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 began contacting me about once a week. Suddenly I had his mobile number and he was calling me on Sunday afternoons. I could see that he was keen, and this could be very good for the zoo, if we managed to buy it. I had always hoped that as a journalist I would be able to partially support and publicize the zoo by writing about it—I had a skill to be deployed in the modern marketplace, and in this case it was for a good cause. My ambition had been to switch my Guardian column from the family page, to which it had migrated from the magazine, to writing about the zoo. I knew the Guardian reader market, and that their level of ignorance (and squeamishness) on animal matters was roughly equivalent to their position on DIY; after all, most of my friends read the Guardian.

  But Jeremy was talking about a different level of exposure. “I think it’s a quintessentially English story,” he said in his soft Oxbridge accent, which is, objectively, only a couple of notches down from Prince Charles’s. “Completely mad and eccentric, but with a very wide appeal. I wouldn’t be surprised if we can get BBC2 to do a series. Keep me posted.” Dream on, I thought, but I kept in touch, adding Jeremy to the loop of phone calls I made from France, and he always provided a supportive and encouraging ear.

  And so one day, it turned out, I was showing Jeremy around the park we had just bought, and he was discussing the timing of the BBC2 series he had recently been commissioned to make about it. Jeremy’s knowledge from a lifetime in natural history was comprehensive, and most of our animals were of species he had filmed in the wild, often with a celebrity presenter. The tigers reminded him of his direct experience of them while filming a documentary with Bob Hoskins, the lions with Anthony Hopkins, and my aspirations for orangutans (Julia Roberts) and chimpanzees revealed that he had twice filmed Jane Goodall at her world-leading chimpanzee research and conservation center in Gombe. But my favorite remark was as we walked past Basil, the coatimundi, the South American climbing raccoon I had barely heard of before we arrived. “Oh, you’ve got a coati!” He beamed. “Wonderful creatures. You see them in the canopy in Ecuador all the time.”

  I was humbled by the entire film crew’s knowledge and their professionalism, and uplifted by their enthusiasm for this project—our project—which simply involved filming us while we learned about just exactly what we had got ourselves into. But it was a relief from time to time to be recast as the relative expert, for instance when the Guardian sent down a photographer to cover a feature on the park I had written for the magazine.

  As a journalist and feature writer, much of my time for about ten years was spent working with photographers. I’d be sent on some hare-brained but marvelous assignment, like horse-riding in Spain, swimming with dolphins in the Florida Keys, or snow boarding in California, and a photographer would come with me to document exactly how badly I messed it up. It was a wonderful way to earn a living, but a large part of the pleasure was working alongside another professional with the same objectives, out on our own overseas. Photographers are practical people. They make the best of situations, they improvise, they have gaffer’s tape. As another pair of eyes and ears, a photographer is useful in spotting good people to interview, and I was also able to help by drawing out and distracting people while they were photographed. Working as a complementary duo like this was enormously satisfying, and it was one of the things I missed most when I fled to France to write my book.

  So it was a very welcome relief from the myriad unfamiliar pressures of the zoo when the newspapers got hold of the story (after Sovereign and Parker made the nationals, they could hardly miss it), and started sending the odd photographer down to capture developments. This was something I was used to and knew all about, from the demands of the picture editor to the backdrop and the light, but more than that, it was a chance to dip back into that world of journalism where I had spent so many comfortable years. During my time working in London I was always the person most likely to mention animals or to suggest an animal story (usually rejected), or be disgusted with the shallow industry obsession with fashion and other matters of extreme inconsequence. At the zoo, around the many dedicated professionals who have devoted their lives to exotic creatures, I am practically animal illiterate, unable to sex a snake, tell a Bengal owl from a European eagle owl, or dismember a horse for the tigers.

  So when some fashionably dressed Soho-junky with a cappuccino habit and totally inappropriate footware arrived asking all the wrong questions, I found it enormously refreshing. Julian, from the Guardian, arrived in Italian calfskin brogues with designer jeans trailing on the ground, both instantly sodden in the long grass of the walk-in enclosure, where he wanted to get some shots of me with Ronnie the tapir. On being warned of the dangers of Ronnie, who is a Class I dangerous animal easily capable of killing a man with gruesome efficiency, his reaction was to ask the stony-faced keeper supervising us, “Wow. So who’d win in a fight between a tapir and an anaconda?” As soon as I could, I took him away on my own, so he didn’t upset anyone and I could enjoy his hopelessly out-of-place remarks.

  Trying to lure a peacock onto a picnic table for a shot, Julian approached the problem pragmatically, as photographers do, by laying a trail of bread that ended in the tabletop, but he didn’t factor in the tiny pea-size brain of the bird. After twenty minutes with the light fading, he snapped. “Come on, you total fucking spaz. You’re not a peacock you’re a peac–––.” When he met Ben the brown bear, who at three hundred kilos is bigger than Vlad, our male Siberian tiger, his instant reaction was, “So who’d win in a fight between the bear and a tiger?” His “animal maths” theme continued all day, culminating in, “What about four rats against a swan?” I was sorry to see him go back, by his own admission, to the land of trivia and inconsequence, but it was probably for the best.

  Meanwhile, there was plenty of work to be getting on with. And again, for a change, some of it was stuff I was used to. Like demolition. It is marvelously cathartic to wield a pickax or a sledgehammer in times of stress, though I did find that visualizing a particular lawyer, banker, or some other source of frustration often led to an overenthusiastic work rate, unnecessary damage to surrounding infrastructure, and occasional personal injury. Like when I lost a thumbnail to my new, heavy-duty crow bar while thinking about a certain high-end bank. Demolition is not just randomly smashing things up—though there is, occasionally, room for that—but is more a systematic, if brutal, dismantling in the most efficient way possible. My most enjoyable project was stripping out the vet room, into which we were sinking thousands of pounds to convert a fetid former stable into a modern animal operating theater. In the deeds, this was already officially the vet room, and animals had in the past been stored here when there was an urgent need for isolation. But in reality it was a series of four dank interlocking chambers with flimsy partitions, lethal wiring, and a constant splattering trickle from the faulty plumbing running across the ceiling. Smashing this stuff out, sifting the lead and copper for salvage, piling up the hardcore barrow by barrow for use under the concrete base of the jag enclosure, was a luxury I allowed myself two or three hours a day while it was going on.

  The best discovery was a room that had not been opened for fifteen years. A former workshop, its doorway onto the vet room was blocked with the subsequent decade and a half’s worth of damp junk, so the easiest way in was taking out the rotten window frame. Inside, it was like a small museum of artifacts from another time. There was a mini dilapidated range like the one in the flagstone kitchen, and the walls were bedecked with rusted two-man lumberjack saws and other agricultural implements from the nineteenth century—plus, of course, the mandatory piles of grimy miscellanea, here including many decomposing rats, covering the floor so that not one square inch of it was exposed. Sifting this lot for scrap and interesting artifacts was a welcome distraction, particularly when it came to ripping out the ancient rotten tongue-and-groove paneling with the aforementioned heavy-duty crowbar. Insulated from the world by a breathing mask and goggles, covered in sweat and grime, I co
uld wield heavy implements and avoid calls and callers for a couple of hours a day, while performing useful work and also saving money on gym membership. But inevitably, a line would build up outside and I would have to engage with them. Well-dressed young reps—women in stilettos on the uneven grimy surface of the yard, men in gray suits—would stand clutching clipboards with things for me to sign, always (enjoyably for me) surprised that the man they had come to see was the person loading the skip they had assumed was a laborer and turned their noses up at before we were introduced.

  Reluctantly, when it was fully gutted, I had to hand over the vet-room resurrection to a team of outside builders, who were remarkably proficient in transforming this shell into a white-tiled medical facility. They worked well, though the expense for an off-show area was worrying, as the money, so hard-won, was hemorrhaging out in all directions, and front-of-house issues like pathways, enclosures, and the kilometers of stand-off barrier to be replaced seemed at least equally as important. But investing heavily in an off-show facility like this would benefit the animals, who wouldn’t have to be moved so far to undergo veterinary procedures, and it would demonstrate to the authorities that we were serious. The new crew of builders took over, and seemed to know what they were doing, so I moved my recreational focus to other areas of demolition.

  Like digging out enclosure fence posts from concrete with a road drill, pickaxing loose concrete wherever I could find it, and transporting rubble in the dumper. All too soon—though not quite soon enough—this stage of the operation was complete, and the only jobs to be found were restorative. Again, as long as they were not too complicated and something I could dip in and out of to make way for the other myriad demands of my new position, I gladly got involved. In the absence of a budget for much needed tarmac for the car park and paths, Adam had organized deliveries of road planings. These are the bits they trim off the tops of roads before resurfacing, with that huge machine like a giant electric razor without a guard, a whirring wheel with blades that chews up and spits out the chips of the old tarmac onto a conveyor belt behind it. The conveyor belt deposits them into lorries, and the lorries, if you’re quick enough and know where they are working, will come and deliver them to you for a token price of about ten pounds a ton. We secured about a hundred tons, which was left in the bottom car park in vast piles, and which needed to be transported up the drive (a fifth of a mile) and deposited on the pathways for Tony in the digger to rake out, and then someone on the steamroller to flatten down.

  We had tried for some weeks to buy reliable machinery ourselves, but this meant thumbing through Farmers Weekly and other magazines dedicated to the sale of heavy machinery. These quickly became compelling, and many times I had eagerly dropped what I was doing when Tony or John came striding up with a folded-back catalogue in their hand saying, “I’ve got a lovely dumper/digger/tractor here for you, Ben.” I even took to thumbing through back issues to get a feel for what was out there. I soon learned to tell the difference between a Massey Ferguson and a John Deere at a glance, and easily identify a mini-digger as a one-, one-and-a-half-, two-, or three-tonner. But what I couldn’t seem to do was buy any of them at a reasonable price. Good ones tended to be locked in some place like Dundee, where the transport costs could double the price of the machine, and there was that delicate trade-off between getting something cheap, within our relatively measly budget, and getting something that was going to work. This meant visiting the nearer ones with Tony, pulling him off whatever he was doing, invariably to find that what was on offer was either not good enough or too expensive. Everything decent, in this heavily agricultural area, was quickly snapped up. Canny farmers were always there before you, bidding against you, knowing exactly what they were doing. (I still pine after a particular John Deere with a front loader, which was stolen from under my nose by a neighbor of the vendor just before we got there. It would have been perfect but, alas, it wasn’t to be.) So we ended up hiring equipment, much too late in the day for Tony’s liking, who was then further harassed by the weather. English summer was starting, and so of course, was the rain.

  But eventually, with only a few weeks to go before the inspection, two diggers (a one-and-a-half- and a three-tonner, as it happens) and a thunderous steamroller arrived, and everybody in the park set to work as one. Minor differences and big egos were forgotten as keeping-staff, maintenance, directors, and everybody else worked like a human conveyor belt, shifting to whatever was needed at the time with the alacrity of reckless troops volunteering indiscriminately for dangerous missions. And sometimes it was potentially dangerous. Once I had taken some time out to escort a local journalist around, and I noticed that the steamroller was reversing slowly down the path toward us, leaving a flattened carpet of planings before it. I noticed too that the driver was being duly diligent at keeping his distance from the wall to his right, which was just as well, because one wrong move from a machine this size could send it crashing through that wall, and that would be a terrible shame because it was a wall of the tiger enclosure. So far, reassuring. And then I noticed that the driver was Duncan, who, I knew, had only learned how to drive this machine the day before, and I hurriedly ushered the journalist out of the way. But there were no accidents with these potentially lethal machines, and the Health and Safety officers Rob and Adam took their roles very seriously. The first accident recorded in our accident book was a cut finger months later, sustained during an incident involving some stationery.

  In the middle of this park-wide blitz of manual labor, Steve had to think about pressing animal-welfare issues. Like where were we going to put Sovereign the escapist jag while we renovated his enclosure. Twelve of the posts in his enclosure needed replacing, as did the rotten slats in his house, and a few other adjustments needed to be made to his living area, which Sovereign would simply not tolerate if he was around. He had to be moved, and it was decided that the best idea was to reinstate the old quarantine area, once a bear pit, and before that a cottage that the Brownies (junior Girl Scouts) had apparently used as a meeting place during the war. Unfortunately, nobody had told Brown Owl (the leader) about the rudiments of structural engineering, and she had cut away the pesky A-frame timbers supporting the roof to enlarge the loft space for a table-tennis table. While Plymouth naval dockyards succumbed to the Luftwaffe, this fifth-columnist children’s paramilitary organization got their badges for bringing down the roof of what was then a farm cottage seven miles away. But they left the walls and gables standing, which provided a suitable enclosure for temporarily housing dangerous animals.

  With Sovereign, however, no one was taking any chances. As soon as the electric-fence specialist had finished his long (and expensive) refitting of the wolves’ enclosure with a new system and a backup supply in the event of a power failure, he was moved onto this project. Too much was just right for Sovereign, who scared everyone, particularly me, with his propensities for forward planning and timely, decisive action. The place was latticed with electrically charged deterrents to climbing the walls, scratching at the door, and using the internal window ledges as platforms for leaping onto the high iron gantry across the middle of the building, presumably installed for viewing the bears it once housed. As the security measures closed in, this shell of a house with its wired-up observation gantry became a disconcerting place to stand. As our minds prowled around the potential purchase points—rolled steel joist sticking out here, a brick chimney projecting in there—for a single-minded cat to use to climb out, they were closed off one by one. But we were also creating a holding chamber from which even a human, with fore-knowledge and ingenuity, could not escape. Inevitably, this sparks images of maximum-security prisons, and worse, human-atrocity-standard containment where detainees are thwarted in their desire for freedom and utterly controlled. This in turn raises questions of animal rights, and just exactly what we were doing containing such an animal who longed to get out. The answer always, honestly, was absolute.

  The International Union for C
onservation of Nature (IUCN) says that jaguars in the wild are “Near Threatened,” and the good news is that they moved down the Red List from Vulnerable in the 1990s as protection measures kicked in. However, habitat destruction has pushed them into increasingly isolated pockets of forest, bringing them into conflict with ranchers whose cattle they eat, and hunters, for whom they represent competition for food, and mortal danger if they are attacked. Despite being protected, jaguars are frequently shot on sight, and are already extinct in El Salvador and Uruguay. It is expected that at the next audit they will be moving back up the list to Vulnerable again. We inherited Sovereign; he can’t be reintroduced to his diminishing native habitat, but he is top of the stud book and his excellent genes are underrepresented in captivity. We will be breeding from him as soon as we can.

  Eventually there came a time when the wires in the new enclosure were in place, the locking mechanism on his gate had been quadruple-checked by every available pair of eyes, and it was time to introduce Sovereign to our new dart gun. This enormously expensive piece of equipment (£3,000) is able to deliver a dose of anaesthetic at any distance from a yard to fifty, and we spent a day having a fairly strict tutorial from the Austrian supplier, who set up a target for us in the unfinished restaurant. This dart gun is a Dan-Inject, the preferred industry standard, a top-of-the-range model often brandished out of the sides of Land Rovers in wildlife documentaries as they chase down and dart rhinos and lions. Its laser sight also enables you to shoot from the hip, because many animals seem to recognize the raising of a rifle as a sign of danger. Firing from the hip, even I was able to hit the bull’s-eye at thirty yards.

  But such minor deceptions cut no ice with Sovereign. The second he saw Steve with the gun he began to pace and spit in his house, careful not to present his flank, as he has been darted before and knows that this is the target. Eventually his agitation got the better of him, he turned slightly, and Steve darted him in the thigh, a perfect hit. We all retreated, as planned, for fifteen minutes while the vet monitored the progress of the drug, and Sovereign gradually went down. These operations were carefully planned in advance, with only the people who were directly involved in the vicinity. Everyone had a role, which was rehearsed in meetings—a bit like a benign bank job—ceaselessly, until everything was clear. The crate was ready, the van in position outside the jag house, and the exact route to the new quarters established. But even so, it is always a moment of high drama when the door is opened into the cage where the sleeping cat lies.