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 the day wore on, nothing bad happened. The keepers were smiling almost in disbelief at being showered with compliments, praise, and positive feedback. It had been a long haul for them too, the old and the new, in very trying times and with a level of uncertainty about their future that most had not experienced before. What they had experienced before, however, was the public, and I was struck how at ease they all seemed in moving through the crowds, giving impromptu talks, then getting on with their routines. It made sense, of course. None of them had worked in an empty zoo before they came here; crowds were normal.

  The only zoo I had ever worked in, however, was this one, which had always been empty. Any member of the public on the site was our responsibility and had to be escorted at all times. In between being granted the license and opening, less than two weeks before, the local school had asked to visit. I had said yes, and though it was technically allowed as a private visit, it had not gone down well with Steve, Anna, and Peter Wearden. Under strict supervision it had been a tense time, shepherding twenty-six vulnerable youngsters and their six or so adult caretakers through the minefield of dangers that, I had been trained, the zoo presented. Now, suddenly, there were children everywhere, running and laughing, virtually unsupervised and oddly unharmed. I loved seeing them, recognizing the glee on their faces that said they were having a special day out. Here, in our zoo. It was hard to take in.

  The restaurant was also a teeming success: cakes, coffee, tea, panini, hot meals prepared by Gordon, our new chef, all selling well, all being consumed happily, nonchalantly even, by a satisfied public who took for granted that this should be the case. If they had only seen the room where they were eating even a week before, no one would have thought this achievement possible.

  Then something did hit me: Katherine. Throughout the day, amongst the stream of general well-wishers, several people had come and shaken my hand to offer their condolences about Katherine. News of her death had reached the local paper, which had sent a reporter a couple of weeks afterward to cover it. I hadn’t minded, as the questions were suitably restrained, and the young reporter was suitably uncomfortable asking them. Until the photographer turned up. He was a talker, a spiel merchant, which probably served him well with uncertain old ladies whose cats had been rescued by the fire brigade or surly landowners with oversized marrows. It didn’t irritate me much, until he asked for the photo of Katherine he had warned me in advance they wanted to reproduce. I didn’t mind this either, and handed over the only photograph I had of her—one of my favorites, which, to me, could have adorned the cover of Vogue. I asked him to take care of it and post it back afterward, but he said there was no need to take it away, he’d just take a close-up digital picture of it with his vast Nikon, and that would be fine. Even better.

  But when I handed it to him, he said, “Oh, great. She’s beautiful. Yeah, lovely,” and by the time he had the photograph of Katherine in his viewfinder, something clicked in his brain and the spiel came on again, as if he was talking to a living person, in his tacky, squalid monologue. “That’s it, lovely. Beautiful, looking good there”—click, click—”Yeah, that’s it, my lovely, come on, one more”—click, click, click. I can’t tell you everything that went through my mind; suffice to say that I realized that killing him would probably be counterproductive, so I wandered off.

  This article and this picture was produced over a full page in the local paper quite prominently, page three I think, and had been widely read by the local population, it seemed. On opening day, perhaps fifty people came up to me to offer congratulations, and maybe seven of them offered their sympathy about Katherine; one or two really hit a nerve I hadn’t known was there by saying, “I’m sure your wife would have been proud,” or words like it. Obviously, with any comment from any member of the public, you are forced to trawl the validity of their observations, as with the complaint about the bouncy castles. And I had to conclude that perhaps Katherine would have been proud to some extent (though she’d have said something suitably sarcastic about it all). But I wasn’t expecting to have to think about that on this day, until other people brought it up. I was expecting a Code Red, but not one from inside my head.

  To be fair, I had had some warning, though not really in time. The day before the formal opening we had held a VIP reception, where local councillors and various people we were indebted to—or soon to become indebted to—were invited to experience the newly revamped facilities and eat and drink at our expense on one of those jollies I had so often experienced—virtually lived on, in lean times—as a journalist. This, again, was no problem and though a new experience to be on the other side of the fence, it was a delight to be hosting, until people started pulling me aside and saying that same thing: your wife would have been proud.

  I was required to make a short speech, and to thank various people for their help, so I went to the office to prepare something, with the party audible a few rooms away. Unfortunately, there was the article with Katherine’s picture, unearthed and left out by some well-meaning member of staff for me to take over to the house. It was too much, and too unexpected on this day. I felt like I had prepared for everything else, during which processes I had managed to put Katherine to the back of my mind most of the time during the day. But here she was, smiling at me, looking so gorgeous and carefree, little knowing that in a few years she would be dead, under the ground in Jersey, about a mile from where the photograph was taken, leaving her two little children motherless. Such an undeserved death. Would she have been proud? She’d certainly have been pleased to be there, just to have been alive for one thing, but she’d also have absolutely made the occasion, with her effortless, genuine charm. I couldn’t come out of the room for at least an hour. When I finally emerged to make the speech, which was indeed very short, I forgot to mention by name one or two members of the staff, who promptly went into a sulk. I tried to apologize later, but the sulk continued, and though I didn’t mind, my mum was verging on apoplectic. She finally sought out the sulkers and gave them a stiff dose of her plain northern speaking, which, take it from me, you don’t want to be on the receiving end of. A couple of days later, the sulk was at an end.

  But we had other things to think about, like the next day, and the next, stretching into the distance as far as we could see. It had occurred to me while guiding the dumper truck through some of the narrow gateways of the park, which had taken a few weeks to learn how to do efficiently, that I could be driving a dumper around this park for the next twenty-five years. I liked the idea. I’d once spent seven years as a contributing editor on a glossy magazine, and realized that more than half a decade of my life was measured by the yard or so of copies of this mag pressed together on my bookshelf. What was I doing in August 1996? Researching and writing the pieces published under my name in the September 1996 issue, and so on. I had many happy memories, I’d learned many skills, been sent all around the world and met many interesting and lovely people, but it still suddenly seemed like a bit of a treadmill, or a gilded prison. Okay, I’d been sent out on an icebreaker in northern Finland to meet a husky team and go dogsledding for three days; I’d done several free-fall parachute jumps from 14,000 feet (the horror, the horror); I’d been paid to go snowboarding at Lake Tahoe, California, for ten days; I’d swum with dolphins in the Florida Keys (those pesky dolphins were the ones who snapped me out of it). And driving a dumper truck full of manure in the rain may seem less glamorous and more agricultural, but it contained the seeds of something far more important, far more worthwhile. The depth of potential for internal expansion and development on this site in pursuit of such a worthwhile cause was limited only by the imagination. It didn’t seem like a prison at all. As one good friend said to me, when we first started at the zoo, as I was enthusing to her on the phone, “It’s like your whole life has been a preparation for this moment.” And it does seem like that. It feels like a vocation.

  Milo and Ella were also thoroughly enjoying the exposure to these sorts of experie
nces—what child wouldn’t? At first they used to tell everyone they met that they lived in a zoo (usually met with total disbelief), and that Daddy climbed trees in the lions’ den to feed them. Gradually they have developed a deeper understanding of the animals and their needs, cross-referencing their daily exposure with a boundless appetite for natural-history documentaries. They’ve watched so much of Monkey World on Sky television that they probably know more about chimpanzee group dynamics than I do. When we finally get our bonobos (or gorillas or orangs), I’ll probably have to employ them as consultants. But it’s the hours at a time spent out in the park actually watching the animals close up that is really giving them such a thorough grounding in how the world works, and their place in it. Ella hasn’t decided yet, but Milo wants to be a zoo director when he grows up. This zoo director wouldn’t necessarily recommend the position, though it does have enormous benefits. Most of the time is spent on more-or-less tedious matters of infrastructure worries, staff issues, and other concerns that come with running a business open to the public. But every now and then you are called on to spend quality time with, or make a decisive intervention about, the animals. Which is what it’s all about. I can’t imagine investing this much time or emotional energy in any other cause that repays it all so fully.

  Mum, too, is delighted with her new and invigorating role as a zoo director. Though still caught up in the daily running of the place, she always makes time to walk around the park, coo to the animals, and enjoy them—particularly the big cats. Having stroked lions in Namibia instead of retiring to a life of memories in her late seventies, she is notching up other exotic-animal petting conquests—bear, tiger, jaguar, and puma (all anaesthetized)—which leave her fulfilled and make her the envy of her contemporaries. One of these days, she’ll be out there as we planned, with her sketchbook, drawing from life her own tigers.

  Without the animals, there is nothing I can envision that would have lured me from my life in France—and nothing that could have helped us all so much to cope with the terrible loss of Katherine. With the animals, there is a clear mission, which everyone here feels part of.

  Epilogue

  The day after opening, a Sunday, was also a scorcher, and more people came. Again we were flooded with visitors, awash with praise, and nothing went wrong. It was astonishing. It was a weekend, of course, but before the school holidays had begun this could only be considered a good turnout. Now all we needed was a summer full of such days, and the seamless plan would glide effortlessly into the future.

  Unfortunately, after our wettest June, we then experienced the wettest July for a hundred years as well. But on the good days, it was unbelievably good. People flocked to the park, spending the whole day here, buying stuff, having a nice time. And learning about animals and conservation, and experiencing the natural world from closer up than most had ever seen it before. This was a massive, unexpected pleasure. I loved seeing the people swarm over the park, enjoying themselves, enthralled by the animals. It is uniquely infectious being amongst a crowd of people who are so clearly having such a good time, and knowing that you have in part been able to provide it. Seeing the animals I had become accustomed to—though not blasé about—through new eyes, particularly those of children, was enormously refreshing.

  The animals liked having the public there too. A lot of visitors say that they like the intimacy of this zoo, where you can get much closer to the animals than is usual. This is not because the enclosures are small—many are far larger than those of bigger zoos. We just have fewer of them, and several are designed, like Tiger Mountain and the jaguar and bear enclosures, so that there is no wire between viewer and beast. This creates an intimate—and often spine-tingling, hairs-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck—experience, which seems to work two ways. On that opening weekend, the animals were out and about much more than before. The tigers and the wolves in particular were clearly showboating. Of course, having been born on site, they were used to crowds (though not so many in recent years), and seeing people milling around restored their normality. It was good to see them sniffing the air, taking it all in, and settling down somewhere conspicuous to watch us watching them.

  August was less wet, almost like a proper summer month, and packed with busy days, many of them breaking records set the previous week. On August bank holiday we had nearly twice the number of visitors as on our opening day itself—according to Robin, who has been here for nearly twenty years—as busy as any day he had ever seen.

  Other good news was the arrival of the lynx from France. We had been trusted by another zoo to look after a gorgeous, young Siberian lynx, on the stud book and ready to breed. We would need to build her an enclosure, but in the meantime she could go into quarantine in the enclosure Sovereign had vacated when he went back to his revamped home at the top of the park. (Sovereign’s old pad had been passed by DEFRA as suitable for this purpose.)

  The lynx was gorgeous, so much more sleek and lithe than the elderly lynx, Fin, we already had, for whom she was to be a companion when she finished her quarantine, though obviously she was a bit tense at the unfamiliarity of her surroundings. She was deposited successfully into the quarantine pen, which we were confident she could not escape from; if Sovereign couldn’t get out, no one could. And I hardly saw her for the next six months, partly because she was a bit shy, but also because it was a nuisance to negotiate the gates and footbaths necessary to maintain the quarantine.

  The rest of the summer passed in a blur, up early, bed late, a blizzard of meetings and decisions in between, but all moving in the right direction. One slightly sad adjustment for me was that, shortly after opening day, the camera crew, having got what they needed for their four-part series, packed up and left. As a journalist I had got on well with the crew, and the core group— Francis the producer, Joyce, Max, Charlie, and Trevor—had been embedded with us for so long that they seemed like part of the staff, only less prone to bickering. Over the months they had watched us develop, and we had watched them—particularly Trevor, who had arrived on his first day in a gleaming rental car and unpacked a brand-new pair of walking boots from the back, still wrapped in tissue paper in their box. He didn’t look like he’d last long, but Trevor was quietly steely, and by the end he was usually spattered with mud, and his boots were unrecognizable, worn in and virtually worn out on a single job. At the start I had related to the crew at least as much as the staff, because they were from a world I knew. But by the end, hearing them talk longingly of Paddington Station, where they arrived after their week’s shift in the countryside yearning for overpriced cappuccinos and Soho eateries, I realized that I had changed. I didn’t yearn for these things, and the few times I had been required to go to London, I couldn’t wait to get out, and back to the clear air and big trees of the park. But I missed their banter. Trevor had a particular phrase when he was pleased with a sequence he’d shot: “That’s TV gold,” he’d announce, grinning and putting down his camera if something had gone well, like when an animal had strolled into the shot.

  However, after the summer, the numbers dropped off sharply. So sharply, in fact, that several people got nervous that the business was going to fail, and one or two even resigned to look for safer jobs. I was glad to see them go. With their kind of loyalty, the business would surely work better without them, but it increased the workload and the recruitment process was inevitably time consuming. I am happy to say that we now have a full complement of dedicated, harmonious keepers and maintenance and catering staff who all seem to get along seamlessly, though in my new role as Someone Who Sacks People, perhaps I’d be the last to know if they didn’t.

  Soon, the mild autumn and the marketing of the new education officer produced regular snaking, gabbling, grinning convoys of school parties, holding hands in pairs, making a sound like a mobile babbling brook, watched over by fraught, young (so young!) teachers. These boosted our income, increased our profile locally, and provided the educational service we’re here for.

  It
had been a stormingly successful summer, in terms of gate numbers on sunny days, spend per head, customer satisfaction, and feedback. But I knew the bank wouldn’t see it like this. And they didn’t. As far as they were concerned, July hadn’t produced as much money as we had said it would, and they refused to extend our credit (“It was raining, guys, but more people came on the other days.” “That Does Not Compute . . .”) for the winter if we needed it, even though they had promised that they would if the basic business model seemed to be working. Which it clearly was. But once again, we were on our own. And once again, it was looking bad. The late start to the season had cost us dearly, as had the rain, and the reserves we needed to pay wages and running costs for the winter were not as big as we’d hoped. Even closing for a few months, as many attractions do, would make little difference, as we needed core staff to keep going, and the bills would keep coming. We sensed distant lawyers reaching for box files and dispassionately perusing repossession clauses.

  And then the TV series started.

  Ben’s Zoo went out on BBC2 from late November to early December, from 8 to 9 PM, and was watched by an average of 2.5 million people a week. Things started to change. During the first program, Adam monitored the Web site and reported a thousand hits during the transmission, many of them much-needed animal adoption enquiries. The next weekend, fortunately mild, the trickle started, and rose to a torrent over the next few weeks. By the time the Christmas holidays had begun, we were inundated. And everyone had nice things to say. Mainly locals, many of whom had been to the park before and drifted away during the years of decline, congratulating us on the improvements. It was a lovely feeling, like summer all over again. Keepers were being recognized and given presents of chocolates and flowers by an adoring public, and I found it impossible to move about the park without being congratulated every few yards by a gaggle of well-wishers. Though it meant having the same conversation about fifty times a day, I didn’t mind in the slightest, and I was genuinely, enormously grateful to everyone who came. The crushing handshakes became a problem, though, as all the men around here seem to have huge, strong hands unlike my “women’s” hands, made delicate by fifteen years of typing for a living. One old man in particular, a little guy on crutches, actually gave me a sprain. I asked him, while massaging my hand, what he had done for a living, expecting him to say crushing rocks with his bare hands in a circus. “Graphic designer,” he replied, which wasn’t good for my ego.