by Benjamin Mee
So the Day of the Dentist was set, and we prepared. How we prepared. Peter Kertesz is the UK’s leading specialist in exotic animal dentistry, and is also, mainly, a Harley Street practitioner on humans. He happens to have taken an interest in animal dentition, and has become one of the world’s leading experts. Nick Masters, from the IZVG, was going to handle the anaesthetic and carry out general health checks on each animal while it was under. Both of them were booked, and we had to be ready.
In the predawn darkness of 6 AM the team started to assemble at the park, and most of the normal routine procedures and feeding began. By 8 AM, Steve had endured his increasingly familiar dance with Sovereign, who had been darted successfully and transported to the park’s shiny new vet facility. Sovereign made a spectacular first patient for the vet room, his beautiful markings contrasting with the sterile white environment and green-coated medics. On examination, both Sovereign’s two chipped upper canine teeth exposed some of the pulp, so there was a real possibility he might lose them. But Peter was unfazed and simply trimmed them, using a terribly efficient little grinder which makes all the worst noises that you don’t want to overhear during human dentistry. Having stabilized the external structure of the teeth, he set about performing root-canal work. For us, this involves a special pipe cleaner about two inches long, which is inserted into the hole in the center of the tooth where the dentine once was, and shuffled back and forth to clean all the residual tissue out of the cavity deep in the bone. Thank God for anaesthetic. For Sovereign, the pipe-cleaning probes needed to be at least five inches long to get deep enough into his enormous roots, but also to travel the extra inches of the length of the teeth themselves, for Peter to dig out all the pulp. Fortunately, for such a dangerous patient Sovereign was as good as gold. Nick Masters ensured that he was under a closely monitored general anaesthetic; there were tubes in his mouth, monitors on his heart, and machines that went beep. After some very in-depth reaming, and then a similarly comprehensive filling, Sovereign’s root-canal work was complete, and he was returned to a bed of straw in his enclosure.
Then it was the turn of a female puma, who we thought was probably Holly, who had been dribbling saliva in an unusual way. We carried the prostrate cat on a stretcher that had been lent by another zoo for the occasion. It was a short haul, with a relatively small cat, and the drugs were internationally recommended, so I didn’t feel too apprehensive about this. The transfer went well, and once she was on the table, Peter immediately saw that the problem was a couple of premolars on her lower jaw, which had nothing above them to chew against. For the last several years she had been biting against her gums, which were bleeding and causing the dribbling, and now extraction was the only option. But this was all routine to Peter, and forty-five minutes and two extractions later, the procedure was completed, and Holly was on her way back to her enclosure to recover in her bed of warm straw.
Everybody broke for a late lunch, and a refreshed team faced what they hoped would be a simple task of clipping the over-grown claws of the park’s oldest mammal, Fudge, the twenty-nine-year-old European brown bear. Fudge was tricky to sedate. Her weight was unknown (it turned out to be 147 kilos on the scales in the vet room—she’s a small bear), so it was difficult to get the dose right. And she was tough. Eventually six people managed to transport a sleeping Fudge to the operating table, where we manhandled her into position for Peter and Nick. Nick, as anaesthetist, had priority initially, to stabilize her, and his array of beeping machines ensured that she was safely under, with all her vital signs monitored. As soon as this was established, Peter took over with a flourish. Neither Nick nor Peter are tall men, but both are fit and extremely precise in their movements—archetypal medical professionals—and it was a real privilege to watch them work. They looked the part too, both choosing blue paramilitary-style boiler suits with leg pockets, Peter’s to carry the rechargeable battery pack for the elaborate headlamp he wore throughout, sometimes fitting it with extra optical devices, like a sort of jeweler-surgeon. Which, I suppose, an exotic-animal dentist probably is. Peter is perhaps twenty years older than Nick, and though in the glamorous role of specialist, he gracefully deferred to the anesthetist whenever he needed access to check the tubes going into Fudge’s mouth or made recommendations about how long he could take. He’d stand back, tools in the air with all the time in the world, saying, “You do what you have to do. I’m just the technician.” But though Peter was charming, he also constantly supplied a monologue about what a superb job he was doing. “Look at that,” he’d say, cutting around the gum and deftly extracting a minor rotting tooth, then stitching up the gum with one hand. “I’m probably the only person in the world who could do that. From diagnosis to extraction in under twenty minutes. Good job I’m here.” There had been rumors that Peter would arrive with a new, attractive female assistant, and he did (he always does). Unfortunately, though extremely competent, she was not quite as fast as Peter demanded, and he gave her several ruthless dressing-down. But of course, this was a serious business. The bear could only stay under for so long, and all the people involved had been working for many hours, with several more to go, during which no one could afford to make mistakes.
The more Peter looked, the more bad stuff he found. In the end Fudge had five extractions, and the molars, particularly her remaining upper canine, were not twenty-minute jobs. “Bears’ teeth are built to last,” said Peter as he struggled with Fudge’s well-rooted dentition, which involved using a small stainless steel hammer and chisel. It was all hands on deck as the dental nurse, Anna, Steve, Duncan, and I all held Fudge steady while Peter tugged and cajoled the teeth out and sewed up her bleeding gums. Sovereign I had met before under general anaesthetic, and his languid musculature had been no surprise. “Holly,” the puma, was past her prime, and had seemed like just a very big domestic cat—though one you wouldn’t want to mess with. But Fudge seemed unbelievably solid, perhaps like the wild boar that Leon had so wisely declined to pursue in France. She felt like she could go through anything, and Nick was impressed with the strength of her vital signs throughout. I was totally impressed with Fudge. She was really a beast. And during these procedures, it became clear why Fudge had been moving slowly for some time.
Peter uncovered and drained an abscess the size of a golf ball in her lower jaw, which if left untreated would sap the immune system and could be fatal. One of the earliest examples of a skeleton of early man was found by a lake in Africa and diagnosed as having died of a dental abscess that had eaten at his jaw and killed him, probably very painfully, in his prime. In the wild, Fudge would have never lived this long, as this abscess would probably have killed her.
Three and a half hours later, the operation was over, and Fudge was returned to her enclosure through a park shrouded in darkness once more, as when we had begun. It had been a long and fairly gruesome day, and though it was impossible not to reflect, at least for a moment, on the cost (£8,000 vet bill, plus vet room, staff, etc.), it felt great to have diverted some funds from the world in general and channeled them into this hugely worthwhile cause. Now at least, if we ever did have to disperse the animals, these three would be healthier and a more attractive proposition for rehoming. But it was more than that. The optimist in me found it enormously satisfying to be able to provide such highly skilled, expert care for these amazing animals here in our own facility on the site. There was no doubt that Nick and Peter were, quite literally, world-class professionals. And we had managed to deploy them to address long-term health problems in three animals in our care who hadn’t previously been treated.
I looked on Peter’s Web site and there he was, with a range of animals and in locations far more exotic than ours: the most impressive shot was an elephant on its back, with, I counted, twenty-nine people hauling it into position so that Peter could perform an extraction, probably of a tooth the size of a rugby ball. Compared to that, six people on standby for fourteen hours and a man with a large gun posted outside was small pot
atoes, and it was an honor that he asked if some of the pictures taken could go on his Web site with the others. But it had been exciting for us nonetheless.
All three animals made excellent recoveries, and far from seeming subdued by their day at the dentist’s, all three animals seemed to have an extra spring in their step as their long-term painful conditions were finally addressed. The next day Sovereign eagerly stripped a huge piece of meat with his newly filled teeth, Holly the puma ate some diced chicken, and Fudge happily crunched through a bucket of apples, despite the many stitches in her gums.
Vets’ bills make up just one column on the spreadsheet. In the bigger picture, it’s just a necessary expense in the running of the business. The trouble was, there still was no business. Several potential lenders had pointed this out early on, and some had even cited it as a reason not to lend us money. How unreasonable, I’d thought at the time. But I was beginning to see their point.
Obviously, we had now passed our license inspection, and we could soon open to the public and begin trading. But unfortunately, the date for this to happen had kept slipping further down the calendar—April, then Easter, then June—until it had hit the very worrying month of July. Sixty-five percent of the year’s trading in a seasonal attraction like this takes place in July and August. If any of July went missing from the figures, we would be in serious trouble. And we still weren’t there yet. We had enough to pay the wages and essential creditors until October, then that was it. People had to come in July and August, and in significant numbers. If they didn’t, we could close at the end of our first season. It was sobering, but we ploughed on, using things we already had in stock, recycling existing materials, and enthusiastically turning off lights at the end of the day, though this probably had little impact on the staggering £6,000 monthly electricity bill.
The license had come with a few conditions, mostly things we could address over the next twelve months, but one or two things—like the restaurant—needed to be brought up to standard before we opened. It was all in hand, though, and probably on about 1 July, Adam happily informed us that the bar was now fully functioning, able to serve wines, spirits, and draft cider and bitter, our very dry ale. And Stella Artois. As Adam’s taillights disappeared down the drive that night, Duncan and I and Max, a cameraman with whom we had bonded particularly well, opened up the bar and began sampling this important commodity, for quality control purposes, of course. The bar became a convenient place to meet at the end of the day to debrief each other and discuss story lines that needed following up with Max. Strictly business meetings, of course. Ten days later, the eighty-four-pint barrel was empty, Adam having sold about six pints to the paying public. “I can see that in order to make a profit on the Stella I’m going to have to charge about £12.50 a pint,” he lamented, perhaps slightly tetchily. We sniggered like naughty schoolboys as he walked away—though I am six years older than Adam, and Duncan and Max are considerably more. Of course we realized that this was no way to run a business, though it seemed necessary at the time.
With one day to go before opening, the restaurant was actually ready, the shop was stocked with appealing fluffy toys and DZP-printed merchandise, the meat and vegetable rooms for the animals were gleaming, the new paths were surreally flat and groomed, and the picnic area was dotted with restored picnic tables in front of the new kiosk, whose power and water supply was almost complete in anticipation of the hordes who would, we hoped, soon be swarming around it. Even more striking were the staff, newly kitted out in their pristine uniforms, green for keepers, blue for maintenance, white for catering and retail. Each shirt was emblazoned with Katherine’s logo of a tiger-striped DZP, the last thing she ever designed, destined now, apparently, to outlive her by many years.
The only thing that wasn’t playing ball was the weather. Having passed through the wettest June on record, early July showed no inclination toward becoming summer either. The rain was relentless, and we even had prolonged periods of fog, making it impossible to see more than twenty yards. As Kelly succinctly put it on the eve of our big day, “We’re opening tomorrow, and we’re living in a fucking cloud.” There was nothing to do but have one last tidy-up, one last walk-around, then turn off the lights and see what tomorrow was going to bring.
9
Opening Day
So, the day of 7 July 2007 dawned, and we were going to open to the public at 10 AM. And, amazingly, for the first time in about six weeks, it was sunny. It was actually hot. The sky was cloudless, even the park itself was cloudless, for a change. Down in the car park a small crowd was collecting from half past nine onward, and a ribbon had been strung across the entrance, ready to be cut as the zoo was officially reopened for business for the first time in fifteen months.
Mum, Duncan, and several of the smartly dressed staff were already down at the bottom when I arrived, but we were far out numbered by the expectant crowd of mums with buggies, family groups, and the odd OAP (old-age pensioner). The day before, the weather would have made this highly unlikely, but this sudden gap in the clouds was like the curtains unexpectedly opening on the cast of a play, long in rehearsals with the opening date constantly threatened with delay. Suddenly we were on. These were real customers, all genuinely wanting to visit a real zoo. Some would even be wanting to buy a toy, have a meal, and go to the toilet; so, for the next eight hours (for the first time in our lives), this was our job: to see that this randomly selected cross-section of the public got what they wanted, and left content with their experience.
Mum made a short speech thanking everyone for coming and the staff for all their hard work, then declared the park open and cut the ribbon. Watching her cut her first ceremonial ribbon in seventy-six years, I thought she might have been thinking a little about the house where she was born, which was not even a two-rooms-up, two-down in Sheffield, but a one-up, one-down plus a small attic on top, with tin baths in front of the fire in the living/ dining/kitchen/bathroom. But in fact that was just me being sentimental, and Mum was thinking along much more practical lines of, “Thank God there’s finally some money coming in” and “How can I get up to the top of the drive before all these people?”
As it happened we were carried up the drive at the head of the surge on a huge wave of positive energy and optimism. Apart from me worrying about the steep gullies on the side of the drive which, it had been helpfully pointed out to me many times over the last few months, could easily snap an ankle if someone went over one the wrong way (though in forty years they never had). Everyone in my immediate vicinity somehow made it up the drive safely, but soon they would be at the top, and the first complaints about the restaurant would start to come in, then about the kiosk, the pathways, the toilets, and the rubbish bins. And then, of course, there would be the Code Red. Animal-rights activists cutting some wire, or an excited keeper making a mistake, and suddenly Solomon is running across the picnic area with a baby in his mouth. The screaming crowd disperses never to return, and the sale of the zoo doesn’t cover the claims because we only had £5 million public liability insurance.
Everywhere I looked, there was something that could go wrong. I constantly fiddled with my radio, checking that it could scan both frequencies simultaneously, so that I could pick up customer services catastrophes as well as animal department disasters. I wasn’t actively expecting these things to happen in a pessimistic way, but I wouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised at this stage if any of them did. The emergency mode had been going on for so long, it was hard to stand back and see this day for what it was. An enormous, unqualified success.
People were coming—pouring—up the drive, wandering around, enjoying the facilities. They were buying ice cream, cups of tea, lunch, and toys in the shop and smiling. Furthermore, they were saying nice things to us and the keepers. How well everything looked, what a refreshing change it was, how happy the animals seemed, how hard we must have worked. None of us were used to this. Up until now, most visitors from the outside world had been
officials, bankers, inspectors, lawyers, or creditors of one sort or another, stressing the extreme seriousness of our position, the enormous amount of work ahead, and the disastrous consequences if anything at all went wrong. But here we were, having finally got it right and being praised, continually all day, by a smiling and even grateful public. Toward lunchtime I made my way up to the picnic area, and Solomon was nowhere to be seen, safely behind the wire, entertaining rather than eating his public. And the public were eating at the kiosk. Every picnic table was full; people were sitting on the grass, relaxing and sipping tea—tea they had bought from the kiosk—while small children in socks burned off energy on the bouncy castles. I couldn’t resist a head count, and that first one revealed forty-two adults visible from the bottom corner, which, times £8 entrance fee, translated into £336. Right in front of me we had raised enough money to more than pay for that incredibly expensive power drill we’d had to buy three months before. Plus coffees and teas, plus all the other people milling on the site and in the restaurant. Maybe it was going to work after all.
Then I received my first complaint. “Why have you got these bouncy castles here?” demanded a mildly irate mother. “I brought my child here to see the animals, but he won’t come off. They’re just a distraction.” I didn’t know quite what to say, so I tried out my new customer services mode, apologized, but pointed out that many people used the bouncy castles as a chance for a break so their children could go back to looking at the animals when they’d burned off a bit of excess energy. This platitude seemed to work. Though I took the complaint very seriously, as it was offered, and it made me question the core idea of play facilities momentarily, I was confident enough by now that every zoo and almost every leisure attraction has a play area of some sort, after all, and this was all we could afford at the moment. Usually it’s seen as a form of public service. But there really is no pleasing some people, as I have discovered, though that was the only complaint of the day.
