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

  The ease of this move gave us confidence, though the second crate looked less suitable than the first. It had a window about a foot square in the roof panel, secured with two layers of wire mesh: one on the outside, and one on the inside. Again the construction was marine ply, though much older and more worn. Again Rob raised his doubts, particularly about the strength of the mesh on the window, which looked bent and was of a lighter gauge than that on the door. “Are you sure these boxes aren’t for pumas?” he said, but again was reassured, somewhat tetchily this time, that everything was under control. We consulted with each other and decided to give the rangers the benefit of the doubt, even though the jaguar is much stronger than a puma—stronger than a leopard—and had the most powerful weight-to-jaw-strength ratio of any of the big cats. This enables them to bite through turtle shells and hunt larger prey such as deer (and if you are unlucky, man), by puncturing the skull directly with its canines. We really didn’t want her to get out of the box.

  The same procedure of lining up and nailing down the box was followed. Kelly called the cat, who, anxious for food, readily jumped in, and the door was closed behind her. And then it started to go wrong. This was the grumpy sister, and she wasn’t at all pleased about her confinement, or being tricked, or us peering down at her through the window in the roof panel. Immediately she began thrashing around with that almost supernatural strength of a wild animal, and began using her primary weapon, those awesome jaws, on the mesh that separated us. Upsettingly, the first layer began to yield right away. Her teeth, her flashing eyes, the primal guttural noises emerging from the box, which was bucking—though not buckling, I was pleased to notice—suddenly all seemed reminiscent of the scene at the beginning of Jurassic Park, where some large creature exerts far stronger forces on its holding bay than anticipated. Somebody dies in that scene, and though we were a long way from that possibility at the moment, it would definitely raise its head if we didn’t get the next bit right. In fact, our worst-case scenario was simply to open the door of the crate and let the jaguar back into the enclosure so that the men of the woods would have to come another day. But if we delayed too long, it looked like the jag could definitely burst out of her window to be among us, and may not be tempted by the prospect of going back into her enclosure. Before that happened, the four or five people in the jag house could, obviously, clear out in time so that the house could be secured—if not, the redoubtable John on firearms would have to shoot her, which would not be a good result. This was a plan that could conceivably go wrong at some stage—those unknown unknowns again—and we had to act decisively to minimize the risk to the people and the animal, who could easily hurt herself if she continued chewing on the mesh.

  Time shrank down so that every second was precious, eked out in a serious group analysis of the situation. If the first mesh went down, we would open the gate into the enclosure and exit the building, closing the door behind us. Before that happened, though, we had time, we calculated, to reinforce the window, so that the transfer could proceed as planned. It was not a full Code Red yet, but it had all the ingredients needed to become one.

  Someone suggested sliding some metal slats under the top mesh, to be gripped by the bolted fixings securing it, and I ran to the workshop, fortunately only a few yards away, with Paul and Andy Goatman, the young knacker man, who had been making a delivery and is always good in a crisis. It was a good thing the workshop was now functioning, at least to some degree. Paul quickly found some suitable metal slats and began cutting them to length with the newly relocated bench-mounted grinder, pretty well our only tool. Andy and I rummaged amongst the old agricultural miscellanea in the three-quarters cleared loft for a hook, or something that could be made into a hook, to pull the top mesh on the box clear of the plywood roof and to insert the slats underneath without losing a finger. I think in the end we used one of the slats, modified at the end to make a hook, and it was successfully deployed. Somebody strong hooked it into the wire to raise it the necessary millimeters, and the slats were inserted one by one. As they went in, the Jurassic Park scenario still loomed large, but the jaguar gradually became calmer, and so did we. When the light went out above her, she stopped thrashing entirely, though continued her low, disturbing growl. The rangers said they were happy, and we loaded her into the van without further incident.

  As they drove away I marveled at the fact that rear-ending this particular white van could potentially have terrible unforeseen consequences for the average unsuspecting motorist, unleashing two extremely unsettled middleweight predators onto the hood of his car. Armed police along the route had been alerted, but their response time, measured in minutes, would not do much to reassure those possibly already injured people on the scene. But that was now no longer our problem. In fact the nine-hour journey would go without a hitch, the two jaguars would be successfully relocated to a much more suitable environment, and we would be left with a tranquil, empty enclosure that had previously been a source of much concern.

  During the fray, with the cat box bucking in the background, I had joked to Andy that if he had any extra guns lying around, now might be a good time to deploy them. Afterward, as everyone was packing up, Andy showed me that in the midst of the situation he’d slid his .357 Magnum revolver into his trouser pocket. Issued for killing livestock above a certain size, four of the six chambers were blanked off by law, because if you can’t kill a bullock with two shots from this piece, you’re in the wrong job. These two enormous slugs, in the hands of someone who could hold his nerve, were, retrospectively, intensely reassuring to me. I liked the fact that should things go wrong, there were people equipped and prepared to intervene. If somehow everything had all gone pear-shaped, and if John had slipped in the wet leaves at a critical time, it was good to know that somebody like Andy was there.

  Officially, Andy was not a designated firearms officer for the site, and the correct procedure, should the cat have got past us, would have been to notify the police, whose nearest firearms unit was about five miles away. I preferred knowing that we had backup on the ground, but this was yet another entirely new world for me: real guns, big ones, deployed in the routine procedures of everyday work. With guns come danger, both in their handling and in the nature of the reasons for their deployment; if you need guns, something pretty heavy must be going down.

  I cornered Andy and asked him to show me his gun. He pulled it out of his pocket, checked the safety, and slipped it into my hand. It was a solid steel .357 Magnum with a three-inch barrel, iconic from countless crime and cop films, here battered and worn, used as an agricultural tool. And it felt like a tool, heavy with precision engineering, unremittingly purposeful. Much as it scared me, I could see that to do this job properly I would have to get my firearms license. I trusted myself to be able to shoot a tiger on the loose without panicking (until afterward), and we needed all the cover we could get. And I also made a mental note never to get into an argument with Andy Goatman.

  LICENSED TO CULL

  When we arrived in October, the vervet monkeys were fighting— kept in a tiny cage with a concrete floor and a few old bits of rope covered in years of grime. Two rather truculent adolescent males were being ostracized by the alpha male for not showing sufficient respect, and out of a little bit of preemptive vindictiveness on his part. They risked serious injury if they remained in such a small enclosure with him. We tried to find homes for them, but nobody wanted them. Vervets are common—classed in South Africa as vermin—so two boisterous young males are very difficult to rehouse in Western zoos. The ethical review process—whereby the vet, the council, a senior employee from another zoo, and some of our own employees meet to discuss the best course of action—concluded that we should resort to euthanasia: basically, taking them somewhere and shooting them in the head.

  “Absolutely not,” I said as the solitary non-zoo professional but the one with the deciding vote. He’ll learn, I could see them thinking, but I was determined that the two monkeys shouldn�
��t die for the sake of convenience. If necessary, we’d build another enclosure, an idea that went down like a lead balloon, since it would take resources from other, more exotic animals we could get in the future. The two monkeys were rehoused temporarily in the large cinder-block molting sheds, known as Conway Row, which were part of the license requirement to house working birds of prey so that they can shed their feathers in comfort. As we didn’t have any of these—our eagles, eagle owls, and Coco the caracara were all long since retired from public duties—the huge sheds, four large, terraced chambers, were free. One was made monkey proof and decked out with some branches and straw for enrichment and warmth, and the two ostracized adolescent males were netted, transported in cat boxes, and introduced to their new home. It wasn’t ideal, and it presented me with a new front in resisting the orthodox opinion—which felt like a thin line to tread in the circumstances.

  But at least the monkeys wouldn’t be killed, and I was absolutely certain about my position. It gave me the confidence to realize that, though esteemed and impeccably well-intentioned, the zoo community was not necessarily always right, and if I felt morally obliged, I could and should challenge it. The last thing I wanted to do was create the impression of an amateur maverick who wouldn’t listen to the experienced professionals around me, but there were some things where I simply felt I had to draw a line in the sand. “Those monkeys are standing between you and your license,” I was told on numerous occasions from all my most trusted sources. But I countered with ideas of two separate communities of vervets, in different areas of the park, which could then be studied for differences in dialects, for instance. As it happened, a paper on dialectic differences in vervet monkey calls had just been published, and I was able to argue that we could keep one troop roughly where they were while developing another group, out of earshot, who would be exposed to different stimuli. Like the eagle display, which could fly above their enclosure. That would teach those naughty adolescent troublemakers to form their own troop properly and get with the program.

  This may sound cruel, but it is normal for a vervet monkey to be exposed to predators—from the ground, from the trees in the form of snakes, and from the air, several times a day. It is their species-typical environment. This is why they have evolved clearly distinct calls to indicate predators from above, causing the troop to take cover, or from the ground, triggering a mass exodus to the trees, or for a snake in the tree, which tells everyone who needs to know to get down onto the ground. These calls— their frequency, accuracy, and dialectic nuances—are currently being investigated, and by running two populations of vervets separately exposed to different stimuli on the same park, there is every chance that we could contribute something useful. More important for me, however, was that we had inherited these monkeys and there was no way that we were just going to kill them because we had been told by “experts” it was “for the best.”

  This argument fell on deaf ears but was met with tacit compliance. In the absence of funds to establish a second monkey enclosure, the two monkeys were fed, watered, and housed in Conway Row throughout the winter and spring of 2007. When I emerged from the house to start work in the park again in April, it was still part of the keepers’ routine to feed and care for these monkeys, but still disapproved of roundly at a senior level, though the junior keepers continued to work tirelessly to find new homes for them. It seemed as though there was no way we would get a zoo license if the National Zoo inspector found that we were indefinitely storing these animals off show in an enclosure not built for that purpose. The Conway Row sheds are each nearly as large as the enclosure left to the rest of the monkey troop, with branches inside to climb and a window the length of the front wall that gives a view over hills and trees. But they couldn’t stay there forever. With the amount of work we had to do to get the zoo ready for the inspection, it was impossible to build them a new enclosure yet, so the date for the euthanasia of the monkeys was set for the week before the inspection, and the issue ran like a sore with the experienced keepers, who felt that animals in improper accommodation should not be kept, and I was simply staving off the inevitable and prolonging their suffering.

  But as it turned out, a few weeks later, well inside the inspection deadline, a small but well-run monkey sanctuary unexpectedly stepped in to take them on, and the monkeys got to live happily ever after, after all. I felt vindicated, and ratcheted up another notch of confidence in my overall approach, which was to listen to all the expert opinion, then make the decision which required the least intervention in the delicate ecosystem of the park, complete with all the animals and staff we had inherited.

  Initially, it seemed, this was a continuing theme; I had the impression of being constantly enticed to cull from all quarters, both animals and staff. Several of our early advisors had recommended sweeping the board, both of a majority of animals (to redesign the collection from scratch) and the staff. The ongoing problem with the wolves had resulted in an order from the council to cull three of them to reduce overcrowding, which I was resisting. And as well as the monkeys, there were two tigers in the frame, one of whom was ill with chronic kidney disease, another simply very old. As well as the old guard of employees, most of whom were constantly presented as mandatory candidates for dismissal from some quarter or other. But I didn’t want to do this. There was a guiding principle at stake. There would be no deaths of animals, and no sackings if I could help it, and everything we had inherited should be tampered with as little as possible in order to achieve what we needed. As in any ecosystem, everything was interdependent, and until we understood exactly how it all fit together, it was foolish to presume we could make sweeping changes without unforeseen consequences.

  Even moving “inconvenient” animals had to be treated with caution. Although provisional homes had been found for a majority of the animals during the protracted process of the sale— and these were the animals it was suggested we rehouse in order to establish a new identity—I felt that we could easily go too far, and most of the animals could be happy where they were. Apart from that, there were local favorites; people often phoned to ask if the otters, or the foxes, or the lynx or pumas were still there, because when we opened they would be back to see them.

  And then there was the pressure to change the staff. Because of their tremendous devotion to the tigers, and their occasional forays into sentimentality, Kelly and Hannah, who had stuck with the animals through some extremely testing times, were denounced by senior zoo establishment figures I was in contact with as “bunny huggers.” This dismissive term is applied to zookeeper wannabes who don’t understand some of the harsh realities that the job actually involves. But, hey, neither did I, and I’d been proved right with the monkeys already (and was later to be further vindicated on the wolves and the tigers—and most of the staff I defended). When I looked at Kelly and Hannah I saw dedicated zookeepers, unqualified perhaps, but absolutely invaluable holders of knowledge about the specific animals we had, and whom they had looked after, for several years in often intolerable circumstances. They were loyal (to the animals rather than us) and extremely hardworking, and I was going to keep them and get them trained up.

  Another member of staff who came into the crosshairs a few times was Robin. Lovely Robin, who I had first met when he challenged me and Nick Lindsay on that first formative walk-around, was difficult to pigeonhole. Having worked on the park as a bird and reptile keeper as well as graphic designer, in later years he had been used as Ellis Daw’s personal assistant in writing his memoirs. For the last two years, this had largely meant sifting through four decades’ worth of dusty local papers and magazines for clippings that mentioned the park. Robin had set about this with due diligence, but I think it is fair to say that it had worn him down. When Duncan first met Robin, he came to me afterward and said, “I think Robin is clinically depressed.” Duncan had gone over to Robin, still processing old newspapers, on our first or second day and asked him what he was doing. On hearing the explanatio
n, Duncan put his hand on Robin’s shoulder and said, “You can stop now. You don’t have to do that anymore.” With a half-turned page in his hand, it took Robin more than a moment or two to absorb the enormity of these words, and us a bit longer to work out where he could be fruitfully deployed.

  It turned out that Robin had many useful skills, which were soon unearthed, and one of the first was administration concerning the license application. He was offered a place in the office to work, but preferred to spend his time at a table by the restaurant instead. Though a horrible room, it was spacious and had good views and natural light, which the office lacked. He got on with his new work at his own pace, which was efficient if not frenetic, stopping for his half-hour lunch break every day with his thermos and radio at exactly one o’clock.

  Now, one day early on, Katherine, accompanied by my mum and Jen, Mike Thomas’s wife, had decided, in that way that strong women do, to take matters into their own hands with regard to the restaurant. A huge open space for three hundred diners, it was choked with old Formica display cabinets for leaflets, the scattered remnants of those leaflets, the piles of old newspapers, yellowed fallen light fittings, tables stacked on top of each other amidst piles of chairs and a stuffed tiger, all coated in a layer of airborne grease. As these three female whirlwinds of industry set about clearing up and sorting out, working up a sweat, their certainty enhanced with every radical decision they made and every heavy piece of furniture they lifted, one of them was finally moved to ask Robin, on his lunch break looking out of the window, exactly what he was doing. “Well, I’m just counting the peacocks out on the drive,” he said, before helpfully adding, “There are twelve. But it was fourteen yesterday.” This was very much the wrong answer. I have been around enough fussing strong women—sue me—to know that you never admit to any kind of whimsy when they are working and you are apparently in repose. What he should have said was, “I was calculating how long we had to submit the license application for the established business plan to remain viable.” But the damage was done, and Robin was unceremoniously added to the list of endangered creatures on the premises.