriad kitsch, but which had DIY and lighting sections. I sprinted up the stairs, grabbed an assistant, and asked for halogen floodlights. There was a long pause. Then, as if in slow motion, she said, “Well . . . I . . . think . . . we’ve . . . got . . . some fairy lights—” NO, no, no. Flood-lights. Halogen floodlights, 500 watts. Completely different. Where would they be? As she drifted off to ask someone, I combed the lighting section again at emergency speed, eyes scanning systematically up and down the rows of frilly pink bedside lights, glass ladies holding a single bulb, and of course, fairy lights. I tried to broaden my mission statement; would any of this lighting detritus work as a compromise? I pictured our grizzled team working in a dank corridor with metal angle grinding machines, tigers in the next bay, and imagined their faces as I presented them with a Disney-character desk lamp. No.

  And then I found it. In an unmarked box on a bottom shelf was a single exterior wall-mount halogen lamp, but no plug or cord. I grabbed it with both hands and shot down to the DIY section, past the emerging assistant, who was saying, “I’m sorry . . . but . . . we . . . haven’t got—” It’s okay. Got one. Thanks.

  With no one around in DIY I found a plug and some cord, and finally raised an assistant to measure it out for me. It was taking too long, so I decided to take the whole roll. “I’ll . . . have . . .to . . . get . . . a price . . . for that . . . and Reg . . . is . . . on his . . . break . . .” Okay, measure it out and roll it back, quickly please, as I’m in a bit of a hurry. He got the idea and I was soon in the checkout line, restlessly shifting my weight and craning over the three people in front of me to see how long they were likely to take. Now, my tolerance for the dead time in checkou
t lines is minimal even when I’m not in a hurry. Over the years I have developed zazen breathing strategies, and trained myself not to focus on the inevitable sequence of minor ineptitudes that slow the line down and that could be avoided. But this wasn’t working. I was in full emergency mode—a couple of hours before I was making life and death decisions for the first time in my life, there was a volatile big cat prowling around up the road in the wrong place, and it was going dark and I needed to complete this purchase so that we could continue working to get him contained. And this was not a proficient checkout. The cashier seemed bemused by her till, and everyone around me was moving as slowly as molasses. Then, as the first transaction finally meandered to its conclusion, the departing customer stepped smartly back into line and reached for a packet of marshmallows; “Ooh, I forgot these,” he said. I very nearly cracked and went into manual override. My hand was twitching toward the bag of fatuous pink-and-white confectionery, and I fought the urge to snatch it away, throw it down, and demand to be processed next. But I didn’t. Deep breaths. Eventually it was over, and I was speeding back through the darkness toward the emergency.

  On the home straight an obstruction loomed in the head lights. Unbelievably, the guys in the transits I’d passed earlier had closed the road between my leaving the park and returning. Concrete barriers were in place, and a sign said it would be closed for the next four months to build a power station. The diversion signs weren’t up yet and my mental map of the area was scanty to say the least, and it was an additional half hour of getting lost down identical single track back lanes before I eventually tore up the drive and set off at a run for the top tiger enclosure.

  A single 60-watt bulb had been rigged up, and I rapidly set about wiring up the lamp using the Leatherman tool on my belt. I’ve wired hundreds or so such lights in my time, but for this one I noticed that my hands were shaking slightly, and I wasn’t doing a very good job. Doing it eighteen inches away from Spar, the elderly but massive and menacing Siberian tiger, didn’t help. Sporting a small bloodied cut on his ear from an earlier encounter with Sovereign, Spar was naturally spooked by the afternoon’s events, and didn’t like unfamiliar people working in his house at strange hours of the day. He was as unsettled by my presence as I was by his, and kept up an impossibly low and ominous growl, occasionally reaching a crescendo with a roar and a short lunge at the welded mesh between us, his big orange eyes wide and locked onto me at all times. These noises travel right through you, resonating in your sternum and sending alarm signals to your primitive midbrain, which is already awash with worry, trying to suppress the distressing news from the eyes, and warning of massive predator proximity and imminent death. Perhaps understandably, in stripping the flex I cut too deeply into the wire, and the terminal connections were messy. But it would do.

  When the light eventually flooded on, I confessed to Rob, our acting Health and Safety officer, that its wiring might have to be redone later under more conducive conditions. His drawn face smiled sympathetically and he said, “It’ll do for now.” John, Paul, and Rob worked quickly to finish the inside of the fourth chamber, with the unspoken efficiency of men who knew what they were doing and had worked together for a long time. Duncan had been exploring the dart-gun situation. The nearest zoo, Paignton, couldn’t lend us theirs because it wasn’t licensed for use off site.

  Our park’s previous reputation in recent years, and our much heralded inexperience, can’t have helped with their assessment of the situation, and this sense of fiasco, the public perception of it, and what it might mean for our prospects now had time to sink in.

  Rob finally secured a dart gun and a licensed operator—Bob Lawrence, senior ranger at the Midlands Safari Park—who was prepared to travel immediately, but it was decided that because Sovereign was contained, Bob would come down in the morning. Opinion on the ground was, quite reasonably, that the cat was contained in an enclosure designed to contain big cats, and the risk was minimal. We began trying to lure him into the finished fourth cat chamber by placing meat just inside the door. Though the presence of meat had an almost chemical effect on this muscular predator, bringing him to the threshold several times, his instincts for self-preservation held him back. He was just too canny, and too spooked, to surrender his new territory in return for a free meal in a small box.

  Mike advised that we keep a vigil from a car next to the enclosure, and at the first sign of trouble, such as Sovereign trying to climb the wire mesh fencing, call for the firearms. Rob went to sleep on the sofa in the keeper’s cottage with the gun next to him, and I moved my mum’s car as close as I could and settled down with a flask of coffee and a flashlight. Every half hour, Mike said, I should shine the light and make sure Sovereign was calm—and, most important, still there. “Don’t get out of the car,” warned Mike. “If he has got out, you won’t hear him, and he’ll be waiting outside the door.” Unfortunately, as the evening wore on, sensible Sovereign decided it was safe to sit in the empty chamber, though he kept a watchful eye on anyone approaching the cat house. This meant I couldn’t see him from the car, so every half hour I had to open the door, half expecting a hundred kilos of muscle, teeth, and claws to come bursting in. Then, when it didn’t, I had to walk a few paces into the darkness, which may or may not have contained a large, angry jaguar, and shine the flashlight. My confidence grew with each sighting of the two reflective eyes staring back at me from the house. Sovereign wasn’t going anywhere, and at 5 AM Duncan relieved me in the car. Bob Lawrence arrived at about 7:30 AM with the dart gun. With things hanging off his belt and an Indiana Jones hat, Bob was a very reassuring presence to have on site. If there was a rhino loose (not that we had any), you felt he could deal with it. The vet arrived with the necessary sedatives, and on the third attempt Sovereign was successfully darted, although unfortunately, it appeared, in the tip of his sheath, and he jumped around angrily until he began to slow down, scowling and prowling, glaring at us through the wire. You got the impression he was memorizing faces, so that if he got out again he’d know whom to punish for this indignity.

  There was a danger that, drugged, Sovereign could fall into the moat and drown, so I sent for a ladder, mainly to use to push him out with, but I secretly decided that if it looked even remotely possible, I was prepared to climb down the ladder into the water to drag him out. But that wasn’t necessary. Sovereign went down like a lamb, and we rushed into the enclosure to stretcher him out. Back in the safety of his own house—microscopically examined for flaws that could have contributed to the incident—Sovereign got a quick dental and general health check. It’s not often you get to peer into this kind of animal’s mouth without it being terminal, so the vet made good use of the time.

  Carrying Sovereign on the stretcher, and touching him, was my first direct contact with any of the animals in our care, and it was an incredible initiation. One of the most beautiful as well as the most dangerous animals in the park, he required four men to be lifted. His exotic rosette markings watched you like eyes as he slept, his enormous power dormant, cloaked tight in a coat of deceptive beauty. As Bob Lawrence and the vet hauled this vast cat by the scruff like a sack of spuds clear of the welded mesh door, stepped out, and locked it behind them, there was a huge feeling of collective, euphoric relief. “The Code Red is now officially stood down,” said Rob, which seemed to be his way of expressing it. But of course there were reports to write, and the precise timing of the incident would be critical, combed over by experts, and ultimately put into the public domain. Rob and Duncan interviewed Richard, the keeper responsible for not locking the shutter, several times, and eventually our statements and report were commended by the council as demonstrating that we had acted responsibly and professionally. We also got an endorsement of sorts from Tom, the bellowing IT consultant, who said as he left the next day that, “That was, without question, the most exciting site visit I have ever made.”

  But for now I was left with the horror, the horror of what it felt like to have Sover
eign out, even for a second, and capable of anything. In buying the zoo, I had always thought that the concept of containment was a given—already fully under control, dealt with by experts using failsafe systems. The idea of one of these animals loose, marauding on the picnic area or going down into the village, brought to my chest a new residual level of adrenaline that has remained to this day. The prospect of a Code Red, what it feels like to be in one, and the potential consequences if it goes wrong, are there when I wake up, go to sleep, or walk about the park chatting to visitors. This level of responsibility has to be taken seriously. It’s as though we’re looking after guns with brains, a secured armory of assault rifles, but each one with a decision-making cortex and a series of escape plans. Sovereign had already successfully implemented one of his.

  In fact, although we were exonerated by the subsequent council report, I think that our taking over the park may well have had something to do with that particular incident. Locking in the jaguar was always a two-person operation. It turned out that the junior keeper Richard had, according to his statement and in direct contradiction of an order to wait for the other keeper, “taken it upon myself to try to clean out the jag house on my own.” This, he said, was in order to try to impress his line manager, Kelly, a notion that may or may not have been connected to the general sense of relief over the park’s passing on to new owners and the animals’ being saved. Of course, his line manager was not impressed, and nor was anyone else. That was Richard’s last day. Clearly, zookeeping was not for him.

  Another manifestation of this new atmosphere had struck me forcibly the day before, when I was talking to Rob out in the park. Suddenly his head spun around in the direction of an unfamiliar sound, with the urgency of a man used to having to react quickly to an escaped animal (an urgency I was soon to pick up). “What’s that noise?” he said, and we listened intently. Then we realized it was laughter, coming from the staff room. Rob relaxed and his tired face cracked into a smile. “We haven’t heard much of that round here for quite some time,” he explained.