Chapter 6 The New Crew

After Katherine’s death, I felt as if I might not give a damnabout the zoo. But actually I did. Technically, I could see thatthe zoo was still possible—inevitable, in fact, or we werebust and the animals would be dispersed or killed— andthis fact was bolted to my mind. And as far as I wasconcerned, other people who couldn’t see this could simplyfuck off.
Grief, apparently, according to the widely acceptedKübler Ross model, generally has five stages: Denial,Anger, Bargaining (where you try to make a deal with Godor fate, or in lesser circumstances, the person who has leftyou), Depression, and Acceptance. I feel as if I skipped thefirst three and went straight to depression and acceptancesimultaneously. But the idea of anger intrigued me. I didn’tfeel anger as such—there was nothing and no one to feelanger toward for this random biological event, apart fromsome small-minded mishandling by some of the healthcarepeople involved, and they were just institutionalized cogs ina flawed machine. Besides, I didn’t have the energy foranger.
But I did feel a strong sense of disbelief that peoplecould be so petty. I didn’t mind seeing people arguing in thestreet, or not appreciating each other or frittering theirvaluable time in some other way. I could understand thatthey had drifted into this perspective and it was quitenormal. What really got me, though, was the pettiness ofmany of the people at the park, particularly when there wassuch a clear and obvious common goal to reach for. I sat inon meetings and listened to endless silly bickering andpower plays: “I can’t work with so-and-so”; “He said this, soI said . . .” I stood out in the park in the rain impassively,awash with keepers’ complaints about things like leakingwheelbarrows when they already knew that replacementswere on order, and I wondered how anything in the worldever gets done. But these tiny, seemingly irrelevantpreoccupations, I realized, were the stuff of life. People’sdaily experiences, what they had to deal with on the ground,were what it was all about—and that was somewhere onwhich I had to refocus.
Being part of the zoo had definitely helped, even in themost extreme times. Looking out of the window and seeingyoung keepers laughing as they worked, aware thatsomeone was ill in the house and obviously sympathetic,but still knowing they had a job to do looking after theanimals and getting on with it. Keeping the park going wasparticipating in the cycle of life. Things were born, likepiglets or a deer, and things died, like Spar the Tiger, orone of the owls. And Katherine. But no matter howdevastating for me, the children, or Duncan and Mum, lifegoes on. It was like being on a farm, where it can’t simplystop because one person isn’t there.
For now, there was work to do: new repairs to make, newstaff to hire, and most important, getting our license to tradeas a zoo. This is a complicated procedure, whereby youhave to give notice of your intention to apply two monthsbefore you do so, to allow objections to be raised, aired,and assessed. In our case we knew we could expect strongobjections from animal rights activists who had targeted thepark’s poor practices in the past, but the local communitywas supportive, and the council was showing no signs ofbeing obstructive. An inspection date would then bebooked, after which a verdict could take another six weeksto deliver. So far, straightforward. But the problem was thatif we failed this inspection, we couldn’t just rebook one in aweek or so; we would have to go through the wholeprocedure again, complete with the two-month delay andpossible six-week wait for the result. If we failed theinspection, it would be catastrophic for the business plan,which relied entirely on maximizing the income from thesummer season.
By early April we had already missed Easter, the firstand sometimes biggest bonanza weekend on the leisureindustrycalendar and a significant pillar of our businessplan. As the winter progressed, we’d tentatively suggestedearly June as our opening date, backtracking ourinspection date from there. But in view of the amount ofwork to be done, eventually we settled for July. Which gaveus an inspection date of June 4. There was a cleardeadline to meet, a certain number of tasks to be carriedout before then, and as long as these were addressedaccordingly, it was a done deal. Probably.
My participation was clearly necessary, but it took me awhile to readjust to this already broadly unfamiliarenvironment. In those days, I needed to be alone to cryevery few hours or so. I was lucky that the nature of my job,as roving troubleshooter and director, allowed me to beable to do this. I could steer a meeting or oversee the sitingof a fence post, and then make my excuses and leave,ostensibly to pursue some urgent business about the park.
More often than not, however, I’d hole up in one of my safehavens—the attic, the top of the observation tower, the ferngarden—and let the tears roll. It was like a bottomlessreservoir, busting at the dams, needing to be drainedbefore any progress could be made.
While I had been watching from the house or the frontlawn, Steve was recruiting two new senior keepers.
Normally it would have been unthinkable that I wasn’tinvolved directly in the interview and selection process, as Iobviously have a keen personal interest in who is employedon the site. I want to know about their philosophies ofanimal management, their interpersonal skills, and see howthey respond to the interview itself. I find that with the fewstaff that I have interviewed and then taken on, the interviewitself comes up in conversation from time to time as animportant part of the transaction between us. I may remindthem of something they agreed to do, or they remind me ofa commitment I made, or we laugh about someembarrassing moment. But the interview is criticallyimportant to me in establishing just who exactly we will beputting our trust in, and several candidates fell very wide ofthe mark. But as it was, I was distantly aware that theselection process was going on, and trusted Steve’sjudgment entirely.
And I was right to do so. The two keepers he recruited inthat time, Owen and Sarah, had both participated ininternationally recognized rare-animal breeding programs.
And both of them brought useful contacts lists forexchanges with other zoos, and the personal credibility toback them up. In other words, each keeper carries a directexperience of breeding rare animals that follows themaround. Sarah, for instance, has unique and directexperience of the fishing cats at Port Lympne Zoo, whosedirectors were so impressed with her that they said abreeding pair could come with her to DZP, as soon as wecould build them a suitable enclosure. Owen, a soft-spokenbut assertive young Scots man who grew up on a croft, orsmall farm, also has a portfolio of rare animals—in his casebirds—which follows him around, and his best idea was tocover the flamingo lake with a large enclosed aviary andput in a mangrove swamp to house some of his moreexotic future acquisitions. I agreed immediately, and thenasked how we would go about putting mangroves in. “Idon’t know yet,” said Owen. “But I’ll find out and let youknow.” Then it would be over to me to work out whether wecould implement it. Such are the challenges that face a zoodirector, I was discovering. But these are enjoyablechallenges, and being able to commission a mangroveswamp is a position I never thought I’d be in.
Owen and Sarah, who were now the senior keepers,were several times referred to as “stars” by people in thezoo world, such as Nick Lindsay and Mike Thomas. Owenand Sarah were people they had read about in theliterature, whose reputations preceded them. Even PeterWearden, our local environmental health officer, seemed tohave heard of them, or at least appreciated the significanceof us being able to attract them to work for us. Owen, I’dbeen told, had turned down a place at San Diego Zoo towork here. San Diego is a world leader in many fields,including his, a place that could offer him almostunimaginable resources to pursue his interests. One day Iasked him why he’d chosen this run-down place instead, inan area with one of the highest rainfalls in Britain, and notthe resource-rich, sunnier climes of Southern California.
“When I walked round the place, I obviously saw theamazing potential of the site,” he said. “But I also saw thatthere was a great sadness here, and that sadness wassomething I wanted to reverse.” He wasn’t talking aboutKatherine, he was talking about the effects of the long,slow, twenty-year decline of the park, on the people, theanimals, and the infrastructure—piles of clutter everywhere,hoarded in hope that had gradually ebbed away, leaving aresidue of fatalism and algae behind it.
Owen and Sarah may have been stars, but they were notprima donnas. They were physically tough andhardworking. Having both relocated from far-flung UK zoos,they initially had no accommodation and so they campedon site in the interminable rain, doing their laundry andwashing up in the rest rooms of the restaurant. I offeredthem use of the shower in the house, when it worked, butthey were happier with their subsistence living—andbesides, the hot water was more reliable in the restaurant.
Out in the park in all weathers, they led from the front, andboth regularly spent many extra hours until dark, mendingenclosures, building new ones, and continuing the on goingproject of the park without the need for constant guidance.
And they fulfilled the license requirement of training theexisting staff in the ways of modern zoo practices.
This “trickle down” training was something we had beentold we needed to do or else close down. Or rather, notopen at all. The people we employed to look after theanimals—Rob, Kelly, Hannah, Paul, John, and even Robinon occasion—were skilled and experienced, but they werenot qualified. For all their hands-on knowledge and years inthe trenches, there was barely a diploma among them. Andthese days, zoo-license-wise, paper qualifications arecritical. I was delighted that these trickle-down processeswere going on, because it was a vital part of our licenserequirement that we employed fully trained staff.
Increasingly now I roamed the park believing that theimpossible, which then became the merely improbable,had now, objectively, become the very likely. In fact, I hadnever had any doubt that we were going to succeed inopening the park, but increasingly, surrounded by so manypessimistic perspectives, I had begun to understand otherpeople’s perceptions and I hadn’t liked what I saw from theother side. Even though I knew they were wrong, the sheerweight of numbers in the naysaying camp was almost overwhelming.
To be fair, they had some good points. For one thing, weneeded sixty thousand visitors a year to break even, and atthe moment we had nowhere to feed them. The restaurant,supposed to be a going concern, contained barely a singleserviceable appliance. The dishwasher, gas hob, ovens,microwaves, and two of the three fat fryers didn’t work.
Luckily our new ideas for the menu, involving healthy, locallysourced food, meant that we wouldn’t be needing the twobroken fat fryers, but everything else needed to bereplaced. I had a dream for the restaurant, which was to getit as smart as a Conran venue and open it in the eveningsas a separate entity from the zoo. The figures for the lastthree years’ trading, though in sharp decline, showed thatthe restaurant and bar were the engine of the park,accounting for more than a third of its total income. With itsgrimy Artex ceiling, strip lights, heavy dark-blue carpets andcurtains, and a kitchen full of grease-coated scrap, it wasgoing to be a long haul to get there. The other thing that thetrading figures showed was that the month of August wasabsolutely critical, with combined ticket and restaurantsales accounting for approaching half of the annual income.
August was make or break, and if we missed it, we weresunk. “I think that this August will provide about sixty percentof your income this year,” Mike Thomas told me on one ofhis visits, sitting in the uninspiring environs of therestaurant. A quick glance around us left me in no doubt asto the scale of the task ahead. If sixty thousand peoplearrived over the summer wanting to be fed, we simplycouldn’t afford for them to walk out and find somewhereelse to eat as we had once done, in the park’s final opendays last spring. As well as the requirements for theanimals, this was a business, and the customer serviceside had to be treated with equal importance, or the vetbills wouldn’t get paid and the worthy conservation planswould be unworkable.
So Duncan and I started going to pubs—strictly forresearch purposes, you understand—to observe cateringoperations in action. We put in many, many, dedicated,selfless long hours in this quest for catering enlightenmentbefore settling in a carvery down the road in nearbyPlympton that had an exceptional catering staff. The otherinteresting thing about this venue, though far removed fromour aspirations for our own facilities, was that it wasextremely well run. And always packed. A constant streamof local people came here to eat, so that a good naturedline almost always stretched from the restaurant to the bar.
This meant that, in order to conduct our reconnaissanceeffectively, we had to loiter at a part of the bar forbidden toall but diners, which we did. What struck me was that, whena certain manager named Mark was on, we were alwaysasked to move within about five minutes. Initially he wassatisfied with our line, “We’re waiting for some friends,” buton about the fourth visit he laughed and said, “Are thesefriends of yours ever going to turn up?” Mark waseverywhere: in the kitchen, amongst the tables, behind thebar, even facing down a gang of towering teenagers whohad broken a window the evening before. I warmed to him,confessed that we were actually engaged in mild industrialespionage, and asked if he’d like to help us at the zoo. Hedidn’t want to leave his job, but he agreed, and worked outsome simple menu ideas that could be produced relativelyeasily using mass-market catering suppliers. Thesesuppliers provided food for several well-known zoos, someof which I’d visited and sampled the food of, and it wasn’tso bad. With minimum intervention we could tidy up therestaurant, provide simple food to get us through the allimportantmonth of August, then re-vamp the place duringthe quieter winter months. It sounded like a plan, but a planthat worried me. Now we had the money for theredevelopment, though we were running out of time. By thetime winter came, at the rate funds were flowing out, it wasquite possible that the money would have been spent onother things. Mark visited us several times, brimming withenthusiasm, but because of his full-time job, hissuggestions inevitably entailed a lot of legwork on our side.
As the weeks inched forward toward crunch time, we had todecide whether to go for the holding strategy or the boldmove, orchestrating a full revamp and a “hard” opening,showcasing our radical changes. What we needed wassomeone to take this problem in its entirety, run with it, andturn it into a solution for the other ills at the park.
And then came Adam. I was in a bad mood when I firstmet Adam, standing out by the otter enclosure in a largearea of the park I had always wanted to dedicate to freerangingmonkeys, and to my father, Ben Harry Mee, whohad provided the funds for the park—albeit unwittingly andposthumously, and absolutely certainly (had he been alive)unwillingly. I wanted more tropical trees populated withcolorful birds, endangered, people-friendly primatesrunning loose, and a modest monument to my dadsomewhere, the Ben Harry Mee Memorial Jungle. It wouldhave been the last thing he’d ever have expected, and Iknew that despite his disapproval at the obvious folly of themisuse of his hard-earned capital designated for the futuresecurity of his family, he would have been quietly amusedby this. I liked to picture him sitting down to read in atranquil jungle glade to the sound of kookaburras and birdsof paradise, beset by curious little monkeys, before finallysnapping his book shut and saying, “It’s bloody ridiculous.”
But he’d have kept going back, and one day we’d havefound him feeding the monkeys with a stash of somethinghe’d carefully observed that they loved to eat.
All this was constantly under threat from pressures withinthe zoo for other uses of the land. The petting zoo had to gosomewhere, as did the education center involving a naturepond; between them, they would eat at least two-thirds ofthis space. That morning I had also endured aninterminable barrage of phone calls from double-glazingwindowsalesmen; people who wanted to do marketing,advertising, and building work; and two companies that hada surefire way to reduce our business rates for a small fee(both utterly and obviously spurious), as well as a constantstream of personal callers, usually people who had workedin the park before and wanted their old jobs back, as longas such and such a person wasn’t there anymore. I had hadenough. And then Duncan came up the path, accompaniedby a tall, fresh-faced man called Adam, who had sent mean e-mail a week or two before to offer his services as acatering manager.
Catering was one of the few areas we more or less hada handle on, it seemed to me at the time (though I was sowrong). “What? Yes, fine. I’ll look at your CV,” or tersewords to that effect were probably how I initially responded,making a note to remind Duncan that the last thing weneeded was a change of direction now. But Duncan wasconvinced by Adam. His story was that he had worked inretail and customer services from a young age until veryrecently, in his thirties, when his father had sold the nearbythriving Endsleigh Garden Center to a national chain, andthey had both retired to pursue other avenues. In his father’scase, this meant buying a yellow biplane and setting upanother business in the sunnier climes of southern France(bastard). In Adam’s, it meant buying a nice house in thelocality and setting up a farm shop on the grounds of thegarden center to sell organic produce for the morediscerning market.
The more I delved, the more it seemed to make sense.
Adam wanted to open the restaurant in the evenings—hehad the bearing of the perfect ma?tre d’—and he hadexcellent customer service credentials and experience ofthe local market. And he wanted to start right away. After aweek of dithering, we took him on, and it was as if a weighthad been lifted on that side of the park. Adam wanted to gofor the full revamp, and immediately set about pulling inquotes from reliable local tradesmen he had worked withbefore, ploughing through the administrative processeswith the council, and even finding time to take a onedaylicensing course so that he could be the named licensee forthe bar.
Suddenly this tall man with the enthusiasm of a youngpup, impeccably polite and diplomatic at all times, becameone of our most valuable assets. Undaunted by theprospect of fitting out the restaurant, shop, and kitchensimultaneously, he also ran a computer business and waseager to fit an electronic point of sale (EPOS) till systemwhich would give us instant feedback on visitor numbers,how much they spent and on what (the critical spend-perheadstatistic that we really needed to get above ￡5 perperson on top of their ticket price), and even their postalcodes, so we knew where our market was coming from.
We came to rely on Adam, and not just for his problemsolvingabilities and propensity to take up any slack hesaw, even if it didn’t directly concern him. “Can I make asuggestion?” he would say, leaning in like a wine stewardabout to rescue an ignorant customer from the perils of acomplicated wine list, whenever he saw a problem thatwasn’t being properly addressed. No, what I began to relyon most from Adam was his optimism. Having someonewho said, “Of course, no problem. I’ll get on to it right away,”
instead of “It’ll be expensive, and you’ll have to do X and Yfirst and that’s going to be impossible,” made all thedifference. Optimism was undoubtedly Adam’s mostvaluable contribution.
I once lost quite a lot of blood, about two pints, after asilly accident in a martial arts class (I walked forward when Ishould have stepped back, and took a precision blow to thenose that ruptured something deep in my nasal cavities).
Sitting in the emergency room, dripping prolifically into aseries of compressed cardboard trays, I gradually gotweaker. Young(ish) men with skinhead haircuts andnosebleeds, particularly inflicted by some sort of violence,take a low priority in Accident and Emergency. There’salways a car crash or a heart attack ahead of you, and itwasn’t until my vision started tunnelling and everything wentinto black-and-white that I finally staggered up and informedthe nearest nurse that I was about to pass out, then lay backon my trolley to do just that. Suddenly I was an emergency,and I was dimly aware of a phalanx of medicalprofessionals bearing down on me, ER style, armed withdrips and other bits of reassuring kit. Katherine, who hadbrought me in, didn’t help by saying “Phwoorr,” because atthe head of the phalanx was a bronzed Australian orderlywhose half-sleeve white tunic showed off his amplymuscled forearms, as she had been pointing out to me forthe last two hours. Just as my eyes closed and I started tobe sucked into unconsciousness, they fitted a saline dripinto my arm and gave me some injections, and thesensation was extraordinary. It was exactly like having anenormous thirst quenched, but instead of the reliefspreading outward from the stomach, it was spreadingfrom my arm. That was what it was like having Adam takeover the restaurant at this difficult time. A seeminglyperipheral piece of the puzzle was infecting the whole placewith renewed positivity. The oil tanker of the park wasgradually being turned around before it drifted onto therocks.
The other thing that Adam brought in that cheered me upwere builders, and good ones—well kitted out,hardworking, and versatile. Special mention has to go toTim the carpenter, small but perfectly formed, and head of asmall highly skilled team, which laid a solid oak floor in thethree hundred square meters of the restaurant, built a curvyservice counter based on a whimsical sketch I drew in threeminutes on the back of an envelope, and clad the revoltingbar in the leftover pieces of oak, on budget, and all in aboutsix weeks.
During this time, materials were arriving, electricianswere fiddling with new sunken spot lighting, andplasterboard gradually blotted out the Artex, that decoratingcrime against humanity, on the ceiling. There was floorsanding going on, painting, the first and second fix, allthings I knew about and had witnessed many times, sureindicators of ongoing progress. Whenever I passed throughthe restaurant, it felt good, and I was drawn into discussionswith conscientious experts in fields I also actually knewsomething about. Hell, I was a DIY expert, officially in print. Igenuinely could make informed decisions in a familiar field,instead of having to learn everything from scratch as anoutsider. Whenever I got the chance, I would join in a bit,usually during the lunch hour (even good builders have lunchhours, but I couldn’t seem to justify the time). I rememberone happy afternoon smashing the execrable tiles off thewall behind the counter with a large hammer and abricklayer’s bolster, and another using a belt sander to puta snub-nosed radius on the edge of the beautiful new oakcladbar. These were fleeting visits to a simpler life, and Ialways had to reenter the general fray beyond sooner than Iwould have liked. But, like all good and righteous DIYinterventions, they were good for the soul.
Peter Wearden made several visits to the park in theearly days to see how things were going, give advice, andusually drop off interminable piles of unappetizing matter—Imean, essential reading—such as turgid ring bindersentitled “Secretary of State’s Handbook for Modern ZooPractice,” and “The Zoo Forum’s Handbook.” These, alongwith the health and safety literature, and food, drinks, andentertainment licensing forms, really are essential but nottempting reading. Perfect for dipping into relevantparagraphs in support of some application, or rapidlybringing on sleep at the end of a busy day.
But then one day he passed me something that nearlybrought me to tears: a paper from the journal Biologistabout why we need zoos. I really nearly could have cried.
The big folders of nonsense merely added to the alreadyenormous unfamiliar workload, joining pressing materialfrom banks, lawyers, and creditors, which already overfilledmy day. Suddenly, here was an academic paper I neededto read and digest, in support of future media interviews,press releases, or public debates.
Fifteen years earlier, I had taken a master’s course atImperial College London in science journalism, and sincethen I had been making my living to a greater or lesserdegree by translating into English science papers exactlylike this one, and many much more impenetrable, forpublications in glossy magazines and newspapers andoccasional broadcasts on radio and television. Seeing thepaper felt like home, far more than the house we weresitting in. It was even presented on a stapled black-andwhiteA4 photocopy, a format very familiar, and handy formy pencil notes in the margin. For the last ten months Idon’t think I’d looked at or even thought about a scientificpaper amidst the pressing urgencies of zoo acquisition.
Though I was by now already mentally, physically, andemotionally pretty drained, at last I was being asked tomove back (at least a tiny bit) onto familiar territory, and thisrare ray of positivity was not just a reminder of how life usedto be, but an indication of how it could be again.
One of the main attractions for me in buying the zoo hadbeen the prospect of conducting scientific research andwriting about it in journals, books, and magazines. And thislittle sliver of science, carefully folded and put in my pocketnext to the pencil that would soon be scribbling on it,reminded me that that was still possible—once we’dresolved that pesky matter of getting a ￡500,000 loan,spending it in the right way to get a zoo license, the licensebeing granted in time, and then enough people comingthrough the door for the zoo to be able to support theinterest payments on that loan. Piece of cake. Then I couldthink about research projects.
Another very welcome piece of scientific material, whichcame my way a few weeks later, was the AustralianRegional Association of Zoological Parks (ARAZP)husbandry manual for the species Prionailurus viverrinus,or fishing cats. As an act of enormous faith in us, subject togetting our license of course, another zoo, Port Lympne,had offered us a breeding pair of these incredibly feisty,medium-size cats. Standing up to thirty-three inches tall andweighing over thirty pounds, they are taller than a whippetand heavier than a Staffordshire bull terrier, and far moredangerous than either. Classed as a “hazardous” animal tokeep, in their native Asia they have been known to “fight offpacks of dogs, carry off babies, and even kill a leopard.”
And, according to the IUCN (International union forConservation of Nature), they are “Near Threatened.”
Though only one category away from “Least Concern,” thisis also one category away from “Vulnerable,” which wouldput it on the IUCN’s Red List of endangered animals.
Without sustained active conservation measures it isextremely rare for animals to move back down this list towhere they are no longer under threat. What tends tohappen is that they move up the list to Endangered, on toCritically Endangered, and then inexorably onward towardExtinct. Going, going, gone.
But there is hope. Conservation measures do work: in2006, the number of species that moved up the list into amore critical category was 172, but 139 moved down to animproved status. And there is one other vital category forzoos: Extinct in Wild. Animals have been known to comeback from this category, which nudges full-on, irrevocableExtinct, and even head right down the list and back out intothe wild to Least Concern. It is an unusual but growingtrend, and thanks to pioneers like Gerald Durrell, thezoological community is now increasingly focusing oncaptive breeding programs. These don’t always lead toreintroduction to the wild; generally, creatures go extinctbecause there is no longer enough of their preferredversion of the wild left to sustain them. But captive breedingdoes inform conservation measures in remaining naturalhabitats, also increasingly undertaken by zoos, by revealingthe specific requirements that animals need to breed.
Knowing exactly what conditions you are aiming for, ratherthan things you think they might need, can make that allimportantdifference between Critically Endangered andExtinct.
Fishing cats are quite tricky because they are soaggressive. The male sometimes kills the female, which isnot a good way to continue a species. What prompts themto do this is not known, though as lovers’ tiffs go, it ismaladaptive in the extreme. But fishing cats have beenbred successfully at Port Lympne and in Australia (hencethe Australian husbandry guide—the EuropeanEndangered Species Program [EEP] is still drawing theirsup), several other places around the world, and with luck, atDartmoor Zoological Park, before long. As their habitatshrinks, due to the encroachment of agriculture in northernIndia, Burma, Thailand, and Sumatra, if they do move upthe Red List, at least there will be diverse seed populationsin captivity, should their time come again. At least there willstill be fishing cats.
This was scientific work that was directly applicable towhat we were trying to achieve on the ground—it was evena license requirement that we launch projects such as these—and I avidly absorbed the entire document. Therecommended minimum size for their enclosures, forinstance, is 40 square meters. The Australians hadprovided 85. We could give them160. Why not? We had the space. Better to look afterfewer species well than cram in a load of disparateunhappy animals to pander to decreasing public attentionspans. Besides, fishing cats are gorgeous, eye-catchingcreatures who warrant a sanctuary in their own right. Theirmarkings are like a big tabby crossed with a leopard, on abackground of golden greenish fur, and they sit by the sideof streams intently until some hapless fish passes below,when they dive in headfirst and snatch it up in their jaws.
Other cats, like tigers and jaguars, will go into water, butfishing cats specialize in it, wading around like fools evenwhen they are not hunting, apparently indifferent to the factthat cats don’t do that. I was delighted we were gettingsomething so exotic and worthwhile, and though this was aproject for the (not too distant) future, I kept the husbandrymanual on my desk where I could see it, as a moralebooster.
Another happy by-product of being given this paper wasthat it led me to discover, firsthand, what happens WhenPorcupines Go Bad. I always delight in being humbled byanimals, something for which, happily, this job providesample opportunities. One night I couldn’t sleep because I’dhad a “brain wave” about the fishing cats. The husbandryrequirements told me that, among other things, these rarelittle beasts like to live with running water. Their wetlandhabitat, being reduced across Asia, is often converted topaddy fields: water based, but not moving water. Our site isawash with water running off Dartmoor, and there areseveral places where natural rivers seed, sometimesrunning into one of the two lakes or the two moatedenclosures, but often just creating boggy ground inunderused areas. With these rivers formalized into properwaterways, they could be made into features, and even bea source (on a small scale, for lighting perhaps) ofhydroelectric power. They would also benefit the fishingcats, whose enclosure could be built to follow the contoursof a living stream.
I had a hunch where the best place for this would be, inwhat I still liked to call the giraffe field, but is now “the smallcats field,” where it borders the walk-in enclosurecontaining the flamingo lake. This is where Owen wantedthe mangrove swamp for his birds, and the husbandryguide informed me that fishing cats also love mangroves,which are, I’d discovered, themselves “Threatened,”
according to the IUCN. At this crux between enclosures, anatural spring bursts out from boggy ground to babble intothe lake amidst a thicket of brambles and overgrown exoticplants. It was for this thicket that I set out at three in themorning wearing a headlamp and carrying a notebook, todo a feasibility study for a snaking fishing-cat enclosure,ending in a continuation of Owen’s mangroves for his birdsin the flamingo lake (obviously the mangroves for the birdsand the cats would need to be segregated, or the tenure ofthe birds, and indeed the birds themselves, would be shortlived).
After an hour or so of getting my feet wet and my armsscratched, I retired, satisfied that this was an ideal place towork back from to instigate a small river, which could in turnrun through a futuristic, twenty-first-century fishing-catenclosure. I stood in the field and sketched a few ideas bythe light of the headlamp, and stretched and yawned,knowing that now I could sleep. But I thought I might make asedentary detour to the top corner of the walk-in, where theporcupines live (another enclosure in need of revamping,but adequate and some way down the list). I had been inwith the porcupines a few times with several differentkeepers, most recently with Steve, the curator, helping tohaul some huge pieces of fresh wood on which theseglorified rodents like to gnaw, to keep their constantlygrowing beaverlike incisors in check. Every time, indaylight, Mr. and Mrs. Porcupine, as they are known, hadkept to themselves and stayed in their house while theirenclosure was cleaned or revamped, their natural shynessand nocturnal lifestyle keeping them indoors, so that thedoor never needed to be secured during our forays intotheir backyard.
I nonchalantly vaulted over the fence to collect some oftheir many fallen quills littering the ground, which oftenrotted into the earth before they could be salvaged.
Porcupine quills are particularly lovely objects, almost likepolitically acceptable, harvestable ivory. Some are twelveinches long, narrow with perfectly symmetrical bands ofcream and brown, others as small as three inches, fat as apen in the middle and virtually monochromatic. No two arethe same, except that each one ends in an exceptionallysharp point, with a small barb that leaves it sticking intoyour skin, as I had previously discovered from cleaningthem too carelessly under the tap. They are sometimesused for the tops of fishing floats, or by calligraphers tomount nibs, or just a handful in a jar as decoration. Theywere once sold in the park shop until health and safetyfears prevented it, but I was collecting them because, if youget one the right size, the blunt end that used to attach tothe porcupine’s skin makes a particularly good stylus for amodern mobile phone. I’d lost my original stylus and brokenthe last quill I’d used for the job, which I’d collected from theenclosure, cleaned up, and cut down to size.
Now it was my turn to be cut down to size. As Irummaged nonchalantly in the dirt, Mr. Porcupine camebustling out of his house, his bristling quills shimmering inthe lamplight. I was surprised at how active he seemed, butunflustered, as I had been in the enclosure several timesbefore without incident. But that was in daylight, when Mr.
Porcupine had better things to do, like snuggle up(carefully, I presume) asleep with Mrs. Porcupine. Now Iwas on his patch, in his garden, on his time, and he didn’tlike it. As he paced up and down I gave him more space,with the result that he soon had me herded into a corner. Atwhich point he turned his back to me at a distance of aboutthree yards, then reversed at high speed, brandishing hismotile array of beautiful barbs like a lethal Red Indianheaddress. I just had time to register the extent of hisdispleasure, and the unacceptable consequences ofstaying where I was, before it was time to act, and I foundmyself scrambling backward in the dark, over the fence,and falling heavily on my rear into a patch of nettles on theother side. The nettles went up my sweater and stung mecomprehensively before I could scrabble myself away.
Ouch, ouch, OUCH. I stood up and laughed with newesteem for this pint-sized animal pincushion. I had beentotally trounced by what is technically an elaborate rodent.
Mr. Porcupine, one; Mr. Zoo Director, nil. Respect.
“TOURETTE TONY”
I was introduced to Tony perhaps a week after Katherinedied, while I was walking around the park with the children.
This was before Katherine’s funeral, and everyone wasgiving me lots of space, but a couple of people from the filmcrew who had shad-owed me since before the purchase,and who were booked to stay until after the opening day(should it ever arrive) came over tentatively and said thatthere was someone, if I felt up to it, I ought to meet. We’dhired a digger, a full-size JCB excavator, and the operator,Tony, who had been on site for about a week, had beenmaking a good impression with everybody. Thezookeepers liked him, the maintenance guys liked him, thefilm crew liked him, and he could handle the digger like itwas an extension of himself. Clearing huge swathes ofscrub and rubble with deft efficiency, then moving it intoapparently inaccessible areas with the grace of a ballerina,and without damaging anything, deploying the vast half-tonbucket on the mechanical dinosaur arm to carry out aprocedure delicate enough to make a heart surgeon miss abeat. So he could handle a digger. He could also handlepeople, and by now, people issues were beginning tosurface.
The new crew wasn’t getting on that well with the oldcrew, whom they regarded with suspicion as potentialcollaborators in the alleged transgressions of the oldregime, rumors about which were rife in the zoo world.
None of the new people had ever worked in a place likethis, which was pretty Wild West compared to the pristine,regimented environments through whose ranks they hadprogressed. But Tony had. During his seventeen years as ahired digger hand, Tony had worked in much worse, andwas making no secret about wanting a full-time job with us.
And we needed a head of maintenance. John was multiskilledand able to fabricate or repair pretty well anything ona shoestring, but by his own admission, paperwork was nothis strong point. We had to have someone in charge whocould cope with the order forms, file receipts, and managea budget, which goes with running a busy maintenancedepartment in a modern zoo. I spoke to John, who said, “Ifthat bloke wants a job I’d vouch for him and be more thanhappy to work under him,” which seemed positive. Tonywas also a trained mechanic, welder, marksman, and anassistant Olympic archery coach, keen to set up lessons atthe park should there be a demand. Having not beenaround, I asked various people what they thought, and itwas unanimous. Everyone wanted Tony, and I did too. Thefilm crew asked if they could film me from a distance talkingto him and taking him on, so I conducted an informalinterview next to the JCB to sound him out, making surethat his approach to handling people fitted in with ourneeds, then took him on with a shake of the hand.
Immediately Tony became an invaluable member of theteam, cheering people up, nudging them along, and usinghis technical skills with great efficiency.
And after he started, it transpired that Tony had anotherspecial skill: swearing. From my time working on buildingsites many years ago I’d noticed that prolific swearing wasbasically the dialect in which the building trade operates.
It’s even in the terminology. Cement is shite; nothing is “notstraight,” it’s pissed. Swear words are even used as fillerswhen people can’t think of what else to say, as in anexample I remember from my first day on a bricklayingtraining course. The man working next to me asked, “Canyou pass the, er, fucking, the, er, fucking, the fuckinghammer?” That seemed about par for the course: roughlyone in three or four words was a profanity of some sort.
Tony, as a senior veteran of the game and former soldier,had got his average swear rate up to one in two onoccasion, though he sometimes lapsed back to one inthree.
Tony’s speech is not just littered but positively crowdedout with expletives, but if you accept that and listen carefullythere is an almost poetic quality to some of his utterances.
Once he cornered me to share his concerns that ouradvertising strategy needed to be wider than the medium ofprint. What he actually said was “Not every fucker reads thefucking paper. I was in the fucking paper the other day, Ithought, fuck me every cunt’s going to be taking the piss.
Fuck me if only one fucker did. I thought, fucking hell.” Notquite Guild of Poetry, perhaps, but pithy nevertheless. Hewas christened “Tourette Tony” (or sometimes simply“Fucking Tony,” to distinguish him from “Kiosk Tony,” whocame later), and appointed himself “Chairman of the DZPTourette Club.”
Before Katherine died, I would be out there, listening toeverybody, trying to build bridges, trying to make sure thateverybody got talking again. After Katherine died, I was outthere again, eventually, watching from close up but at whatseemed like an extreme distance, not even able to musterthe energy for contempt at the pathetic bickering, whichdaily demonstrated that even Milo and Ella exhibited moreself-awareness. There was so much to do, and such aclear, straight line in which to proceed, and to squander somuch energy on such petty issues seemed like a crime.
Everybody with any business experience that I spoke toassured me that “staff” were always a big headache, but inmy acutely distanced state, this seemed to me ultimatelylike a crime against the animals. Yet, in any kind of crisis,all pettiness was put to one side and everybody pulledtogether with resolute, practical professionalism.
Like the day they came to get the two jaguars, and it verynearly all went wrong.
One day early on, it was time to move the two femalejaguars. This was a momentous occasion for us, because itwas something I had agreed to with Peter Wearden at thecouncil and Mike Thomas, and I knew that the entire zoocommunity was watching. It could never have happenedunder the old regime, and though it was a difficult bullet forus to bite, the two beautiful jaguars were going to apurpose-built big-cat park, where they would live in a brandnewenclosure, owned and run by a senior member ofBIAZA. We were paying our dues. The jags would be betteroff, and we would be better off without the constant risk oftheir escaping. According to what people said, we mayeven get some zebras in return, somewhere down the line.
And when it was over, the keepers would get to demolishthe much-hated, dilapidated wooden house for the jags,which they had been wanting to do for so long.
It had been mooted by one or two people that we couldactually sell the jags, worth several thousand pounds each,to a private collector who could hold them perfectly legally,with the right facilities, under the Dangerous Wild AnimalsAct. Much as we needed the money, we also wanted to dothe right thing. Under such scrutiny, now was not the time todeviate from the script. I was also looking forward to seeinghow another team from an established mainstream zoo,Thrigby Hall, in Norwich, would operate—and initially, I wasnot disappointed.
An immaculate, anonymous white van arrived, exactlylike a plumber might use (though these guys arrived whenthey said they would), and two unbelievably grizzled rangersemerged from it, clad entirely in green, apart from oldbrown boots, the mandatory dog-eared Indiana Jones hats,and leather pouches on their belts. Their weather-beatenfaces and clothing made them seem a part of the woodlandaround the jag house, almost as if they were covered inmoss, or a wren might fly out of one of their beards. LikeBob Lawrence, who had come down from the Midlands todart Sovereign for us, these two looked like they’d seen itall before and could cope with anything.
So we were surprised when they produced woodencrates from the back of the van, which didn’t look quite upto the specifications for holding jaguars. Rob, as headkeeper, raised this with them. “Don’t you worry, we’vemoved countless jags in these crates,” they assured us.
One of the boxes was newer than the other, made fromheavy-duty marine plywood, and this was deployed first.
Positioned inside the jag house against the solid steel gateinto the enclosure, it was nailed in place with big battens toprevent it moving should the first jag not enter cleanly, orbegin to struggle. Kelly called her with the usual promise offood in the house, the gate was raised, the cat jumped in,and the door of the box was shut behind her. As simple asthat. There were no windows in this box, but a heavy-gaugemesh door to provide light. We carried the box down to thevan and loaded it in like removal men carrying a tea chestof crockery—easy does it, but no problem at all. The onlydifference was that you really had to concentrate onkeeping your fingers away from the mesh on the door, orthey’d be ripped off and eaten in an instant.
The ease of this move gave us confidence, though thesecond crate looked less suitable than the first. It had awindow about a foot square in the roof panel, secured withtwo layers of wire mesh: one on the outside, and one on theinside. Again the construction was marine ply, though mucholder and more worn. Again Rob raised his doubts,particularly about the strength of the mesh on the window,which looked bent and was of a lighter gauge than that onthe door. “Are you sure these boxes aren’t for pumas?” hesaid, but again was reassured, somewhat tetchily this time,that everything was under control. We consulted with eachother and decided to give the rangers the benefit of thedoubt, even though the jaguar is much stronger than apuma—stronger than a leopard—and had the mostpowerful weight-to-jaw-strength ratio of any of the big cats.
This enables them to bite through turtle shells and huntlarger prey such as deer (and if you are unlucky, man), bypuncturing the skull directly with its canines. We really didn’twant her to get out of the box.
The same procedure of lining up and nailing down thebox was followed. Kelly called the cat, who, anxious forfood, readily jumped in, and the door was closed behindher. And then it started to go wrong. This was the grumpysister, and she wasn’t at all pleased about her confinement,or being tricked, or us peering down at her through thewindow in the roof panel. Immediately she began thrashingaround with that almost supernatural strength of a wildanimal, and began using her primary weapon, thoseawesome jaws, on the mesh that separated us. Upsettingly,the first layer began to yield right away. Her teeth, herflashing eyes, the primal guttural noises emerging from thebox, which was bucking—though not buckling, I waspleased to notice—suddenly all seemed reminiscent of thescene at the beginning of Jurassic Park, where some largecreature exerts far stronger forces on its holding bay thananticipated. Somebody dies in that scene, and though wewere a long way from that possibility at the moment, itwould definitely raise its head if we didn’t get the next bitright. In fact, our worst-case scenario was simply to openthe door of the crate and let the jaguar back into theenclosure so that the men of the woods would have tocome another day. But if we delayed too long, it looked likethe jag could definitely burst out of her window to be amongus, and may not be tempted by the prospect of going backinto her enclosure. Before that happened, the four or fivepeople in the jag house could, obviously, clear out in timeso that the house could be secured—if not, the redoubtableJohn on firearms would have to shoot her, which would notbe a good result. This was a plan that could conceivably gowrong at some stage—those unknown unknowns again—and we had to act decisively to minimize the risk to thepeople and the animal, who could easily hurt herself if shecontinued chewing on the mesh.
Time shrank down so that every second was precious,eked out in a serious group analysis of the situation. If thefirst mesh went down, we would open the gate into theenclosure and exit the building, closing the door behind us.
Before that happened, though, we had time, we calculated,to reinforce the window, so that the transfer could proceedas planned. It was not a full Code Red yet, but it had all theingredients needed to become one.
Someone suggested sliding some metal slats under thetop mesh, to be gripped by the bolted fixings securing it,and I ran to the workshop, fortunately only a few yards away,with Paul and Andy Goatman, the young knacker man, whohad been making a delivery and is always good in a crisis.
It was a good thing the workshop was now functioning, atleast to some degree. Paul quickly found some suitablemetal slats and began cutting them to length with the newlyrelocated bench-mounted grinder, pretty well our only tool.
Andy and I rummaged amongst the old agriculturalmiscellanea in the three-quarters cleared loft for a hook, orsomething that could be made into a hook, to pull the topmesh on the box clear of the plywood roof and to insert theslats underneath without losing a finger. I think in the end weused one of the slats, modified at the end to make a hook,and it was successfully deployed. Somebody stronghooked it into the wire to raise it the necessary millimeters,and the slats were inserted one by one. As they went in, theJurassic Park scenario still loomed large, but the jaguargradually became calmer, and so did we. When the lightwent out above her, she stopped thrashing entirely, thoughcontinued her low, disturbing growl. The rangers said theywere happy, and we loaded her into the van without furtherincident.
As they drove away I marveled at the fact that rearendingthis particular white van could potentially haveterrible unforeseen consequences for the averageunsuspecting motorist, unleashing two extremely unsettledmiddleweight predators onto the hood of his car. Armedpolice along the route had been alerted, but their responsetime, measured in minutes, would not do much to reassurethose possibly already injured people on the scene. But thatwas now no longer our problem. In fact the nine-hourjourney would go without a hitch, the two jaguars would besuccessfully relocated to a much more suitableenvironment, and we would be left with a tranquil, emptyenclosure that had previously been a source of muchconcern.
During the fray, with the cat box bucking in thebackground, I had joked to Andy that if he had any extraguns lying around, now might be a good time to deploythem. Afterward, as everyone was packing up, Andyshowed me that in the midst of the situation he’d slid his.357 Magnum revolver into his trouser pocket. Issued forkilling livestock above a certain size, four of the sixchambers were blanked off by law, because if you can’t killa bullock with two shots from this piece, you’re in the wrongjob. These two enormous slugs, in the hands of someonewho could hold his nerve, were, retrospectively, intenselyreassuring to me. I liked the fact that should things gowrong, there were people equipped and prepared tointervene. If somehow everything had all gone pear-shaped,and if John had slipped in the wet leaves at a critical time, itwas good to know that somebody like Andy was there.
Officially, Andy was not a designated firearms officer forthe site, and the correct procedure, should the cat have gotpast us, would have been to notify the police, whosenearest firearms unit was about five miles away. I preferredknowing that we had backup on the ground, but this was yetanother entirely new world for me: real guns, big ones,deployed in the routine procedures of everyday work. Withguns come danger, both in their handling and in the natureof the reasons for their deployment; if you need guns,something pretty heavy must be going down.
I cornered Andy and asked him to show me his gun. Hepulled it out of his pocket, checked the safety, and slipped itinto my hand. It was a solid steel .357 Magnum with a threeinchbarrel, iconic from countless crime and cop films, herebattered and worn, used as an agricultural tool. And it feltlike a tool, heavy with precision engineering, unremittinglypurposeful. Much as it scared me, I could see that to do thisjob properly I would have to get my firearms license. Itrusted myself to be able to shoot a tiger on the loosewithout panicking (until afterward), and we needed all thecover we could get. And I also made a mental note never toget into an argument with Andy Goatman.
LICENSED TO CULLWhen we arrived in October, the vervet monkeys werefighting— kept in a tiny cage with a concrete floor and a fewold bits of rope covered in years of grime. Two rathertruculent adolescent males were being ostracized by thealpha male for not showing sufficient respect, and out of alittle bit of preemptive vindictiveness on his part. Theyrisked serious injury if they remained in such a smallenclosure with him. We tried to find homes for them, butnobody wanted them. Vervets are common—classed inSouth Africa as vermin—so two boisterous young malesare very difficult to rehouse in Western zoos. The ethicalreview process—whereby the vet, the council, a senioremployee from another zoo, and some of our ownemployees meet to discuss the best course of action—concluded that we should resort to euthanasia: basically,taking them somewhere and shooting them in the head.
“Absolutely not,” I said as the solitary non-zooprofessional but the one with the deciding vote. He’ll learn, Icould see them thinking, but I was determined that the twomonkeys shouldn’t die for the sake of convenience. Ifnecessary, we’d build another enclosure, an idea that wentdown like a lead balloon, since it would take resourcesfrom other, more exotic animals we could get in the future.
The two monkeys were rehoused temporarily in the largecinder-block molting sheds, known as Conway Row, whichwere part of the license requirement to house working birdsof prey so that they can shed their feathers in comfort. Aswe didn’t have any of these—our eagles, eagle owls, andCoco the caracara were all long since retired from publicduties—the huge sheds, four large, terraced chambers,were free. One was made monkey proof and decked outwith some branches and straw for enrichment and warmth,and the two ostracized adolescent males were netted,transported in cat boxes, and introduced to their new home.
It wasn’t ideal, and it presented me with a new front inresisting the orthodox opinion—which felt like a thin line totread in the circumstances.
But at least the monkeys wouldn’t be killed, and I wasabsolutely certain about my position. It gave me theconfidence to realize that, though esteemed andimpeccably well-intentioned, the zoo community was notnecessarily always right, and if I felt morally obliged, I couldand should challenge it. The last thing I wanted to do wascreate the impression of an amateur maverick who wouldn’tlisten to the experienced professionals around me, butthere were some things where I simply felt I had to draw aline in the sand. “Those monkeys are standing between youand your license,” I was told on numerous occasions fromall my most trusted sources. But I countered with ideas oftwo separate communities of vervets, in different areas ofthe park, which could then be studied for differences indialects, for instance. As it happened, a paper on dialecticdifferences in vervet monkey calls had just been published,and I was able to argue that we could keep one trooproughly where they were while developing another group,out of earshot, who would be exposed to different stimuli.
Like the eagle display, which could fly above theirenclosure. That would teach those naughty adolescenttroublemakers to form their own troop properly and get withthe program.
This may sound cruel, but it is normal for a vervet monkeyto be exposed to predators—from the ground, from thetrees in the form of snakes, and from the air, several timesa day. It is their species-typical environment. This is whythey have evolved clearly distinct calls to indicate predatorsfrom above, causing the troop to take cover, or from theground, triggering a mass exodus to the trees, or for asnake in the tree, which tells everyone who needs to knowto get down onto the ground. These calls— their frequency,accuracy, and dialectic nuances—are currently beinginvestigated, and by running two populations of vervetsseparately exposed to different stimuli on the same park,there is every chance that we could contribute somethinguseful. More important for me, however, was that we hadinherited these monkeys and there was no way that wewere just going to kill them because we had been told by“experts” it was “for the best.”
This argument fell on deaf ears but was met with tacitcompliance. In the absence of funds to establish a secondmonkey enclosure, the two monkeys were fed, watered,and housed in Conway Row throughout the winter andspring of 2007. When I emerged from the house to startwork in the park again in April, it was still part of thekeepers’ routine to feed and care for these monkeys, butstill disapproved of roundly at a senior level, though thejunior keepers continued to work tirelessly to find newhomes for them. It seemed as though there was no way wewould get a zoo license if the National Zoo inspector foundthat we were indefinitely storing these animals off show inan enclosure not built for that purpose. The Conway Rowsheds are each nearly as large as the enclosure left to therest of the monkey troop, with branches inside to climb anda window the length of the front wall that gives a view overhills and trees. But they couldn’t stay there forever. With theamount of work we had to do to get the zoo ready for theinspection, it was impossible to build them a new enclosureyet, so the date for the euthanasia of the monkeys was setfor the week before the inspection, and the issue ran like asore with the experienced keepers, who felt that animals inimproper accommodation should not be kept, and I wassimply staving off the inevitable and prolonging theirsuffering.
But as it turned out, a few weeks later, well inside theinspection deadline, a small but well-run monkey sanctuaryunexpectedly stepped in to take them on, and the monkeysgot to live happily ever after, after all. I felt vindicated, andratcheted up another notch of confidence in my overallapproach, which was to listen to all the expert opinion, thenmake the decision which required the least intervention inthe delicate ecosystem of the park, complete with all theanimals and staff we had inherited.
Initially, it seemed, this was a continuing theme; I had theimpression of being constantly enticed to cull from allquarters, both animals and staff. Several of our earlyadvisors had recommended sweeping the board, both of amajority of animals (to redesign the collection from scratch)and the staff. The ongoing problem with the wolves hadresulted in an order from the council to cull three of them toreduce overcrowding, which I was resisting. And as well asthe monkeys, there were two tigers in the frame, one ofwhom was ill with chronic kidney disease, another simplyvery old. As well as the old guard of employees, most ofwhom were constantly presented as mandatory candidatesfor dismissal from some quarter or other. But I didn’t wantto do this. There was a guiding principle at stake. Therewould be no deaths of animals, and no sackings if I couldhelp it, and everything we had inherited should betampered with as little as possible in order to achieve whatwe needed. As in any ecosystem, everything wasinterdependent, and until we understood exactly how it all fittogether, it was foolish to presume we could makesweeping changes without unforeseen consequences.
Even moving “inconvenient” animals had to be treatedwith caution. Although provisional homes had been foundfor a majority of the animals during the protracted processof the sale— and these were the animals it was suggestedwe rehouse in order to establish a new identity—I felt thatwe could easily go too far, and most of the animals couldbe happy where they were. Apart from that, there were localfavorites; people often phoned to ask if the otters, or thefoxes, or the lynx or pumas were still there, because whenwe opened they would be back to see them.
And then there was the pressure to change the staff.
Because of their tremendous devotion to the tigers, andtheir occasional forays into sentimentality, Kelly andHannah, who had stuck with the animals through someextremely testing times, were denounced by senior zooestablishment figures I was in contact with as “bunnyhuggers.” This dismissive term is applied to zookeeperwannabes who don’t understand some of the harsh realitiesthat the job actually involves. But, hey, neither did I, and I’dbeen proved right with the monkeys already (and was laterto be further vindicated on the wolves and the tigers—andmost of the staff I defended). When I looked at Kelly andHannah I saw dedicated zookeepers, unqualified perhaps,but absolutely invaluable holders of knowledge about thespecific animals we had, and whom they had looked after,for several years in often intolerable circumstances. Theywere loyal (to the animals rather than us) and extremelyhardworking, and I was going to keep them and get themtrained up.
Another member of staff who came into the crosshairs afew times was Robin. Lovely Robin, who I had first metwhen he challenged me and Nick Lindsay on that firstformative walk-around, was difficult to pigeonhole. Havingworked on the park as a bird and reptile keeper as well asgraphic designer, in later years he had been used as EllisDaw’s personal assistant in writing his memoirs. For thelast two years, this had largely meant sifting through fourdecades’ worth of dusty local papers and magazines forclippings that mentioned the park. Robin had set about thiswith due diligence, but I think it is fair to say that it had wornhim down. When Duncan first met Robin, he came to meafterward and said, “I think Robin is clinically depressed.”
Duncan had gone over to Robin, still processing oldnewspapers, on our first or second day and asked himwhat he was doing. On hearing the explanation, Duncan puthis hand on Robin’s shoulder and said, “You can stop now.
You don’t have to do that anymore.” With a half-turned pagein his hand, it took Robin more than a moment or two toabsorb the enormity of these words, and us a bit longer towork out where he could be fruitfully deployed.
It turned out that Robin had many useful skills, which weresoon unearthed, and one of the first was administrationconcerning the license application. He was offered a placein the office to work, but preferred to spend his time at atable by the restaurant instead. Though a horrible room, itwas spacious and had good views and natural light, whichthe office lacked. He got on with his new work at his ownpace, which was efficient if not frenetic, stopping for hishalf-hour lunch break every day with his thermos and radioat exactly one o’clock.
Now, one day early on, Katherine, accompanied by mymum and Jen, Mike Thomas’s wife, had decided, in thatway that strong women do, to take matters into their ownhands with regard to the restaurant. A huge open space forthree hundred diners, it was choked with old Formicadisplay cabinets for leaflets, the scattered remnants ofthose leaflets, the piles of old newspapers, yellowed fallenlight fittings, tables stacked on top of each other amidstpiles of chairs and a stuffed tiger, all coated in a layer ofairborne grease. As these three female whirlwinds ofindustry set about clearing up and sorting out, working up asweat, their certainty enhanced with every radical decisionthey made and every heavy piece of furniture they lifted,one of them was finally moved to ask Robin, on his lunchbreak looking out of the window, exactly what he was doing.
“Well, I’m just counting the peacocks out on the drive,” hesaid, before helpfully adding, “There are twelve. But it wasfourteen yesterday.” This was very much the wrong answer.
I have been around enough fussing strong women—sue me—to know that you never admit to any kind of whimsy whenthey are working and you are apparently in repose. What heshould have said was, “I was calculating how long we hadto submit the license application for the establishedbusiness plan to remain viable.” But the damage was done,and Robin was unceremoniously added to the list ofendangered creatures on the premises.
But by now it didn’t matter. I was used to opposition. Itwas the natural state. Robin turned out to have, amongother things, draftsmanship skills, which have so far savedus thousands of pounds, as well as a knowledge of the parkand certain animals within it, which is irreplaceable. He isnow comfortably employed in a site of his own choosing, aloft adjacent to the maintenance room called Robin’s Nest,where he fabricates small items like signs and cages forsmall animals, draws up architectural standard plans fornew enclosures, and answers several otherwiseunanswerable queries a day through the two-way radiosystem. He seems happy. And we are happy with him.
This sort of holding on to the past while acknowledgingthe future is the balancing act we must play. Our littleecosystem is now part of a global network of conservationfacilities and programs, and it is up to us in the longer termhow much of a part we play in it. Starting almost fromscratch as we have done, with an amateur-enthusiast eye,we are in a good position to innovate. And on the ground,the rewards of sharing this environment with tens ofthousands of people a year are uplifting.
Many of my friends from London are unrepentanturbanites, buying designer woollies to visit and only puttingthem on again to go to a WOMAD or Glastonbury festival.
But all are uplifted by their visit in a way that transcendssimple excitement at seeing such a big project movingforward. It’s the animals and the trees that reach into a partof them that cannot be stimulated in Soho.
Woody Allen said, “Nature and I are two.” Funny, butwrong. A surprising amount of this archetypal urbanite’sdialogue is delivered in walks through Central Park, whichhas, unconsciously or not, been designed to simulate ourevolutionary species-typical environment. I felt, andcontinue to feel, a missionary zeal about exposing as muchof the population as is feasible to this experience.