by Benjamin Mee
But I doubt they caught it. Those two stupid cats were nuzzling my legs one night as I moved in on some rustling emanating from a lower kitchen cupboard. With two feline predators at my feet I felt sure that if I flushed out a rat, they would catch it. Species-typical pest control. But it didn’t work out like that. I crept stealthily in stocking feet on the hard-tiled floor, positioned myself carefully by the door, tried to attract the attention of the swirling, purring cats without alerting the rat, and then snapped the door open. The rat shot out and glanced off my leg, just as the blissfully oblivious, moronic, purring brother cats made another eyes-shut circumnavigation of my shins. It bolted under the dishwasher (which didn’t work due to the low water pressure), at least revealing one of their entry points, a circular hole drilled through the two-and-a-half-foot-thick granite wall to accommodate a flue. John blocked this off with some balled-up chicken wire, but the rats still occasionally came into the house, and the effect was depressing. With systemic plumbing problems, sporadic electricity, disapproving friends and relatives, creditors, no money, responsibility for endangered animals and keepers’ jobs, filth, decay and the smell of death wafting through the grim weather, the rat infestation probably completed the circle of psychological siege. It’s fair to say that those first weeks passed like a dream. A very strange dream filled with fighting monkeys, severed heads, and carrion shipped in from local farms—but a dream nevertheless.
But it wasn’t all bad news. For a start, we had the park. We’d finally overcome all the obstacles, seen and unforeseen, that had stood between us and this (with hindsight) slightly bizarre objective. And for once, Donald Rumsfeld, in the news at the time over the Iraq war, made sense to me: “As we know,” he said, famously, “there are known knowns—things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns—things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—things we don’t know we don’t know.” I knew exactly what he meant, and so far, we had navigated our known and unknown unknowns successfully. I only hoped that our strategy of sending a light force into a difficult operational area went better than his.
In addition, we had got the park against odds absolutely stacked against us, against the “better judgment” and expectation of almost everyone involved. But this feeling was nothing compared with the invigorating thrill of actually walking around the park itself. The huge trees were sheathed with lush moss and ancient lichens that could only grow in an environment with good air quality (and high rainfall), and this pure, clean air filled our nostrils and lungs (when the wind was blowing the stench of death the other way) like a long-lost antidote to urbanism and stress.
I felt myself really coming alive as I moved around this— yes—species-typical environment for Homo sapiens. Merely showing a picture of a tree to an accountant in an office block has a small but measurable effect in reducing his or her blood pressure. Actually moving about among trees soothes us far more deeply.
Howard Frumkin is a professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Rollins School of Public Health, in Atlanta, and in between advising local governments on the use of public spaces, Frumkin researches the effect that the natural environment has on us. And in meta-analyses of countless studies, Frumkin has found that the natural world has a measurable beneficial effect on human physical and mental health. Prisoners in cells facing a prison courtyard, for instance, have 24 percent more sick visits than those in cells with a view over farmland. Postoperative patients with a view of trees need less pain medication than patients facing a brick wall, and were discharged one day earlier.
This all stems from the Pulitzer Prize–winning scientist Professor E. O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology and general god of evolutionary thinking. Wilson’s “Biophilia Hypothesis” suggests that as a species we feel reassured in an environment that the animal within us recognizes. “It should come as no great surprise to find that Homo sapiens at least still feels an innate preference for the natural environment that cradled us,” says Wilson. Over the last few hundred thousand years this environment has mainly been areas of sparse woodland, backing onto savannah, which has probably hardwired us with a preference for this particular kind of setting, the one we “grew up” with. “Early humans found that places with open views offered better opportunities to find food and avoid predators,” says Frumkin. “But they needed water to survive and attract prey, and groups of trees for protection. Research has shown that people today, given the choice, prefer landscapes that look like this scenario.”
That was now our scenario. Open spaces, groups of trees, watering holes stocked with exotic beasts. By some amazing coincidence, it turns out that almost all urban parks contain precisely the ratio of trees to shrubs to grass as the African grasslands of our ancestry. Big trees nearby, a scattering of shrubs, and open grassland into the distance, with occasional lakes thrown in for good measure. With some small part of your brain you are looking out for deer on the horizon, or a saber-toothed tiger amongst the trees—no wonder it heightens mental alertness.
The most amazing thing about our new environment of trees, open spaces, and lakes was that we actually did have tigers, lions, and wolves peeping through the foliage at us, giving us precisely that mix our ancestors grew up in. To be responsible for this uniquely intellectually, physically, and even spiritually invigorating environment—plus fulfill a mission to open it up and share it with the public for educational and conservation purposes (and get a free lunch in our own restaurant when it opened, as part of the deal)—seemed like a utopian quest.
And so we began to get to know our individual animals. Ronnie the Brazilian tapir seemed a good place to start. Ronnie is like a big pig, with the aforementioned wibbly nose, and while technically regarded as a Class 1 dangerous animal—the same category as a lion—is a huge softy. Keepers showed me photographs of other keepers from around the world who had been killed by these deceptively amiable creatures. Tapir means “strong” in Indonesian, and though usually placid, tapirs have a reputation for being able to power through chain-link fences as if they weren’t there. This ability stems from their defense strategy against their major predator, the jaguar, who hunt them by dropping from the trees and hanging onto the backs of their necks. Evolution has furnished the tapir with a large gristle-filled scruff to absorb this bite, and also a propensity to charge forward through anything in its path in order to reach water to shake the jaguar off. Now, jaguars can also swim, so I have no idea how this strategy eventually plays out, but I suppose trying to fight jaguars on dry land has to be worse. Perhaps Ronnie, should Sovereign ever get out again and decide to come for him, was planning to crash through his fence to the emu lake and use his mini-trunk as a snorkel.
My first lengthy encounter with Ronnie was to help check his eyes for conjunctivitis, which he definitely had. Expensive medication from the vet—to whom we were already indebted by several thousand pounds—was a possibility, but so was bathing his eyes in a mild saltwater solution, something I had done countless times over many years with cats, dogs, and children, with equally effective results. The difference was that none of those creatures could suddenly decide to kill me if they didn’t like it. But Ronnie was a pussycat. After we slipped him a few bananas and cooed to him in that way he seemed to elicit, Ronnie went along with his treatment stoically, even though he didn’t like it, blinking and holding his head upright until I’d sponged the gunk from his eyes and expunged the traces around them. The trick, I learned, was to scratch him on the side of the neck so that he turned his head to the side, or—and this is a secret—to scratch his bum until he sat down.
Up close, Ronnie reminded me of a Staffordshire bull terrier, Jasper, I’d had for fifteen years: strong and solid but hopelessly soppy. Jasper was incontrovertibly and irrefutably gay. Early on in his adulthood he pushed past a bitch in heat to mount one of her male pups from a previous litter, and thereafter demonstrated a lifelong inclination as a “friend of Dorothy.” Ronnie minced around his enclosure, which at the
time was a narrow strip of almost entirely churned mud, with periodic access to the enclosure below, which contained a lake where he liked to defecate and mingle with the emus. As an ungulate—one of the cloven-hoofed persuasion—Ronnie didn’t like treading in mud, which got stuck between his toes (Jasper was the same with snow, and would come limping up to me, paws packed with ice, which, once cleared, would send him speeding on his way again). Ronnie didn’t have that option, and his narrow strip of an enclosure made it uncomfortable for him to walk around pretty well anywhere, except the hard earth surrounding his meager house. Even a trip down to the emu lake, which he was allowed every now and then by means of a gate at the bottom of his enclosure, was spoiled for him by the mud on the way there and back. I resolved straight away that we would give Ronnie permanent access to the lake, though this would require planning permission and relatively expensive new posts and fencing, and was a longer-term solution. Meanwhile, however, a simple answer was to dismantle the fence into the adjacent enclosure, which contained six miniature muntjac deer and was roughly twice the size of Ronnie’s. These small deer were approachable and friendly, and could be left to roam the public access walk-in enclosure (containing the flamingo and pelican lake), which at the time was populated with a great gaggle of wild geese, strutting Bantam cockerels, and guinea fowl, who milled noisily, sticking roughly to their ethnic groups within the overall swarming population.
I asked Rob and John what they thought of this idea and they said they’d been waiting to do it for years, and also to take the fence away from the adjacent epic turkey oak tree to increase the size of the walk-in by a similar amount. This became a common theme: thinking of an innovation and finding that it was already on a wish list but that nobody had suggested it. This was basically because none of the seven staff we had inherited were used to being consulted—quite the reverse, in fact: they seem to have been trained to keep their mouths shut. I repeatedly reiterated that we were all ears, but this kind of cultural shift, naturally, takes time to sink in.
When Ronnie was let back into his new, triple-size enclosure, he tiptoed around exploring everything tentatively with his highly motile hooter. He seemed delighted, almost overawed, and it was a lovely feeling to have been able to implement such a simple but beneficial innovation. With fewer fences, the whole bottom area of the park looked better too.
Ronnie’s one mishap was when he urinated on a newly positioned strand of electric fence, receiving about seven thousand volts (at a very low current) up the stream and probably into his bladder, via his most sensitive organ. The poor bloke apparently hopped and bucked around his paddock for half a morning, but he learned well from his mistake, as he has never peed incautiously near the fence again. In time we would take down the bottom fence and let him have permanent access to the flamingo lake, which would give him an enclosure many times the size of the industry standard laid down by BIAZA (the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquaria, formerly the Zoo Federation) for tapirs. Then we could start thinking about getting him a breeding female—or, if my animal gaydar was at all reliable, a boyfriend.
The subject of gay animals was one I had raised tentatively from the start, even with Nick Lindsay as we did our first walk around, and with Peter Wearden and Mike Thomas as I’d discussed our plans for the zoo in the early days. I’d read about a zoo in Holland that exclusively exhibited gay animals, and a recent exhibition at a museum in Oslo claims to have identified 1,500 species where homosexuality was clearly apparent—some opportunistic, like the notoriously randy (and highly intelligent) bonobo chimpanzee and bottlenose dolphin, while many others pair for life. Darwinian evolutionary theory has had difficulty with the topic of homosexuality, and from a sociobiological perspective it seems hard to explain. This apparent void has left the far-right homophobes and various religious extremists to be able to declare that it is a “crime against nature and God.” In fact, theorists have built a compelling argument that a proportion of gay adults in a population—roughly one in seven humans, and about one in ten penguins, for instance—actually helps with group security and child rearing, because nonreproductive adults bolster the breeding efforts of the group as a whole. Two gay male flamingos, for instance, have been shown to be able to protect a larger territory and raise more successful chicks (albeit from pilfered eggs) than a heterosexual pair. This raises a tricky possibility of group, rather than “selfish gene,” selection, but what is undeniable is that homosexuality exists almost universally across the animal kingdom. Having lived with a gay dog for fifteen years, over the course of which I met many owners of other gay dogs (roughly 5 to 10 percent of the randomly selected canine population of London parks), I am absolutely convinced that homosexuality has at the very least a strong genetic component, is perfectly natural, and nothing to get excited about. Unless you’re gay, of course—or a homophobe.
I was encouraged that my proposals for some gay animal exhibits, for educational purposes, were listened to politely by all the zoo professionals I spoke to, including our own keepers, and not dismissed out of hand, though a bemused smirk often greeted them. But nobody said it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, and several people were actively encouraging. I think they thought that if you’re crazy enough to want to buy a zoo, you’re going to have weird ideas. But as long as the result was educating the public about the natural world, it was okay.
Coco was another character who took me by surprise. Coco is a caracara, a large bird of prey with the coloring of a golden eagle. She stands majestically, almost haughtily, and her call is a rapid-fire staccato version of the laughing kookaburra, but delivered with an extraordinary head flip, in which her cranium jerks backward suddenly through 180 degrees until her throat is exposed to the sky and her eyes are momentarily upside down and pointing backward. The evolutionary origins of this call are hard to discern, other than that it throws the sound out in an arc above her, perhaps reaching a wider audience. All I knew was that it made my neck ache to watch her do it.
But according to a visiting falconer, Coco was probably the most intelligent bird in the park; she was once used in the falconry display, but quickly learned that by ignoring her lure and flying over to the restaurant, she could make a better living cadging french fries and sausages. Obviously, this brought her display career to a premature conclusion, but she remains a socialized and charming presence.
The falconer showed me that if you called her over she would come to the wire and bow her head to be stroked at the back of her skull. I wasn’t surprised that her neck needed soothing with her surely spinally maladaptive call, but I was surprised at just how friendly and personable she was. Birds registered pretty low on my snooty animal intelligence perspective, though crows and some other birds have demonstrated problem-solving abilities and tool use that rivals the higher primates. This seems to be because they can deploy their entire brains onto a single problem, but the taxonomy of birds—which are among the few modern descendants of dinosaurs, and the eponymous inspirers of the term birdbrain—had previously been of little interest to me. Peacocks are definitely named for their brain size, and chickens and herbivorous birds do seem to be cursed (or blessed) with a very limited outlook on the world. But Coco has personality, and as Samuel L. Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, “Personality goes a long way.”
Coco’s dinosaur heritage is paradoxically coming home to roost, as caracaras, though effortless flyers, tend to hunt their prey by chasing them on the ground, like a mini T. rex, which is why her talons are not as pronounced as an owl’s or an eagle’s, who hunt by seizing from above. Coco spends a lot of time walking on the ground in her aviary, with delicate rather than overtly predatory feet. But her beak is formidable, curved like an Arabian dagger and designed for plunging into the vital parts of other animals. She is a raptor, pure and simple, and if you happen to be a small ground-foraging animal, she’ll get you if you stray onto her patch. I once found her with a severed robin in her beak, chatting animatedly about it and looking pretty wild,
but she still came over for a stroke. It was disconcerting venturing a digit through the wire to stroke a bird with bloodied evidence dangling from her beak; should she misinterpret the stimulus, I could be down to nine. “Coco’s another one where you don’t have to worry about rats getting in,” said Kelly with some pride. “They don’t come out again.” Coco also tracks small children who run up and down in front of her, including my four-year-old Ella. At first I thought this was some display of affinity, but, learning more about Coco, Ella probably triggers an interest less benign.
Kevin also impressed me with an apparent personality where I had expected none. Kevin is a five-foot red-tailed boa constrictor whom we had moved from the unheated reptile house into the shop, which is heated and located in between the offices and the restaurant. Walking past him every day, I noticed he seemed depressed, if that’s not too anthropomorphic. He was certainly lackluster, spending all his time curled up in his water bowl. Once, while on hold on the phone with some infernal institution, I asked Robin—the gray-ponytailed graphic designer, one of the seven staff we had inherited with the park—if I could get him out. He gladly obliged, and gave me a quick course in how to handle him. “Hold him gently but firmly, be assertive but don’t make any sudden movements. Constrictors don’t usually bite, but if they do he’ll give you plenty of warning first, darting his head around. If he starts to do that, just stay still, and then pop him back in the vivarium.” As Robin hung Kevin over my shoulder and free arm and made sure I wasn’t going to panic— this was the first time I had ever touched a snake—the switch-board on the other end of the phone put me through. “And try not to let him get round your neck,” said Robin over his shoulder as he went back to his work. So I began a slightly surreal conversation with someone no doubt suited and sitting at a desk, while I was wandering around draped in a snake whose muscular coils had instantly come to life. Kevin’s head naturally probed for the dark warm folds inside my coat, but he also responded well—surprisingly well, I thought, for a reptile—to having his chin stroked.
