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

  Mum’s strength and sense of adventure were absolutely vital in pursuing the zoo in the first place, and in continuing to fight for it once we were there. We were always mindful of the sacrifice Mum had made in buying the zoo, and did our best to make her comfortable and reassure her. But she didn’t need mollycoddling. The plan had been that she could continue her life of making pots and painting, with the zoo as a sort of thriving backdrop. But when Katherine died, when Duncan was away, she ran the place. This was no small step up for a recently widowed lady whose husband had impeccably run the family affairs for the previous fifty-three years. Dad used to marvel at Mum’s lack of proficiency with figures—he would read books like Mathematics Made Difficult, and pass his thirty-minute commute doing complicated mental arithmetic. But Mum was not entirely alone. Adam had put us in touch with Jo, a clear-eyed, perspicacious, and matronly bookkeeper who gradually wrestled the accounts under control, skillfully juggled creditors, and provided daily bulletins on our financial health.

  With so many unexpected expenses—particularly in the restaurant where everything from crockery to cookers had to be replaced—many projects became too expensive and had to be shelved. Like replacing the demolished jag house, which had been priced at £27,000. By simply not doing this we could afford all kinds of other things, like a new lawn mower, a forest of new fence posts, and the staff wages for another month. Mum’s determination to get to grips with the nitty-gritty of the business undoubtedly saved it at a difficult time, and won her the respect and admiration of the staff and many more. As I emerged from my self-imposed exile, I found that Mum was at the center of most things that were going on, despite recent doctor’s orders to avoid stress, following a heart scare. One of the few places in the house where we spent money was in fitting out the old kitchen (the formerly smelly one) with a new floor and turning it into a pottery studio. When it was finished, we tried to get Mum interested in going back to her lifelong hobby, at which she excels, talking in detail about selling her pots in the shop. But she wasn’t—and still isn’t—having it. While ever there is work to be done, Mum will do it. And trying to ease her out of the loop of stressful decisions simply doesn’t work. She has spies everywhere. If she feels she’s getting bland reassurances from management and at department-head level, she just taps into another staff network to find out what’s really going on. Although the television series was called Ben’s Zoo, in more ways than one, it should have been called Amelia’s Zoo.

  8

  Spending the Money

  What a difference the sun makes. I have a theory that a disproportionate number of expatriates who leave this country to seek a place in the sun have seasonal affective disorder (SAD) to some degree. I’m sure I’m on the continuum somewhere, as I crave the onset of spring from the first moment the leaves turn brown in autumn. When the sun finally did start coming out, in late April and May, everything looked a hundred times better. The liberal sprinkling of snowdrops gave way to a host of daffodils, and the optimism in the air was palpable, and no longer only coming from me.

  The workshop was churning out newly welded metal enclosure posts, big machines were laying new pathways before our eyes, and the restaurant was a teeming hive of activity. Spring was definitely in the air, and with it came the need for some reversible vasectomies, as we didn’t yet have the paperwork or facilities for many of our animals to breed. First in line was Zak, the elderly alpha wolf, whose problem actually looked more serious. One testicle had swollen to the size of an avocado, and though this can happen to wolves for short periods, Zak’s had been engorged for several weeks and the vet thought he needed to be opened up. The vet room was still a work in progress, so the shop beside the restaurant was sterilized and some tables pushed together. On the allocated day, Zak was darted and went down easily. Though the van was in position, the vet and Steve decided it was just as easy to carry him the hundred yards or so to the mocked up operating theater. In truth, if Zak had managed to get up and do a Tammy, no one would have been very scared. At nineteen years old, even on his best day you could probably walk faster than he could run, and he maintained his grip on the pack now, not with brute force, but through sheer charisma and experience.

  They arrived slightly breathless, and Zak was placed on his back, cradled by two large plastic blocks with a semicircle cut out of them, a bit like a headsman’s block, specifically designed for keeping animals with ridged spines steady on their backs. The blocks were well worn, and this procedure was fairly routine, though I asked how many actual wolves the vet had done. “Oh, quite a few by now. Don’t worry. No different from an Alsatian.” Like anyone being prepared for an operation, Zak looked painfully exposed and vulnerable, and as he was shaved and washed in the relevant areas, waves of empathy from the men watching went out to him. The women present found our discomfort hugely amusing.

  Once he was opened up, the avocado-size testicle was instantly declared cancerous, and its black and purple striations clearly indicated the presence of this malign nemesis of so many animals and people. Luckily, even when advanced, dogs and wolves hardly ever get secondary cancers from the testicular region—unlike humans. But the sound of a vas deferens, the small strand of connecting tissue between the testicle and the body cavity, being cut, is not a pleasant one. There is much crunching of gristle, and much wincing and crossing of legs in the audience. His other testicle, pinkish white and normal size—more like a big conker in the shape of a kidney bean—was also declared a potential health hazard, since it could have been contaminated by its neighbor, and the second set of crunching and cutting was far worse, as it was into healthy tissue. When the second ostensibly healthy testicle clanged into the metal dish, it was a poignant moment, and every man present felt something, though exactly what, it was hard to pin down. Mainly, probably, never to let the medical profession anywhere near your gonads. Though we had saved Zak so that he could live to lead the pack another day, it could hardly be described as a good day for him. But he made a full recovery, and worries that his empty scrotum might impinge on his leadership abilities were unfounded, as Zak went on to provide his pack, and his successor in waiting, the slightly pathetic Parker, with guidance and leadership for several more months.

  Next in line was Solomon, king of the beasts, the hugely impressive male African lion. This really was a routine reversible vasectomy, as one day we will probably try to breed from him, but at the moment the production of a lion cub would have been seen by the zoo world as irresponsible. Although slightly smaller than Vlad, Solomon is arguably the most impressive cat we have. At around 230 kilos, or more than five hundred pounds, he, his mane, and his roar are truly epic. Tigers don’t roar, but this awesome sound is high in Solomon’s arsenal of weapons of terror. I feel it is worth reiterating that, in nature, you don’t generally get to hear this sound from so close and live. As Solomon blasted Steve with his Death Roar from the confines of his house, his lips curled back revealing dagger teeth, presenting highly alarming visual as well as auditory stimuli, I watched Steve brace himself and resist the temptation to back to the far wall of the narrow corridor. Steve bided his time and soon got the dart in Solomon’s flank. When I next visited the scene, Solomon was out cold, the door was open, and the vet was stitching up the lion’s back end, utterly undaunted by the sheer scale of his patient. I was not undaunted, however. Solomon’s flanks were absolutely huge, and the gory procedure going on in his most intimate region would surely be a source of displeasure should he wake up. John was there on firearms duty, but otherwise there was an open door between him and the park. When Kelly, positioned at the head end inside the enclosure (the other lions were locked away in their parts of the house), started to report that he was blinking—i.e., that the anaesthetic was beginning to wear off—I looked for signs of panic, or at least increased work rate from the vet. After all, doing what he was doing, he’d probably be number one on Solomon’s hit list should he come around. But the vet remained unperturbed, and continued his methodical
stitching as if he were operating on a house cat in the comfort of his practice. A few minutes later, it was done, and the vet and others stepped in with Solomon to microchip him and move him clear of the door. This was also performed with nonchalance, though perhaps now just a hint of urgency. Then, mission accomplished, everyone stepped clear, the door was closed, and normal security levels were resumed. And Solomon bounced back from his ordeal to happily fire off his blanks, in accordance with our license requirements.

  The final vasectomy, which I didn’t witness and was a little uncomfortable about, was Vlad’s—again, carried out in his house, decreed from on high in case he impregnated his two sisters, the absurdly named Blotch and Stripe. These three tigers were bred illegally and hand-reared, despite an obvious genetic defect in the line and overrepresentation of this strain of Siberian tigers in the gene pool. This was one of the reasons Ellis, the previous owner, had run afoul of the authorities, and all three tigers were classified as “Display Only,” and not to be bred from. This I didn’t mind, but what bothered me was that tigers are particularly susceptible to dying under anaesthetic. Vlad’s brother, Ivan, had died during a routine procedure some years before, and Tasmin’s heart had stopped some months before, while she was being investigated for an ongoing kidney problem. In that instance, only Duncan’s fast response in alerting the vet, who was walking back to his car at the time, saved her, and she was quickly given the antidote to bring her round. As Vlad’s amorous efforts with his sister had so far, in seven years, resulted in no illegal offspring, I was reluctant to have him tampered with at the possible risk of his life. I liked Vlad a lot—he is a nice, friendly boy—and the machinery of state intervention, coupled with a mild snobbery about his lack of strict zoological value, I felt, was exposing him to unnecessary risks. But by now I was a bit battle weary, and with my stand on the wolves and monkeys and various other issues, it was probably a good time to let a few slide past. The operation was a success, and Vlad returned to duty the next day.

  The money was ebbing, but at last we had an inspection date, set for 4 June, which gave us an all-or-nothing deadline to work toward. Everybody pitched in, occasionally getting a little high on resources, sending out for new tools or equipment with relative abandon. The core staff we had inherited were brilliant improvisers—they had had to be for many years as the fortunes of the park declined. Instead of buying new metal bars, for instance, I encouraged salvaging existing ones that were liberally scattered around. There was an estimated acre of scrap behind the restaurant, for instance, containing old cars, even lorries and the long-forgotten husk of an old dumper truck, as well as perhaps twenty fridges, innumerable tires and wheels, bits of wood, and a thousand other things “stored” for future use at some indefinite time in the future, which never came. We did a deal with a local scrap merchant, who arrived with a large flatbed truck with a grabber on it and a mini digger (which he kindly lent to us when he wasn’t using it). The deal was that he could have everything, except the choicest bits of metal that we could recycle, in exchange for clearing the site. “No problem,” he said, delighted. “It’ll take about five days.” Nine weeks later, he was still loading up his lorry every day with more metal objects dragged from the ground. Although 95 percent was pure, unadulterated rubbish, in the meantime we had salvaged all kinds of useful things, including double-glazed panels of glass miraculously unbroken, some perfectly useable fence posts, and enough scrap angle iron to fabricate a small enclosure. The first object fabricated entirely from the salvaged scrap was a trailer for the keepers’ new quad bikes that John made in less than a week, using wheels from an old sit-on mower. That trailer is still in service today.

  The quad bikes, however, are not. Or rather, one of them is, just. Duncan’s idea to buy cheap quad bikes as a morale booster for the staff backfired at first, when the wrong people ended up using them for the wrong reasons. Instead of Hannah and Kelly’s workload being lightened, they still seemed to be pushing heavy barrows of meat or bedding up steep paths, while junior maintenance staff and casual employees thrashed around the park on the bikes doing minor errands. The quad bikes deteriorated rapidly, and spent more and more time being fixed or waiting for parts. This caused a lot of bad will, and several meetings were held where strict protocols were implemented for the use of the quads. The person who was least happy about it was probably Rob, head keeper and long-suffering grandson of Ellis. “What’s wrong with walking?” he’d ask. “It’s part of what working in a place like this is all about.” Though well-intentioned, the purchase of the quad bikes taught us a lesson about tampering with the ecosystem we had inherited.

  My own gift to the keepers was on a smaller scale, and caused less controversy. Ten headlamps, distributed throughout the staff, had made working in the dark winter evenings, in the absence of exterior lighting (and even lights inside some of the big cat houses) safer and more bearable. “I haven’t heard a word said against them,” said Rob. Though by spring, every one of them had been lost or broken. On a lighter note, in the lighter evenings we didn’t need them.

  The peacocks were another welcome part of that spring, pouting and preening their quite unbelievably over-the-top plumage for all they were worth. Peacocks seem to have been designed by a flamboyant madman, probably of Indian extraction given the fine detailing, though with more than a nod toward the tastes of Liberace. Even in repose they are stunning, their impossibly blue heads and necks suddenly giving way to equally unlikely green and gold feathers laid like scales from halfway down their backs. These in turn abruptly change into their famous long tail feathers, many of them around a meter, easily three times as long as the males’ bodies. As if this is not enough, as an afterthought their heads are embellished with more blue-tipped feathers on narrow stalks, which blossom out in an animal parody of a Roman centurion’s helmet. And why the hell not? you think. They’ve gone this far. It seems the only limit to their opulence is the almost boundless confines of the imagination of their Indian Liberace designer.

  In the sunshine, watching these extravagant birds, I found, was uniquely cheering. Their sheer physical beauty was uplifting, a symbol that, even striding around with a mobile phone stuck to my ear, I was somewhere unusual, worthwhile, and with a hint of the exotic. And they were highly amusing, too. These pea brains would launch their shimmering fan at anything that moved, and quite a few things that didn’t. The older males, with their magnificent tails, shimmered in the sunlight, flashing their wares at the ducks, cockerels, and moorhens, who studiously ignored them or walked away embarrassed. But they also targeted picnic benches, footballs, plant pots, and even the cats (which upset these still slightly nervous felines no end). Only occasionally, it seemed, did they actually display their wares to the correct subject, a peahen, who is supposed to be so impressed with this array that nothing less will do. But they didn’t seem impressed either, and often wandered off leaving some hapless male shimmering away at nothing, abandoned as if halfway through a promising first date. In the whole mating season I think I witnessed only one successful copulation, and there was certainly only one pregnant female by the end of it.

  I also loved the peacocks because of their place in evolution, or rather in the explanation of it. As an occasional writer on evolutionary psychology, particularly regarding male behavior, I often used the peacock’s tail as shorthand for some elaborate and expensive male display designed to attract females. There are strong arguments in favor of the idea that the entire human cortex—metabolically the most expensive organ we possess— evolved with mate attraction in mind. Similarly, humor, hunting, risk taking, and red Porsche 911s can all be shorthanded as peacock’s tail–type phenomena. You look for other examples, often toward the birds of paradise, but their elaborate displays and one-off shock-tactic plumage, though certainly ridiculous, have nothing on the sheer extravagance of the encumbrance the peacock has landed himself with. The point of the tail is that it is very expensive to produce and maintain—like the Porsche, or cortex—
and having one is a definite drain on resources. A human neocortex requires 40 percent of our calories, and a Porsche costs a lot to buy, and, subject to legal action pending at the time of writing, may become almost as costly to drive in central London, where most of them surely live. But the peacock’s tail really hampers him, drawing massive attention from predators and making evasion much more difficult. The weight impedes take-off, and you rarely see them attempt more than a wing-assisted hop when in full plumage. This point was illustrated graphically a few years previously, when, according to Robin, the bears were moved into their new enclosure in woodland frequented by peacocks. “Yes, it took them a while to get used to the change,” said Robin mildly. “The bears ate mainly peacocks in the first week.” Having landed, the birds were startled by and then poorly equipped to evade the three fast-moving, voracious predators, and this lesson in natural selection is fascinating to me. Watching them parade this incredibly expensive display so poorly, and at such inappropriate objects, while children play football around them, I have to think that, having gone to all that trouble, squandering the display on a camera bag or a tree stump seems marvelous in its profligacy. It really does say to me, to borrow Dawkins’ phrase from his famous book on Darwinian theory, that the Watchmaker was blind. Just an extra gram of neural tissue, you would think, would be a better investment, but not when the market, evolved through rigorous sexual selection, is in expensive tails. I had a soft spot for the peacocks. So I was disturbed to learn that Owen, our star bird keeper, had taken it upon himself to cull four of them, citing overcrowding. I suspected there was more to it than this, because Owen, like Sarah, had told me that he didn’t see the zoo as a place where non-exotic animals, or more specifically, “animals of no zoological significance,” should be kept. Most of the hundred or so birds in the walk-in enclosure—mainly chickens, geese, and ducks—had gradually disappeared—culled apparently by some systemic parasitic infection that was too advanced to treat and that was a health risk to the more zoologically significant rare birds we had and planned to acquire in the future. But several neighbors and farmers were contacted and invited to take the birds, subject to their own health check, and many were saved, going on to produce many eggs for many other people. Adam in particular occasionally taunted me that he enjoyed a particularly fine duck egg for breakfast. This culling, deemed necessary, particularly upset Mum, who had enjoyed being followed around by this raggedy brood while feeding them, an experience, standing in her own park, which seemed a daily reminder of the remarkable distance she had traveled in her life since childhood. It upset me too, and indicated a level of disagreement with the new keeper-staff, which was to culminate in a fiery meeting about the direction of the park a few weeks down the line. More of that later.