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

  As another vital part of the business plan, we had to have at least one good kiosk, ideally two, or if the hugely successful nearby Paignton Zoo was anything to go by, one every fifty meters. Adam rejected a ready-made building next to the future petting zoo, a configuration of facilities through which I have been milked for tea, cake, and ice cream many times since becoming a parent. Owen pounced on the building to incubate birds’ eggs on public display instead, while Adam made a strong case for focusing on a purpose-built kiosk at the top of the picnic area. Obviously this site needed a kiosk one day, but I was disappointed that he was eschewing an existing building, and I took some persuading that we should initially obtain what sounded like a quite expensive shed, instead of waiting and putting in a modern, curvy model that had just won the award for Best Leisure Facility Kiosk in Denmark (so many awards, so little time). But Adam was adamant: the outlay of £2,000 would repay itself in a single good summer’s day by keeping people in the best part of the park, marveling at the proximity of the tigers on Tiger Mountain, being treated occasionally to the lions’ roar and the wolves’ howl, and buying tea, cake, ice cream, and, as we are in the Southwest, pasties like there was no tomorrow.

  As an aside, I have learned two things about pasties, or meat pies, since I came here. One is that the thick outer rim of crust, which in an authentic pasty clogs up your mouth like a packet of cheese crackers, is not actually meant to be eaten, because it was designed to be the handle by which the meal was held in the grubby hands of miners on their lunch break. Sorry if you already knew this, but I enjoyed the discovery because it makes me feel less guilty about leaving that dehydrating arc of carbohydrate, or throwing it away to be eaten by ants. Organic, biodegradable handles and food packaging, generally, are things we should be thinking about now, but they were already being addressed as early as 1510. Which brings me to the second thing I’ve learned. The “Cornish pasty” was invented in Devon. Yeah, where I live. It was recently discovered that 1510 was the first recorded date when a pasty was mentioned, in the accounts of the council for the city of Plymouth. Which is in Devon. Across the Tamar river, “there be monsters,” and this can be proved by the next mention of the pasty, in 1746, when this Devonian recipe was allegedly stolen by pirates and introduced to Cornwall. What kind of pirates were these? Outriders for some despotic, early Martha Stewart? The irrefutable fact remains, at the moment, that the pasty came from Devon. So get used to it, Cornwall. And yes, everybody already knows that pasties originally had two chambers, one savory and one of fruit filling, the world’s first two-course convenience meal. Even I knew that.

  The Great Pasty Debate apparently continues to rage acrimoniously between the two counties, though I must admit, in eighteen months here, I have never overheard a single word of it. And frankly, now, I’m getting a bit sick of pasties.

  So Adam persuaded me that the new structure would be a good use of our rapidly depleting funds, and called me over the radio to watch it arrive. I still had my reservations, in the driving June rain. It still seemed an expensive option compared with refitting the existing building a hundred yards away, and, to me, a bit too square. The team that arrived to erect the prefabricated structure was resolutely professional, working efficiently through the rain on a small site we had paced out and leveled to the kiosk’s requirements. Once again I had a small opportunity to get involved in some DIY construction, supplying the odd hammer blow here, lifting a panel or two there, and I relished it. But once the structure was up, the team swarmed around it, fitting it out with internal panels and hammering down the roofing felt, and there was nothing for me to do, apart from stand back in the picnic area and marvel at how good it looked. Square or not, it looked like it had always been here, like it definitely belonged, and it was easy to get excited about the possibility of queues of paying customers lining up outside it. Though not in this weather . . .

  The kiosk was a very important part of the overall plan and, as the business side of the venture, absolutely had to work. The animals, obviously, came first, but without satisfied customers— and lots of them—they faced an uncertain future. The inspection was only days away, and though it would focus on animal welfare, some attention would also be paid to the facilities for the public. The number of toilets, the state of the paths, disabled access, adequate stand-off barriers to prevent people’s limbs being sheared off by giant carnivores, that sort of thing. What the inspector would not do—could not do—is tell us whether it was going to work as a business. That was down to us, the weather, an element of luck, and whether the local reputation of the park was already too irretrievably tarnished in the public mind. And that was a bit scary.

  Inspection Day dawned a rare sunny morning, which augured well, though the pre-exam nerves infected everyone. As I met the keepers before the inspector arrived, they were barely recognizable. Smartly dressed—and clean! Normally mud spattered and sweat drenched, this crew of hardened workers who would think nothing of throwing themselves into a mire in pursuit of an injured animal, shoveling barrowloads of excrement, or covering themselves with blood while stripping down a horse carcass, suddenly looked like normal people, like you might meet out on the street. I didn’t even know that Steve had a smart jacket, but here he was, looking slightly ill at ease in it, chain-smoking roll-ups while we waited for the examiner to arrive. I was particularly nervous, which took me by surprise, because I had taken soundings from everyone involved and had been persuaded that we had “almost certainly” done enough to pass. It was that “almost” that suddenly came home to roost as we waited.

  The government-appointed inspector arrived with Peter Wearden, who would actually issue the license, should that be the recommendation. Peter winked at me, which was slightly reassuring, but the matter was out of his hands. The inspector, Nick Jackson, ran his own small zoo, a second-generation family operation with an international reputation, in Wales. So, he knew how to run a good zoo. We just hoped that he could discern the seeds of one in what we had done. The walk-around—normally an unequivocal pleasure, showing people what we had got and what we aimed to do and watching them transform from wide-eyed skeptics to energized enthusiasts by the end of it—suddenly became deadly serious. Mr. Jackson was being paid to ask difficult questions, from a position of extreme insight, and nothing was off-limits. He went into every single animal house, exposed every single area where we were lacking, and asked the most difficult questions. Meanwhile, Peter, in his role as Health and Safety Officer for South Hams Council, had some criticisms of his own. “Robin’s Nest,” for instance, where Robin had retreated to carry out his enclosure design work and the construction of signs, was a loft that, no one had seemed to notice or think strange, ended with an abrupt drop, next to his desk, of twenty feet down to the concrete floor of the workshop below. Obviously, Robin was aware of this and knew to stay away from the edge, but equally obvious was the fact that it wasn’t safe. “I want this addressed immediately,” he barked uncharacteristically. “And I mean TODAY.” Other obvious oversights were the lack of signs on the doors of the dangerous animal houses for when people were working in the enclosures. “If I was working out there, I’d like to know that there was a sign on the door telling the keepers not to release the cats, just in case of a breakdown of communication,” said Mr. Jackson. Though our operation was small enough and tight enough for everyone to know what everyone else was doing, it was a fair point, and Duncan radioed to Robin, who, his dangerous nest already being worked on, immediately began implementing this recommendation. I didn’t help; for want of something to say while we waited for the keys to arrive to the tiger house, I pointed out that there was blood on the padlock of the external door. The inspector looked sharply at me and smiled. “I hadn’t noticed that,” he said. “Poor working practices.” And he made a note. Damn.

  At about five o’clock the inquisition was over, and rarely have I felt so relieved. But the day wasn’t over yet. We moved to the office, where everyone sat down and endured a full
two-and-a-half-hour debriefing, going over every point raised and being given some indication of our score on it. It was almost as grueling as the inspection itself, and although it was useful feedback in that we had scored quite well, it still wasn’t conclusive, as the final report would contain extra material. I was relieved that my padlock remark, though drawing attention to our deficits, had actually played quite well, and was singled out by the inspector as part of “a culture of openness,” apparently quite lacking at previous inspections over the years. He had also asked for private interviews with keepers and other staff, away from their employers breathing down their necks, and had been impressed by what he had heard from them about their interpretation of what we were doing and where we were going. So no need to sack anybody there, then (just kidding). Unless, of course, the result came back with “Application Declined,” in which case everybody would be looking for new jobs.

  I remember the next day vividly. I was (stupidly) unexpectedly exhausted, sitting on a bench outside the house with the children, when Rob came up to me. “I can’t work any longer with Steve,” he said. Rob was head keeper, Steve was the curator, and their relationship was vital to the smooth running of the zoo. This should have been a bombshell. I should have felt panicky, or at least alarmed, but instead I felt, from very deep down, Whatever. I felt that we owed a lot to Rob. He had held on to the park, keeping it out of the developer’s hands by taking on the collection under the Dangerous Wild Animals (DWA) legislation when the license to display the collection held by his grandfather was withdrawn. I had spoken to him and exchanged many e-mails during the negotiating period when I was in France. Rob was one of the most important people involved in us getting the park. I didn’t want to lose Rob, partly because we owed him, and also because he was multi-skilled, and had a depth of knowledge about the park that would be impossible to replicate.

  I waited. He suggested moving to working on the grounds instead, which, after brief consideration, I thought was a very good idea. With thirty acres to tend, we needed a dedicated grounds person (though we couldn’t really afford one), and Rob was a qualified tree surgeon who knew the park as well as anyone. He needed a less-stressful job due to a change in his personal circumstances, as he was now single-handedly looking after a daughter he hadn’t seen in four years. Moving to grounds would take him from under the direct control of Steve, with whom he had a stormy relationship that seemed to reach the breaking point roughly every two weeks. Under Tony, with whom he had a less-uneasy relationship, he could work outside, not worrying about other people’s rotas or changes in procedures he had grown up with being implemented by the new regime. He also knew a bit about the many exotic plants that flourish all over the park, mostly grown from cuttings by the green-fingered Ellis. (I have brown fingers; any plant in my care automatically shrivels and dies, though Rob told us early on that one rare plant, a kind of creeper, had thwarted Ellis for forty years, but that as soon as we arrived it had started to sprout leaves. This was a strange, apocryphal tale that was nevertheless nice to hear.) It would be a simpler life for Rob, and I almost envied him.

  Steve was also delighted, and suggested that he would spend more time out in the park with the staff, encompassing the head keeper role, leaving more of the administrative side of his job to his eminently capable wife, Anna. Everybody seemed to be pleased with this new configuration, and I felt a bit like a soccer manager who had come up with a new way of deploying players; instead of 4–4–2, we were going for a radical 1–1–8. Or something. I have to admit I’m a bit shaky on soccer, but that’s roughly what it felt like. Probably.

  So, oddly jaded but also rejuvenated, we all set about filling the time until we heard our fate. We had to assume we would pass the inspection and open soon, but when, exactly, we could not predict. This was a complicated issue, because publicity material needed to be printed with dates and opening times for distribution all around the county. When the printers, up against their last possible deadlines, pressured us for information, we simply didn’t know. In the end we went for “Opening Summer 2007.” We had better be.

  Finally the day came when Peter Wearden summoned me to appear at the council offices in Totnes to hear the result. I drove with Steve and my mum (maybe Peter would be more lenient with an elderly lady present). The last time I had been there was to register Katherine’s death three months before with Ella, when I had played with her afterward in the small maze in the courtyard. But I tried to put this out of my mind because, as the King of Swamp Castle says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, about the wedding disrupted by the slaughter of many guests by the exuberant Lancelot, “Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion.” Peter smiled, I smiled, everybody smiled. It was looking good. He handed me the report, which was long but fortunately had a covering letter. “I recommend that Dartmoor Zoological Park be granted a license to trade as a zoo . . .” Wow. At last. We had done it. We thanked Peter and drove back elated, and presented the news to all the staff, some of whom shed tears. We set a definite date for our opening, two weeks away, on 7 July—07/07/07—which everybody agreed was somehow auspicious.

  Most important, it was just before the school holidays, at the beginning of the busiest period, though it meant we would have to hit the ground running. It would have been nice to have a gentler opening in June, to get a bit of practice at actually dealing with the public before exposing our newly revamped infrastructure to the (ideally) swarming hordes of July. If those hordes found any holes in our plan they would burst through them, impelled by market forces, and puncture the whole damn balloon. But 07/07/07 was set in stone. We really were opening on that date, no matter what. If the restaurant wasn’t ready, there would be sandwiches. If the kiosk wasn’t wired up properly, we’d run an extension lead. If the play area was uninstalled, we had bouncy castles, lent to us by Adam’s Bouncy Castles, a secret part of our customer services manager Adam’s former life. It was going to happen.

  But the money had run out. We had tried—in vain, as it turns out—to keep track of our reserves. But by the time Joanne, our bookkeeper, had got a grip on the situation, it was to tell us that we had about £60,000 left, and about a month to go before opening. An endangered zoo eats money like a specially designed money-eating machine, and for the valiant army of Dartmoor Zoological Park, £60,000 was a pittance. An industrial shredder specially adapted for banknotes couldn’t get through money any better. As well as hungry mouths to feed—lions, bears, tigers, monkeys, and otters, to name but a few—all those animals require expensive veterinary dental checks, fecal screening programs, routine vaccinations, microchipping, and a whole gamut of other services, which for a custodian of exotic animals, is the first priority.

  But these are so unequivocally part of what the zoo is about that they present no dilemma. The Day of the Dentist was a memorable, and memorably expensive, inauguration of just what is needed to responsibly maintain so many exotic animals. Fudge the bear, as well as needing a second go at cutting her claws, which had grown semicircular and impeded her walk, looked like she had toothache. At twenty-nine, she could be expected to live perhaps another seven or so years in captivity (though she would have been long dead in the savage wild where her kind are down to perhaps five examples in the Pyrenees, and are still being hunted for sport in Eastern Europe). Her claws were one issue, but she seemed subdued and slow moving, and the occasional glimpses into her mouth she offered revealed a horrifying set of broken gravestones, cracked and covered in brown grime, as well as what looked like an abscess. It was enough to slow anyone down, particularly a venerable old lady.

  One of the pumas was also ailing, and dribbling, which had been consistently diagnosed as gingivitis and treated as such periodically over the last several years. The trouble was that gingivitis is usually an acute condition—very rarely chronic—but this puma rarely showed her teeth to the keepers, and was in fact recently revealed to be an entirely different puma from the one we thought we had. An X-ray taken a few months prev
iously showed that she had a metal plate in her leg, which she was not supposed to have, and meant that she was someone else entirely. We had to find out who she was and what was wrong with her.

  The third, and arguably most important, client was Sovereign, the Ninja-escapist jaguar and the most endangered animal of the three. He had somehow cracked both his upper canines, one of which was flat at the end. It had been suggested that both these teeth might need to be extracted, which bothered me, because Sovereign was still a young adult and these teeth were the tools of his trade. Obviously he didn’t need them for hunting at the zoo—we could feed him mince, if he needed it—but I was concerned for his psychological well-being if these teeth were lost. He would feel the loss. And I was concerned that preoccupations with preventing future abscesses would not include this in the calculations. I wanted to be there when these decisions were made.