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

  So what’s the plan? I asked. Another shrug, another far-too-lightweight smile. There wasn’t one. What about X, Y, and Z, and some other drug combinations suggested by the Americans? No, not available. I was rocked, and wanted to cry, but I wanted to stay strong for Katherine. Besides, at the back of my mind I still held out hope for the German iron-oxide treatment, or Duncan’s DCA, which I genuinely believed could be fruitful, and once it was demonstrated to be working, the medics would back us up. But when the vast, imperfect but reassuring teat of NHS support is withdrawn, that is a cold feeling indeed.

  It took a few days to adjust to the idea that we’d been cut loose from real treatment, and meanwhile the busy agencies of cancer care made it seem like things were happening. There were appointments with the district nurse, the Marie Curie people, the Macmillan team, the occupational therapist, and some people called the re-ablement team. After a bit, it occurred to me that a lot of people were arriving, sympathizing, and asking questions, but nothing was actually happening. Still no one could get us a wheelchair, for instance, because the NHS red tape strangled all efforts. No one could help me with lifting Katherine, as lifting is now against NHS regulations, but they all approved of my technique. One department gave us a load of blue nylon things that were apparently for hoicking Katherine around, but all of them seemed massively intrusive medicalizations of what can be a simple, friendly process. Someone else was looking seriously into the idea of fitting a stair lift. But I wasn’t holding my breath.

  Most of the physical disabilities, even if they became permanent, were things that I thought she could probably learn to live with. But I couldn’t bear her looking confused. Offering, poker-faced, her leg to be put into a sleeve or a bra strap, reaching for a bar of soap instead of a toothbrush to brush her teeth, being surprised that the light is controlled by the light switch. But her humor was still there. Her laughter was readily available, which told me she was still in there. And her cool reproach if I wasn’t doing something properly. Just one eyebrow raised (she could only raise one, but that made it more effective) told me I was still being critically assessed.

  FEBRUARY

  Katherine had become confused by the concept of spitting into a glass during the process of brushing her teeth in the bedroom. If you offered the glass to rinse and spit, she drank, then looked confused as to what to do with it once it was in her mouth. She often tried to quickly start brushing with a mouth full of water, which inevitably ended in a mess. But she more readily followed the concept of rinsing and spitting in the bathroom as it is a more familiar environment for teeth brushing, though the bath-room was logistically difficult to get to, and very cold. Yet despite this she was instantly amused if you pointed this out by mimicking her full-mouthed, wide-eyed perplexity. Her language seemed to improve at bedtime, briefly, when she could still be brilliantly dry and scathing. Having propped her up in bed with several pillows, which she indicated were working perfectly, I overeagerly searched the house for yet another. Propping it behind her, I asked if that was any better. “Marginally worse,” she said, perfectly, after a day of being unable to discriminate between producing a yes or a no.

  It got to the stage where, because I spent so much time with her, and already knew her so well, I had to be called in as translator for many simple interactions with other people. The trick was not to suggest too many things for her to choose from, and to realize that when she said yes, it could easily mean no, and vice versa. Once any word or gesture was out, it tended to be repeated. Watching someone new to Katherine’s situation try to understand brought home how far she’d slipped. Usually I had to step in, but once or twice I left her at the mercy of a well-meaning friend or relative while I snatched a few minutes catching up with things I had to do. Like when Katherine’s lovely sister Alice was trying so earnestly to understand what she was trying to say, and offered a cornucopia of possibilities. Katherine appealed to me with her eyes across the room, and I knew exactly what she wanted. But for those five minutes, I simply smiled at her and shook my head, happily catching up on my e-mail. “You’re on your own.”

  Before she almost completely lost her speech, Katherine was sitting at the table with all the family struggling to say something to my Mum. “Can I . . . can I . . . can I . . .” Have the salt? The butter? The vegetables? people helpfully suggested. A rare look of frustration passed across her face before she finally got it out. “Can I pass you something, Amelia?” With her one good hand, and seven tumor sites multiplying exponentially in her brain, she was still more attentive to others than anyone else at the table.

  15 FEBRUARY: A GREAT ESCAPE

  During this period, in the middle of February, I was still able to leave Katherine in the house for an hour or two at a time, propped up in front of the fire with some magazines, snacks, and the TV remote (which she never seemed to resort to, though I would have done). I didn’t like to leave her for long, but I had to attend an urgent design meeting with a local firm to discuss whether they were able to carry on Katherine’s design work, which she had so far, unfortunately, only sketchily outlined. Then the meeting was interrupted when I heard the news that a wolf had escaped (don’t you just hate it when that happens?).

  At first, I tried to carry on as if nothing had happened—I had enormous faith that the keepers and curator could handle the situation. Unfortunately, the wolf got past them, across the perimeter fence, and into the outside world. That was when the fun really started. Suddenly, instead of taking the odd call on the internal radio to keep in touch with the situation, I was stepping out of the meeting to do a quick interview on Radio Devon, and then Radio Five Live. The designers were very understanding and saw the funny side, but unfortunately, none of the journalists I was talking to did. Obviously it was a serious situation, and members of the public were also keen to point out on air that seeing a large black timber wolf running down their street was not conducive to a relaxing afternoon. Trying to explain to hostile journalists (don’t you just hate hostile journalists?) that Parker, the number-two male wolf, was not a danger to anyone unless he was cornered, didn’t seem to work. The truth remained that a Class I dangerous animal in our care was now running free in public, and that’s not how things are supposed to be.

  Phrases I used in radio interviews like “He’s just a harmless scavenger,” and “He’s basically a big girl’s blouse” have been quoted back at me derisively by friends who heard my torment. Other zoo professionals phoned to sympathize, saying that escapes were relatively common but for God’s sake not to quote them on that. The meeting finally disintegrated as I liaised with armed police now two miles away, with Parker in sight, wanting to know exactly how dangerous this big girl’s blouse actually was.

  Then we got lucky. Instead of heading into woods, or across people’s gardens, the black wolf turned left into a china clay quarry, which was a couple of square miles of containable basin, and most important, completely white terrain. Also in the WBB China Clay Works quarry were several redoubtable quarrymen equipped with local knowledge, four Land Rovers, and their own radio communications. As they liaised with our keepers on quad bikes (all-terrain vehicles) and the police, the tide turned toward the forces of containment. But Parker, not quite finished, ran the highly equipped humans ragged for an hour or so before finally succumbing to a keeper’s dart. I waved to the parting designers over the heads of the mud-spattered keepers and police, and settled in for an evening of battle stories.

  It sounded exciting, and part of me wished I’d been there. As it happened, a friend and former colleague of Duncan’s was visiting at the time, and was a perfect person to join in the chase. Kevin Walsh is a rangy six-foot-four Cockney who worked for several years with Duncan as a private investigator. The nature of their work meant that they had to be adaptable, unflappable, and used to pursuits. Duncan and Kevin sped off down the road after Parker, in radio and phone contact with the police and keepers. “We just went straight into ‘mode.’” Kevin laughed, clearly having enj
oyed his day, and playing no small part in the recapture. At several stages, despite the manpower on the ground, only one person had “eyes on” Parker and was able to relay this vital information to the rest of the team. Kevin, Duncan, John, and a policeman had all held the line vitally in this way, in what sounded like a very near miss. If Parker had got onto the moors, or into built-up backyards, he would probably still be out there. “At one stage we were separated,” Duncan recounted. “But I next saw Kevin riding shotgun—and carrying a shotgun—in the back of a pickup truck, in the thick of it.” The vet who had been scrambled to provide the anaesthetic for the dart gun, apparently, was a fairly slight woman, who also had to carry a shotgun in case things didn’t go as planned. With her other paraphernalia, this was proving an encumbrance, and she handed it to the capable-looking Kevin. “That shotgun was my golden pass to the center of events,” said Kevin. “Everywhere the vet went I had to go, in police cars, Land Rovers and pickups.” In the end Rob’s sharpshooting with the dart gun meant that the shotgun was never used. Another close shave for us. And another satisfied visitor to the park.

  It was deeply serious. It was absurd. It was not the first time the wolf had taken a shot at freedom. Parker had escaped once before, before our time, and had been collared, quite literally, outside the local pub. He seemed to have gone in search of Rob, who “scruffed” him and bundled him into the back of a van.

  When I started down this road of running a zoo it was the psychological welfare of the animals that interested me most. The physical containment aspect, I assumed, was a given. Now I see that the two things are often closely related. Unhappy animals can take desperate measures, making them unpredictable. Parker, as number two, was stressed by the decline in Zak, the elderly alpha male, from whom he would soon have to wrest control of the pack. Rather than face his fear, he decided to try his luck elsewhere, and against the odds he pitched his bid when the electric fence was momentarily down.

  The sleeping Parker was placed back in the wolf house on a bed of straw with some hot-water bottles scavenged from our house (Mum, Katherine, and the children would have to go without that night, because Parker’s temperature regulation system was compromised by the anaesthetic). I popped back into the house and tended to Katherine, who needed a bit of help, while the keepers got cleaned up. Then I went back out into the driving rain to establish with Rob exactly how Parker had got out. There were a few theories flying around, and by now, everyone was absolutely drained—including me, from my difficult day of unplanned hostile questioning by the national media. The calls were still coming in, our reputation had been seriously damaged, and I could feel that one more incident like this would finish us. It was vital that we establish exactly what had happened and make absolutely sure it couldn’t happen again, tonight or ever in the future. One possibility I had to eliminate was keeper error, which had been raised by an external professional who knew the design of the enclosure, and that the keepers were so used to working with the wolves, who scattered like, well, big girls’ blouses, whenever anyone went in with them. This could have led to complacency, and Parker could conceivably have got behind them and fled before they reacted. The whole concept of going in with the wolves was something that needed to be addressed before our inspection with a redesign of the enclosure, but for now, my general paranoia at the end of another Code Red day led me to question Rob about this possibility. It was understandable, I said. There would be no recriminations. We just needed to know definitively. Understandably, he was not very pleased, but nor was

  I. I desperately wanted to get back inside to Katherine, so I insisted that he show me some evidence there and then that indicated that Parker had gone over the fence rather than through the gate.

  In the woods behind the wolves, who were now howling and yapping in agitation in their sealed-off section of their enclosure—both of us drenched to the skin by the relentless rain— we shone our flashlights around the perimeter fence until we reached the section where the two halves of the enclosure are divided by a fence so that the wolves can be isolated from each other if necessary. Inexplicably, at this back corner, rather than meeting the perimeter fence at a right angle, the line of the dividing fence veered off obliquely, creating a triangular nook and meeting the outer fence at a sharp angle of about thirty degrees. Though protected by a couple of strands of “hot wire,” or electric fence, this narrow triangle could provide purchase for an animal to climb, if the hot wire was down (there was no backup in those days) and the wolf sufficiently desperate. As it turned out, it was, and Parker was. “He’ll have known straightaway when the hot wire went down,” explained Rob, rainwater running down his face in the light of our flashlights. Many of the animals on the park apparently tested the fences vigilantly, not by receiving a shock, but by coming extremely close and somehow detecting the electrical field. This bothered me, as the old hot-wire system was one of the primary defenses against escape for many of the more “dangerous” animals, including the wussy but controversy making wolves. Rob shone his flashlight on the overhand at the top of the fence, and there, without a doubt, were some tufts of dark fur that shouldn’t have been there. It was from Parker’s chest. The power was back on, but if it failed again, we were in trouble. The rest of the pack were to be contained in the secure half of the enclosure until the rest of it could be made safe. Relieved, I went back into the house to Katherine.

  The council had ordered a cull of three of the wolves on the basis that overcrowding was causing the unrest, but once again I was reluctant to carry out this euthanasia without a lot of further research. The last cull several years before had apparently killed the wrong three wolves, all important in the hierarchy, resulting in the present instabilities in the pack. We employed freelance wolf whisperer Sean Ellis, a controversial anti-establishment figure, to advise us. He apparently performed a little dance that had all the wolves sitting at his feet, then recommended that we feed them a whole carcass instead of the joints of cut meat, because in the wild the hierarchy is established by who eats what. The leaders establish themselves at the feast, and then their urine smells different according to the bits they have eaten. Simple, and 100 percent effective. The pack calmed down, and after the electric-fence expert Roger Best had finished with the enclosure, motive, means, and opportunity for escape were reduced to nil. Once again, the orthodoxy was proved wrong, and some animals were saved.

  I would have liked to have met Sean and seen his assessment, but by then I was with Katherine more or less full time, often out in front of the house if the weather was mild enough. Katherine would be wrapped up warmly, and I spent this time on the phone about treatment options and, while waiting for calls, renovating an old tabletop I had found in a refuse container and married with some steel table legs discovered in one of the barns on the park. The tabletop was covered with many layers of paint, which needed stripping off, and the legs were rusty, but these gentle DIY activities were normalizing for me and for her. For the twelve years we had been together, I had spent an inordinate amount of time doing DIY. Partly because of doing up our flat and then the barns in France, partly because a significant portion of my income had come from writing about DIY as a columnist for the Guardian and other magazines, but also because, to be honest, I am an inveterate putterer. We settled into an almost familiar rhythm.

  Unfortunately, during this time, the phone calls were not going well. The scorpion-venom trials and the measles and herpes virus groups all rejected Katherine, sometimes because they were not ready, and sometimes because she had too many different tumor sites—six or seven—and what they needed was one good primary tumor. Then, finally, a letter arrived from Germany to say the same thing. Because of their intracranial injection technique, her multiple sites meant that she was not a suitable candidate.

  MARCH

  Suddenly the options were drastically reduced. It might have been possible to find another experimental procedure in another country, but Katherine was not very well at all now—probab
ly well enough to travel, but the huge upheaval of adapting to a new country, possibly a new language, at this stage on the off chance that it might work was not appealing. Duncan’s DCA idea now seemed like Katherine’s best bet, particularly when a good friend of mine from college days, Jennifer, who trained as a research chemist, also got in touch and said she thought it was a good idea. “The Internet is absolutely swamped by this,” said Jen. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The researchers have closed down their site and aren’t taking e-mails, which is unheard of. Everybody wants DCA.” That didn’t necessarily make it a good thing, but I was already as convinced as I needed to be, and when Jen said she might be able to get hold of some from her laboratory contacts, I asked her to please try.

  Meanwhile, I contacted as many doctors as I could to try to get a private prescription for what was, after all, a cheap, widely available medicine that had been in use for the last thirty years. The problem was, it hadn’t been used for this condition before, and so it was unlicensed. This meant that a doctor who prescribed it was technically taking Katherine’s life—and their career, should anything go wrong—in their hands. And they would be personally liable, should I decide to sue them if things went wrong. I know quite a few doctors from my medical journalism days, and I contacted them all, and my GP. All, understandably, declined regretfully, and I understood that it was a very difficult demand to make on someone, and I think they understood how desperate I must have been to ask. The one person I didn’t understand was the local oncologist in charge of Katherine’s treatment. Her ideas, which were officially palliative anyway (that is, designed to alleviate suffering or symptoms without eliminating the cause), had not worked. She had not even tried to eliminate the cause, and here was the possibility of a noninvasive treatment, successful in the lab, known to have negligible side effects, which was actually sitting in the pharmacy in the building where she worked. As with all the other doctors I approached, I sent her the relevant pages of the American Environmental Protection Agency toxicology report, published in August 2003 to assess the use of DCA over the last thirty years. This clearly concludes that the side effects, even in long-term use over five years, were minimal: traces of peripheral nerve damage and minor toxic effects on the liver. If Katherine lived long enough to experience these symptoms, we would be delighted. Besides, she already had a lot more than peripheral nerve damage; she was paralyzed down one side and losing control of her other side day by day. As next of kin I could sign any disclaimers necessary. It had to be worth a try.