We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

I’d picked up from the twenty or so leading attractions in Devon – was now very much hypothetical. The urgent spending which was due to commence as we arrived was now delayed as we searched for new lenders, who circled again, sniffing with renewed interest as we had lurched to a new status with their back-room boys, as holders of actual assets.

      As it turned out, the back-room boys remained less than impressed. We could hear their collective eyebrows creak up, releasing small puthers of dust from their brows, but the calculators were quickly deployed, and though some offers were tentatively made, all were swiftly withdrawn. This was a problem which was going to catch up with us fast, so with phones glued to our ears, we set about trying to solve immediate problems on the ground without actually spending any money. In those first few days, we walked in wonder around the park, meeting the animals, gathering information, marvelling at the bears, wolves, lions and tigers, getting to know the keepers, and grinning wildly that this was our new life.

      The first time I met Kelly, with Hannah one of the two dedicated cat keepers who had stayed on against the odds to look after the animals, sometimes not being paid, and having to pay for vitamin supplements for the animals (and rudimentary sundries like torch batteries, and toilet paper for their own use) out of their own pockets, I got a surprise. ‘Are you the new owner?’ she asked, wide eyed and intense, to which I replied I was one of them. ‘Can you please do something about the situation with these tigers?’ I had no idea what situation she was talking about, but Kelly soon filled me in. The top tiger enclosure is a moated range of 2100 square metres called Tiger Rock, after the enormous Stonehenge-like boulder construction which is its centrepiece. It contained three tigers: Spar, at 19, the elderly patriarch of the park, and two sisters, Tammy and Tasmin, 10 and 11. But only two tigers were ever out in the enclosure at any one time. This was because Spar, though old, was still a red-blooded male, and occasionally tried to mate with the two girls, even though his back legs were arthritic and wobbly, and they were his granddaughters. Five years earlier, Tammy and Tasmin were given contraceptive injections to prevent inbreeding (and because Ellis was not allowed to breed tigers anymore, having recently been prosecuted for 32 counts of illegal tiger breeding). The unfortunate result of this hormonal change in the two sisters was that they suddenly hated each other and began to fight, and fighting tigers are very difficult to separate. It could only end in death, so one of the sisters was locked into the tiger house for 24 hours, while the other played fondly with her granddad. Then the other tiger would be locked away for 24 hours, allowing her sister a day-long taste of freedom. As Kelly explained this to me, she drew my attention to the a-rhythmic banging coming from the tiger house, which I had assumed was some maintenance work. In fact it was Tammy, frustrated by her confinement in a 6 x 12ft (2 x 3m) cell, banging on the metal door to get out. Kelly was on the brink of tears as she told me that this had been going on for five years, causing enormous suffering to the tigers (and keepers), and making them much more dangerous to handle. ‘It’s unacceptable in a modern zoo,’ Kelly ended, slightly unnecessarily, as even an amateur like me could appreciate this. I immediately promised her that we would do whatever was necessary to rectify the situation, which turned out to be finding one of the warring sisters a new home. A new tiger enclosure was expensive and unfeasible (we already had two), and would have meant permanent isolation for one of the girls. I asked Kelly to research new homes for whichever tiger was most suitable to pass on, and walked away from the encounter amazed that such an ongoing systemic problem had not arisen in the negotiations to buy the zoo. On the bright side, it was a big improvement we could make for almost no cost, but it was one we hadn’t been expecting, and it was worrying that we hadn’t known about it before we bought the zoo. Why had Peter Wearden or Mike Thomas not told me about this? What else would emerge?

      It was all the more surprising given that Peter and Mike had not been shy about throwing me in at the deep end with difficult animal-management decisions already. On the phone from France, probably about three months before we bought the park, Peter sprang something on me as the last bidder planning to run the place as a zoo: ‘What are you going to do about the two female jaguars?’ he asked. ‘Er, they’re lovely. What’s the problem?’ ‘The house fails to meet with industry standards and there is a serious concern about the possibility of an escape.’ ‘Can’t it be rebuilt, or refurbished?’ ‘It’s been patched up too many times already, and rebuilding it with the animals in the enclosure is unfeasible. They have to be moved. If you’re going to be the new owner, you have to decide now what you are going to do.’

      Standing barefoot in my hot, dusty, French barn office, looking out over sun-drenched vineyards throbbing with cicada song 700 miles away from this unfamiliar problem, I was taken aback. I wriggled for a bit, suggesting they be rehoused in the puma enclosure and move the less dangerous pumas elsewhere, desperately searching for a way of keeping these two gorgeous big cats on the site. Hand reared from cubs, they were particularly responsive to humans, answered their names and rubbed up against the wire-like epic versions of domestic moggies. Sovereign, the male jaguar housed separately, only got on with one of the females, who could be tried with him, but the sister cats were inseparable from birth and would pine for each other. As a keeper of cats (albeit domestic ones) since childhood, I understood the very real suffering this would cause, and instinctively shied away from that option.

      In the end I realized that this was a test, and the correct response was to roll with it, however uncomfortable it felt. For the good of the animals, and in the interests of demonstrating a break from the past to the council, I asked Peter what he recommended. ‘Re-house them in another zoo as soon as you take over,’ he said. ‘Mike Thomas will organize it for you.’ I canvassed Mike and Rob, the head keeper currently responsible for the jags under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, and they both said the same thing. To prevent the very real risk of an escape, we should re-house as soon as possible. With a very deep sigh, I eventually agreed. ‘That’s the right answer,’ said Mike. ‘For that, you can probably get a couple of those zebras you’ve been on about, some way down the line when you’re ready to receive them. And probably a breeding female for Sovereign later on.’ This I liked, spots for stripes, and it made me feel a little closer to the zoo world, knowing I had made a tough decision everyone approved of, and was building credibility.

      But with two prime big cats going, the Tammy/Tasmin question loomed large. In the first few days it also came out that a wolf and three of the seven vervet monkeys had also been ostracized by their groups and needed re-housing. Would we have any animals left by the time we re-opened? One well-meaning relative called to helpfully explain that I had made an elementary blunder with the jaguars. ‘If you’re going to run a zoo, it has to have animals in it,’ she said. The sense of siege from all sides was tightening, but I was sure that I’d made the right decision with all the information available to me on the ground, and it only made me more determined.

      In these very early days a lot of time was spent clearing out the house and grounds of junk, and burning it on a huge fire in the yard. This was cathartic for us and the park as a whole, but must have been hard for relatives of Ellis like Rob, his grandson, who had to help haul furniture which was dilapidated but still things he had grown up with, onto the pyre. I’d already agreed that Rob could stay in the run down cottage on site, and offered him anything he wanted to salvage, but generally he seemed relieved by the process, and Rob was extremely positive and helpful towards us.

      But then, four days after we took over Dartmoor Wildlife Park, while chatting to Rob about what to do with our surplus stock, the unthinkable happened. One of the most dangerous animals on the park, Sovereign, was accidentally let out of his enclosure by a catastrophic blunder from a junior keeper. At about 5.30 pm I was sitting with Rob in the kitchen when Duncan burst in, shouting ‘ONE OF THE BIG CATS IS OUT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,’ and then ran off again. Now, Duncan doesn’t normally shout, or get agitated, but here he was clearly doing both. Rob disappeared like a puff of smoke, and I knew he’d gone to get the guns and organize the staff’s response. I sat for an increasingly surreal moment, and then decided that, as a director of a zoo I probably ought to go and see exactly what was going on. I started making my way towards the part of the park where the big cats are kept. This was one of the strangest moments of my life. All I knew was that a big cat – a lion, a tiger? – was out, somewhere, and may be about to come bounding round the corner like an energetic Tigger, but not nearly so much fun. I saw a shovel and