Chapter 7 The Animals Are Taking Over the Zoo

When an angry lion roars at you from less than a footaway, it is impossible to remain impassive. Late one night Iwas making notes and sketches for the new jaguar house梬hich is situated near the lion enclosure梟onchalantlysitting against a post and working by flashlight. After twentyminutes I抎 finished, and stood up to find all three lions?
two females and a magnificent maned male calledSolomon梤ight up against the fence next to where I抎 beensitting. The fact that three such large and dangerousanimals can get so close without your noticing isimpressive but chilling. Watching their intent faces so closeto mine I realized that Solomon was about to roar at me,something I抎 witnessed from afar, and the impact of whichI抎 seen on other people (usually total involuntary full-bodyspasming and retreat) but never experienced directly.
Okay, I thought, I know he抯 going to roar, but there is a lionprooffence in between me and him. I抣l hold my ground, staycalm, and stare him down by the light of my head-lamp. Myplan worked well for the next few seconds of eye-balling,until suddenly he roared and lunged at the wire, and Iinstantly leaped backward three feet into darkness andunseen brambles. It抯 impossible to remain impassive inthe face of a charging lion. There抯 something in yourprimitive midbrain that tells you it抯 just not right to be thatclose to something that can eat you, and the amount ofadrenaline dumped into your system at such times is trulyprimeval.
As a new zoo director I am privileged to be exposed tosuch experiences fairly regularly. This also helps explainwhy zoos, with their captive breeding programs, mandatoryconservation measures, and outreach educationalprograms, have such a vital part to play in the promotion ofbiodiversity in the twenty-first century. David Attenborough(may his name be praised) can educate and promote on abigger canvas, but even he cannot replicate that visceral,direct experience of physical proximity to these magnificentcreatures.
I抦 not saying that all visitors will get roared at梩hough afew might, if Solomon is showing off (stumbling on the pathin his line of sight sometimes triggers him). But having nowshown many people around, from surveyors, lawyers, andbankers to friends and neighbors, the euphoriaengendered convinces me that the direct viewing of exoticendangered animals is one of the best motivators for futureinvolvement in conservation.
As I am discovering, there are many complicatedarguments for and against zoos, from those extremists whothink that all captive animals should either be releasedback into the wild or killed, to those who see no harm in anykind of containment for entertainment. The conservationargument to me seems unassailable, with a long history ofimportant species saved from extinction by zoos over theyears (the South African white rhino, the Mauritius kestrel,the golden lion tamarin, the P鑢e David抯 deer, the condor;the list is long, though shorter than it should be).
But high standards in zoos are needed, which is whereconservationists should concentrate their efforts, ensuringthat each animal is held for a good reason, as close to itsspecies-typical conditions as possible, and that itseducational potential is maximized. Then if you抮e lucky, youcan feel that moment of sheer physical terror in a safeenvironment, which can抰 be synthesized. Toilet facilitiesare available nearby should they be required.
I had had a dream. Dartmoor Zoological Park was goingto be a massive, thriving success, with the potential tobecome world class, and contribute in some small buttangible way to the effort to reverse, or slow down, or atleast in some way mitigate, humankind抯 inexorable, selfdestructiveonslaught against our planet. There was nowenormous reason for hope梖or the park at least. We hadmoney in the bank, a definite plan, and all that stoodbetween us and achieving it was a lot of hard work. Whichis a happy position to be in. Throwing yourself intoworthwhile, fruitful hard work that you believe in, as much asyou can handle and more, is a kind of luxury not everyonegets to experience. It is also exhausting.
My days were incredibly varied. They always started withgetting the children ready for school between 8 and 9 AM,which often saw me in pajamas and dressing gown alsohaving a quick simultaneous kitchen meeting with TouretteTony (always on his best behavior in front of the children),or Steve, Adam, or a combination of the above, whilebrushing hair (not my own) and dishing out shredded wheatand orange juice.
A scrawled note from that time reads:
Reallocate office space to Robin, Rob, Sarahand Steve. Clear own desk and set up computer.
Speak to Katy, education officer working askeeper until facilities arrive to reassure. Let downby absentee, re-organize rota to cover. Councilrepresentative arrives for preliminary health andsafety audit. Pull necessary people off jobs toaccompany, spend two and a half hours on[more than mildly irritating and demoralizing]
walk around. Conduct three media interviews,ambivalent, relying on extremist animal rightsactivists?views for 揵alance.?Research and thenfax absolutely final, last piece of paper to lawyersregarding company setup. Speak to BT againabout delay in providing more lines. Resendrequest to two-way radio company for newfrequencies. Fetch children, get them changed,pass to grandma. Resolve argument about newstand-off barriers for tapir. Help install fenceposts. Listen to keeper concerns at end of shift.
Chop wood for fire. Do school admin andhomework. Eat. Answer phones. Kids to bed.
Answer more phones. Bed.
Some days were more exciting, some less. But it wasalways nice to get a call from an urban friend when I抎 justdone something decidedly unusual. A phone call fromsomeone in magazines once went like this: 揥hat are youup to??揥ell, we抳e just darted the jaguar and he抯 gonedown okay, so I抦 about to go into his enclosure andstretcher him out.?Short pause. 揝o your day抯 turning outmuch the same as mine then.?
Whenever possible I took the opportunity to go inside theenclosures, to see what it抯 like from the other side of thewire and wonder what can be improved. One of the firstenclosures I worked in that spring was the lion den. Mymission: to deliver a collection of gruesome severed headswhile perched on the end of a branch fifteen feet off theground. The heads, from farmers culling young bullocks, areregularly hung from the trees, or wedged into branches togive the lions a puzzle to solve to get a treat: crunchy on theoutside, chewy in the middle. The lion enclosure is adisturbing place to be: one keeper error or lock malfunctioncould release three hungry cats expecting food and findingus as a live bonus. And I knew the lions would not messabout. At Christmas we had made a full-size cardboardzebra for them, filled it with bits of meat and left it in theenclosure. Four seconds after they were let out, one of thelionesses was onto its back, dragging it down, while theother closed in from the front. Captive bred, but instinctsundiminished.
While Kelly and Hannah cleared out the old bones anduneaten bits of skin from the lions?last meal, I lookedaround trying to find imaginative places that wouldchallenge the lions and give them something to think about.
The girls, being busy梐nd being girls梔idn抰 have quitethe same enthusiasm for climbing trees as I did, so I setabout showing off a bit and placing the heads a bit higherthan they usually had time for. I shinned up a suitable tree,and edged out along a branch about fifteen feet off theground. One of the lionesses had apparently taken a heronin flight at a similar height, so I knew it was possible forthem to reach this branch. When I was in a good position bya solid fork, I called down to Kelly, who stretched up as Istretched down to receive my first head. This really was myfirst-ever head. Kelly handled them nonchalantly, as tools ofher trade, and I knew I mustn抰 appear squeamish or I抎never live it down. She held it by the neck, its glazed eyesaskew and its slippery purple tongue uppermost. I couldonly just reach it but I didn抰 want to grip the tongue in caseit slipped (not through squeamishness, you understand), soI asked her to pass it ear first. I just managed to reach theblood-soaked ear, like wet leather, hauled the head up ontomy perch, and wedged it in the crook of the fork. Jumpingdown I sited several more heads, one from a rope, whichinvolved piercing the ear with a knife to thread it through,then helped gather the last remnants of scraps into thebarrow.
Looked upon by my wide-eyed children, I抎 braved thelions?den and managed to hide my fear. But the best bitwas that it took the lioness three days to get that headdown. Through-out that time, she never relaxed or stoppedthinking about it. She paced underneath the tree, climbedup it a bit and then jumped down, and prowled aroundirritably, trying to solve the problem. This was realenrichment, giving her the sort of tricky issue she mighthave to solve in the wild梥tumbling on a leopard抯 killstored up a tree, for instance. Whenever I went up to theenclosure, she was there, fretting about it. How she got itdown in the end I don抰 know, but I bet that bullock head wasone of the best she抎 ever tasted.
Despite these intense distractions, I was frequentlysnapped back into vivid memories of Katherine, often fromthe most unlikely or mundane sources. During a meeting inthe house I popped into the downstairs toilet, and realizedthat this was the first time I抎 visited this room since I usedto prop Katherine up in there, its wobbly unsecured base anextra hazard for someone who couldn抰 keep her balanceunaided. It hit me like a train, but I had to leave that roomand go straight back into the meeting looking like I wasconcentrating and on top of things.
Other triggers from the mundane world included thingslike opening a cupboard and finding a half-full box of herfavorite herbal tea. A trip to Tesco was also fraught withperil. After walking past the wheelchairs that she had soenjoyed being spun around in, there was aisle upon aisle ofreminders from our years together, when I used to hunt herout a treat while doing the shopping. C魌e d扥r chocolate;chocolate truffles; sushi; navel oranges; magazines likeElle, Vogue, Red, or the one she had begun writing for,Eve; the makeup aisle, easily avoided now but once asurefire way to brownie points via the latest wonder cureantiwrinkle cream; Bombay mix; cashew nuts; herbal teas梩he list was endless. And it didn抰 stop in thesupermarket. Being in any part of London; black cabs;Converse All Stars, Jimmy Choos, Prada shoes and bags,coveted and unaffordable; people wearing old Birkenstocksandals; costume jewelry shops where she could pick out agem and make it look like the real thing; Muji; John Lewis;kitchen and bathroom showrooms; tile showrooms;drapers?shops stacked with bolts of shot silk;haberdashers; Apple Macs; yoga mats; Ian McEwannovels; flower stalls; health-food shops; passports; any sadmusic; good graphic design; stationery shops; bookmakingsuppliers; speaking French; seeing the children,our bed, and the chair where she died.
Against this backdrop, very little out in the zoo itselfreminded me of Katherine, because she was hardly there.
The new information signs going up about the animals,though informative and capably drawn up by our educationofficer, were a mish mash by Katherine抯 standards, and avivid illustration of her absence. But I didn抰 know what to doto put it right, and each time I contemplated tackling it leftme feeling like I was running across the Sahara in leadshoes with a plastic bag over my head. But putting heads intrees, driving the dumper truck, breaking up concrete with aroad drill, dealing with keepers?needs and seeing salesreps had no such connotations, and I knew I was lucky to beable to lose myself in these nonassociative tasks.
Having the camera crew around also helped a lot.
Getting them on board, in the early days of negotiations forthe park, had been the final persuader for me, because thiswas one of the few other things I knew a bit about and couldsee the enormous benefit of. Careful readers will havenoticed that there were several final persuaders for me: theNick Lindsay/ZSL endorsement of the park; talking to thethirty or so other big attractions in Devon who raved aboutthe site and offered their support; Tesco persuading methat we were within the reaches of civilization梐ll weremini-tipping points in the final cascade. But thisdevelopment, I could see as a journalist, was not just achance to air a great story about animals, but, cynically, itwas also going to have a positive impact on the businessplan.
Frustratingly, though a huge coup for us, none of the earlypotential lenders even registered it. The backroom boysbarely looked up from their calculators: after all, there wasno tangible money coming in as a result, no change in frontof them to our wonky bottom line. It needed a tiny leap ofimagination to comprehend it, and leaps of imaginationwere not how they got to be backroom boys. The TV serieswas one of those things that were dependent on us gettingthe park in the first place, so no benefit would be felt unlesswe had already succeeded. Therefore, by their strange butimmutable logic, there was no benefit.
I put all this to one side and concentrated on the positive,and suddenly here we were, in the middle of myriad(resolvable) crises, a great breaking story, all being filmedfor BBC2. The crew, from Tigress Productions, naturalhistoryspecialists I had worked with before, were inspiring.
One camera operator/director, Aidan, who had shadowedMum and me since before the purchase, had just returnedfrom seven months in the jungles of Cameroon, filminggorillas orphaned by the bushmeat trade, and was quiteunfazed by anything about our predicament. Max, acharismatic, clear-blue-eyed reprobate, had a host ofnatural-history filming experiences and countless stories togo with them.
Another tremendously knowledgeable person at TigressProductions was Jeremy Bradshaw, M.D., whom I hadworked with briefly in the past. When I抎 lived in France, I抎once spent a few days making a pilot with Tigress, andduring my one ten-minute meeting with Jeremy, had thrustmy book of DIY columns from the Guardian at him, with ashort pitch about how it would make a wonderful series. Hehad taken the book politely, and even read it, and every fewmonths we exchanged e-mails about ideas of how todevelop it梑asically, whenever I was desperate ordisheartened by some obstacle to my work. To a freelancerpitching is routine, as is having the pitch rejected or simplybeing completely ignored. But Jeremy was impeccablycourteous, and would always return an e-mail after threeweeks or so. For someone in his position to someone inmine, this was outright encouragement, even though theywere almost always one-liners saying he was very sorry buthe hadn抰 managed to think of an angle yet, and if I ever hadany other ideas to let him know. A reply of any kind otherthan an outright negative is gold dust to a freelancer, andthis tenuous direct line to Jeremy had felt like an enormousasset梩hough I抎 known it could evaporate fairly quickly if Ifailed to come up with anything of interest over the nextcouple of years.
But I had been happy writing my book and doing mycolumns, until the zoo came up. I happened to mention thisdevelopment to Jeremy in an e-mail fairly early on in thenegotiations, and was amazed by his response. He cameback the same day with an effusive reply about how he hadheard of this zoo (he is a Fellow of the Zoological Societyof London and had read about it, whereas I抎 just receivedthe real-estate agent抯 details from my sister), wished meluck, said it was an enviable way to spend one抯 life, andurged me to keep him informed.
He began contacting me about once a week. Suddenly Ihad his mobile number and he was calling me on Sundayafternoons. I could see that he was keen, and this could bevery good for the zoo, if we managed to buy it. I had alwayshoped that as a journalist I would be able to partiallysupport and publicize the zoo by writing about it桰 had askill to be deployed in the modern marketplace, and in thiscase it was for a good cause. My ambition had been toswitch my Guardian column from the family page, to whichit had migrated from the magazine, to writing about the zoo.
I knew the Guardian reader market, and that their level ofignorance (and squeamishness) on animal matters wasroughly equivalent to their position on DIY; after all, most ofmy friends read the Guardian.
But Jeremy was talking about a different level ofexposure. 揑 think it抯 a quintessentially English story,?hesaid in his soft Oxbridge accent, which is, objectively, only acouple of notches down from Prince Charles抯. 揅ompletelymad and eccentric, but with a very wide appeal. I wouldn抰be surprised if we can get BBC2 to do a series. Keep meposted.?Dream on, I thought, but I kept in touch, addingJeremy to the loop of phone calls I made from France, andhe always provided a supportive and encouraging ear.
And so one day, it turned out, I was showing Jeremyaround the park we had just bought, and he was discussingthe timing of the BBC2 series he had recently beencommissioned to make about it. Jeremy抯 knowledge froma lifetime in natural history was comprehensive, and mostof our animals were of species he had filmed in the wild,often with a celebrity presenter. The tigers reminded him ofhis direct experience of them while filming a documentarywith Bob Hoskins, the lions with Anthony Hopkins, and myaspirations for orangutans (Julia Roberts) andchimpanzees revealed that he had twice filmed JaneGoodall at her world-leading chimpanzee research andconservation center in Gombe. But my favorite remark wasas we walked past Basil, the coatimundi, the SouthAmerican climbing raccoon I had barely heard of before wearrived. 揙h, you抳e got a coati!?He beamed. 揥onderfulcreatures. You see them in the canopy in Ecuador all thetime.?
I was humbled by the entire film crew抯 knowledge andtheir professionalism, and uplifted by their enthusiasm forthis project梠ur project梬hich simply involved filming uswhile we learned about just exactly what we had gotourselves into. But it was a relief from time to time to berecast as the relative expert, for instance when theGuardian sent down a photographer to cover a feature onthe park I had written for the magazine.
As a journalist and feature writer, much of my time forabout ten years was spent working with photographers. I抎be sent on some hare-brained but marvelous assignment,like horse-riding in Spain, swimming with dolphins in theFlorida Keys, or snow boarding in California, and aphotographer would come with me to document exactlyhow badly I messed it up. It was a wonderful way to earn aliving, but a large part of the pleasure was workingalongside another professional with the same objectives,out on our own overseas. Photographers are practicalpeople. They make the best of situations, they improvise,they have gaffer抯 tape. As another pair of eyes and ears, aphotographer is useful in spotting good people to interview,and I was also able to help by drawing out and distractingpeople while they were photographed. Working as acomplementary duo like this was enormously satisfying,and it was one of the things I missed most when I fled toFrance to write my book.
So it was a very welcome relief from the myriadunfamiliar pressures of the zoo when the newspapers gothold of the story (after Sovereign and Parker made thenationals, they could hardly miss it), and started sending theodd photographer down to capture developments. This wassomething I was used to and knew all about, from thedemands of the picture editor to the backdrop and the light,but more than that, it was a chance to dip back into thatworld of journalism where I had spent so many comfortableyears. During my time working in London I was always theperson most likely to mention animals or to suggest ananimal story (usually rejected), or be disgusted with theshallow industry obsession with fashion and other mattersof extreme inconsequence. At the zoo, around the manydedicated professionals who have devoted their lives toexotic creatures, I am practically animal illiterate, unable tosex a snake, tell a Bengal owl from a European eagle owl,or dismember a horse for the tigers.
So when some fashionably dressed Soho-junky with acappuccino habit and totally inappropriate footware arrivedasking all the wrong questions, I found it enormouslyrefreshing. Julian, from the Guardian, arrived in Italiancalfskin brogues with designer jeans trailing on the ground,both instantly sodden in the long grass of the walk-inenclosure, where he wanted to get some shots of me withRonnie the tapir. On being warned of the dangers ofRonnie, who is a Class I dangerous animal easily capableof killing a man with gruesome efficiency, his reaction wasto ask the stony-faced keeper supervising us, 揥ow. Sowho抎 win in a fight between a tapir and an anaconda??Assoon as I could, I took him away on my own, so he didn抰upset anyone and I could enjoy his hopelessly out-of-placeremarks.
Trying to lure a peacock onto a picnic table for a shot,Julian approached the problem pragmatically, asphotographers do, by laying a trail of bread that ended inthe tabletop, but he didn抰 factor in the tiny pea-size brain ofthe bird. After twenty minutes with the light fading, hesnapped. 揅ome on, you total fucking spaz. You抮e not apeacock you抮e a peac枛??When he met Ben the brownbear, who at three hundred kilos is bigger than Vlad, ourmale Siberian tiger, his instant reaction was, 揝o who抎 winin a fight between the bear and a tiger??His 揳nimal maths?
theme continued all day, culminating in, 揥hat about fourrats against a swan??I was sorry to see him go back, byhis own admission, to the land of trivia and inconsequence,but it was probably for the best.
Meanwhile, there was plenty of work to be getting onwith. And again, for a change, some of it was stuff I wasused to. Like demolition. It is marvelously cathartic to wielda pickax or a sledgehammer in times of stress, though I didfind that visualizing a particular lawyer, banker, or someother source of frustration often led to an overenthusiasticwork rate, unnecessary damage to surroundinginfrastructure, and occasional personal injury. Like when Ilost a thumbnail to my new, heavy-duty crow bar whilethinking about a certain high-end bank. Demolition is notjust randomly smashing things up梩hough there is,occasionally, room for that梑ut is more a systematic, ifbrutal, dismantling in the most efficient way possible. Mymost enjoyable project was stripping out the vet room, intowhich we were sinking thousands of pounds to convert afetid former stable into a modern animal operating theater.
In the deeds, this was already officially the vet room, andanimals had in the past been stored here when there wasan urgent need for isolation. But in reality it was a series offour dank interlocking chambers with flimsy partitions, lethalwiring, and a constant splattering trickle from the faultyplumbing running across the ceiling. Smashing this stuffout, sifting the lead and copper for salvage, piling up thehardcore barrow by barrow for use under the concrete baseof the jag enclosure, was a luxury I allowed myself two orthree hours a day while it was going on.
The best discovery was a room that had not beenopened for fifteen years. A former workshop, its doorwayonto the vet room was blocked with the subsequent decadeand a half抯 worth of damp junk, so the easiest way in wastaking out the rotten window frame. Inside, it was like asmall museum of artifacts from another time. There was amini dilapidated range like the one in the flagstone kitchen,and the walls were bedecked with rusted two-manlumberjack saws and other agricultural implements from thenineteenth century梡lus, of course, the mandatory piles ofgrimy miscellanea, here including many decomposing rats,covering the floor so that not one square inch of it wasexposed. Sifting this lot for scrap and interesting artifactswas a welcome distraction, particularly when it came toripping out the ancient rotten tongue-and-groove panelingwith the aforementioned heavy-duty crowbar. Insulated fromthe world by a breathing mask and goggles, covered insweat and grime, I could wield heavy implements and avoidcalls and callers for a couple of hours a day, whileperforming useful work and also saving money on gymmembership. But inevitably, a line would build up outsideand I would have to engage with them. Well-dressed youngreps梬omen in stilettos on the uneven grimy surface of theyard, men in gray suits梬ould stand clutching clipboardswith things for me to sign, always (enjoyably for me)surprised that the man they had come to see was theperson loading the skip they had assumed was a laborerand turned their noses up at before we were introduced.
Reluctantly, when it was fully gutted, I had to hand overthe vet-room resurrection to a team of outside builders, whowere remarkably proficient in transforming this shell into awhite-tiled medical facility. They worked well, though theexpense for an off-show area was worrying, as the money,so hard-won, was hemorrhaging out in all directions, andfront-of-house issues like pathways, enclosures, and thekilometers of stand-off barrier to be replaced seemed atleast equally as important. But investing heavily in an offshowfacility like this would benefit the animals, whowouldn抰 have to be moved so far to undergo veterinaryprocedures, and it would demonstrate to the authorities thatwe were serious. The new crew of builders took over, andseemed to know what they were doing, so I moved myrecreational focus to other areas of demolition.
Like digging out enclosure fence posts from concretewith a road drill, pickaxing loose concrete wherever I couldfind it, and transporting rubble in the dumper. All too soon?
though not quite soon enough梩his stage of the operationwas complete, and the only jobs to be found wererestorative. Again, as long as they were not toocomplicated and something I could dip in and out of tomake way for the other myriad demands of my newposition, I gladly got involved. In the absence of a budget formuch needed tarmac for the car park and paths, Adam hadorganized deliveries of road planings. These are the bitsthey trim off the tops of roads before resurfacing, with thathuge machine like a giant electric razor without a guard, awhirring wheel with blades that chews up and spits out thechips of the old tarmac onto a conveyor belt behind it. Theconveyor belt deposits them into lorries, and the lorries, ifyou抮e quick enough and know where they are working, willcome and deliver them to you for a token price of about tenpounds a ton. We secured about a hundred tons, whichwas left in the bottom car park in vast piles, and whichneeded to be transported up the drive (a fifth of a mile) anddeposited on the pathways for Tony in the digger to rakeout, and then someone on the steamroller to flatten down.
We had tried for some weeks to buy reliable machineryourselves, but this meant thumbing through FarmersWeekly and other magazines dedicated to the sale ofheavy machinery. These quickly became compelling, andmany times I had eagerly dropped what I was doing whenTony or John came striding up with a folded-backcatalogue in their hand saying, 揑抳e got a lovelydumper/digger/tractor here for you, Ben.?I even took tothumbing through back issues to get a feel for what was outthere. I soon learned to tell the difference between aMassey Ferguson and a John Deere at a glance, andeasily identify a mini-digger as a one-, one-and-a-half-, two-, or three-tonner. But what I couldn抰 seem to do was buyany of them at a reasonable price. Good ones tended to belocked in some place like Dundee, where the transportcosts could double the price of the machine, and there wasthat delicate trade-off between getting something cheap,within our relatively measly budget, and getting somethingthat was going to work. This meant visiting the nearer oneswith Tony, pulling him off whatever he was doing, invariablyto find that what was on offer was either not good enough ortoo expensive. Everything decent, in this heavily agriculturalarea, was quickly snapped up. Canny farmers were alwaysthere before you, bidding against you, knowing exactly whatthey were doing. (I still pine after a particular John Deerewith a front loader, which was stolen from under my nose bya neighbor of the vendor just before we got there. It wouldhave been perfect but, alas, it wasn抰 to be.) So we endedup hiring equipment, much too late in the day for Tony抯liking, who was then further harassed by the weather.
English summer was starting, and so of course, was therain.
But eventually, with only a few weeks to go before theinspection, two diggers (a one-and-a-half- and a threetonner,as it happens) and a thunderous steamrollerarrived, and everybody in the park set to work as one.
Minor differences and big egos were forgotten as keepingstaff,maintenance, directors, and everybody else workedlike a human conveyor belt, shifting to whatever wasneeded at the time with the alacrity of reckless troopsvolunteering indiscriminately for dangerous missions. Andsometimes it was potentially dangerous. Once I had takensome time out to escort a local journalist around, and Inoticed that the steamroller was reversing slowly down thepath toward us, leaving a flattened carpet of planingsbefore it. I noticed too that the driver was being duly diligentat keeping his distance from the wall to his right, which wasjust as well, because one wrong move from a machine thissize could send it crashing through that wall, and that wouldbe a terrible shame because it was a wall of the tigerenclosure. So far, reassuring. And then I noticed that thedriver was Duncan, who, I knew, had only learned how todrive this machine the day before, and I hurriedly usheredthe journalist out of the way. But there were no accidentswith these potentially lethal machines, and the Health andSafety officers Rob and Adam took their roles veryseriously. The first accident recorded in our accident bookwas a cut finger months later, sustained during an incidentinvolving some stationery.
In the middle of this park-wide blitz of manual labor,Steve had to think about pressing animal-welfare issues.
Like where were we going to put Sovereign the escapistjag while we renovated his enclosure. Twelve of the posts inhis enclosure needed replacing, as did the rotten slats inhis house, and a few other adjustments needed to be madeto his living area, which Sovereign would simply not tolerateif he was around. He had to be moved, and it was decidedthat the best idea was to reinstate the old quarantine area,once a bear pit, and before that a cottage that the Brownies(junior Girl Scouts) had apparently used as a meeting placeduring the war. Unfortunately, nobody had told Brown Owl(the leader) about the rudiments of structural engineering,and she had cut away the pesky A-frame timberssupporting the roof to enlarge the loft space for a tabletennistable. While Plymouth naval dockyards succumbedto the Luftwaffe, this fifth-columnist children抯 paramilitaryorganization got their badges for bringing down the roof ofwhat was then a farm cottage seven miles away. But theyleft the walls and gables standing, which provided asuitable enclosure for temporarily housing dangerousanimals.
With Sovereign, however, no one was taking anychances. As soon as the electric-fence specialist hadfinished his long (and expensive) refitting of the wolves?
enclosure with a new system and a backup supply in theevent of a power failure, he was moved onto this project.
Too much was just right for Sovereign, who scaredeveryone, particularly me, with his propensities for forwardplanning and timely, decisive action. The place was latticedwith electrically charged deterrents to climbing the walls,scratching at the door, and using the internal windowledges as platforms for leaping onto the high iron gantryacross the middle of the building, presumably installed forviewing the bears it once housed. As the security measuresclosed in, this shell of a house with its wired-up observationgantry became a disconcerting place to stand. As ourminds prowled around the potential purchase points?
rolled steel joist sticking out here, a brick chimneyprojecting in there梖or a single-minded cat to use to climbout, they were closed off one by one. But we were alsocreating a holding chamber from which even a human, withfore-knowledge and ingenuity, could not escape. Inevitably,this sparks images of maximum-security prisons, andworse, human-atrocity-standard containment wheredetainees are thwarted in their desire for freedom andutterly controlled. This in turn raises questions of animalrights, and just exactly what we were doing containing suchan animal who longed to get out. The answer always,honestly, was absolute.
The International union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN) says that jaguars in the wild are 揘ear Threatened,?
and the good news is that they moved down the Red Listfrom Vulnerable in the 1990s as protection measureskicked in. However, habitat destruction has pushed theminto increasingly isolated pockets of forest, bringing theminto conflict with ranchers whose cattle they eat, andhunters, for whom they represent competition for food, andmortal danger if they are attacked. Despite beingprotected, jaguars are frequently shot on sight, and arealready extinct in El Salvador and Uruguay. It is expectedthat at the next audit they will be moving back up the list toVulnerable again. We inherited Sovereign; he can抰 bereintroduced to his diminishing native habitat, but he is topof the stud book and his excellent genes areunderrepresented in captivity. We will be breeding from himas soon as we can.
Eventually there came a time when the wires in the newenclosure were in place, the locking mechanism on hisgate had been quadruple-checked by every available pairof eyes, and it was time to introduce Sovereign to our newdart gun. This enormously expensive piece of equipment(?,000) is able to deliver a dose of anaesthetic at anydistance from a yard to fifty, and we spent a day having afairly strict tutorial from the Austrian supplier, who set up atarget for us in the unfinished restaurant. This dart gun is aDan-Inject, the preferred industry standard, a top-of-therangemodel often brandished out of the sides of LandRovers in wildlife documentaries as they chase down anddart rhinos and lions. Its laser sight also enables you toshoot from the hip, because many animals seem torecognize the raising of a rifle as a sign of danger. Firingfrom the hip, even I was able to hit the bull抯-eye at thirtyyards.
But such minor deceptions cut no ice with Sovereign.
The second he saw Steve with the gun he began to paceand spit in his house, careful not to present his flank, as hehas been darted before and knows that this is the target.
Eventually his agitation got the better of him, he turnedslightly, and Steve darted him in the thigh, a perfect hit. Weall retreated, as planned, for fifteen minutes while the vetmonitored the progress of the drug, and Sovereigngradually went down. These operations were carefullyplanned in advance, with only the people who were directlyinvolved in the vicinity. Everyone had a role, which wasrehearsed in meetings梐 bit like a benign bank job?
ceaselessly, until everything was clear. The crate wasready, the van in position outside the jag house, and theexact route to the new quarters established. But even so, itis always a moment of high drama when the door isopened into the cage where the sleeping cat lies.
Even in his sleep, something like Sovereign梚nparticular he, in fact梚s scary. Your brain is telling you tokeep back. It may be a trap (you almost suspected this cathad hid an antidote pill inside his mouth like some secretagent). What if he just springs up? I feel it every time, that Iam not supposed to be close to an animal like this. But hewas genuinely out, and the only thing to remember was thatit was a light dose, for safety抯 sake梙is safety, not ours?
and that jerky movements and loud noises could trigger anadrenaline response in him that might, conceivably,counteract the drug. Which you don抰 want. So theatmosphere of total silence梤adios and phones off, onlyessential commands whispered梘reatly adds to thetension of the occasion. As we successfully maneuveredhim onto a blanket and manhandled him out of his house, Inoticed that in our efforts not to jostle our lethal patient, Ihad somehow ended up with the head end, while the otherthree porters were carrying the rear legs. Not only was myend much heavier, it抯 much scarier, too. His head is as bigas a medium-size Halloween pumpkin festooned with realfangs, the most prominent being his two two-inch caninesdesigned for puncturing skulls. I抎 just noticed the proximityof my delicate seeming wrist to these gaping jaws(remember the jag has the most powerful jaws of all the bigcats), when the vet抯 phone went off. As the ringtone (aKylie Minogue track, incongruously) boomed and echoed inthe narrow concrete corridor, the vet did a pantomimehorror retreat to turn it off, and hissed over to me, 揚ut theblanket over his head.?I gladly complied, but had little faiththat this flimsy material would do much to lessen the sound,or protect my wrist, particularly with Kylie singing her littlelungs out trying to wake him up.
But he didn抰 wake up, and we got him into the crate, andthe van, and his new quarters without a further hitch. It was agreat moment. Our new equipment worked perfectly, thenew team performed impeccably, and we had successfullytransferred a very dangerous animal without incident. Wecould now get on with the license requirement of renovatinghis enclosure and relining his leaking moat, which meantmore demolition work for me, and more welding, fencework, and rendering for people with better skills.
Unfortunately, the next move did not go quite so well. Thistime it was for the much-anticipated relocation of Tammythe tiger, who, you may remember, had been fighting withand had needed to be separated from her sister for aboutfive years, since they both had hormone-changingcontraceptive injections. After tireless efforts from all thekeepers, eventually a home was found for her in France,and a date set for her transportation. The procedures wererun through as before, and minor adjustments made to theplan from small lessons learned. The Frenchies arrived thenight before, ready for an early start, and we spent anenjoyable evening in the local pub getting to know eachother. I had been looking forward to speaking a bit ofFrench, perhaps to translate some crucial information at acritical time, but these vain hopes receded quickly when itemerged that both of them spoke English as well as I did.
On the morning of the move, the first little thing to gowrong was that the van couldn抰 get as close to the tigerhouse as we had liked. It was further up a long steep slopethan the jag house, and that slope was now covered withroad planings, which don抰 give much purchase for anempty two-wheel drive van trying to reverse. No problem,the vet was confident that she would be out long enough forus to carry her the extra fifty yards to get her safely inside,so we carried on. Tammy was less canny than Sovereignand easier to dart, but she made some hellishly frighteningnoises after she was hit. After the requisite time, adelegation went in to have a look, and it was deemed sheneeded another dose, so we waited again. After the vetflicked her ears for a bit, he decided she wasn抰 goinganywhere, and we maneuvered this considerable animalonto another blanket (we still hadn抰 been able to afford astretcher). Six of us carried Tammy?again, under a codeof silence梬atched over by John on firearms with the biggun, which could kill her with a single shot should things gowrong. And then, go wrong they did.
Halfway down the path, which is about three meters wide,with lions on one side and tigers on the other, Tammy wokeup. The first sign was her tail, which started moving andthen wrapped itself tightly around someone抯 leg. Then shejust stood up, right out in the open, scattering people likegunfire in a shopping center梠r, indeed, a big cat in acrowd of people. She was incredibly groggy and couldbarely stand, but she was still a big girl, upright and on thewrong side of the wire. People evaporated from the sceneover the stand-off barriers backward梟ot too close to thelions though, because they were suddenly very vocal in theirobjections to seeing Tammy so close (Duncan抯 policy ofputting the other cats away during these procedures hadbeen overlooked, with potentially volatile consequences). Inoticed that several people had somehow managed toclimb the observation tower, despite the bottom six feet ofrungs of the ladder having been removed to make itinaccessible. But mainly I noticed Tammy, less than threeyards away, standing, then slowly wheeling round to faceme. I decided to stay still. Her eyes were glazed, but I knewthat they are hypersensitive to tracking movement, andcould easily be triggered by signs of a prey animal in frontof her (i.e., me), trying to escape. I didn抰 have to look to myright to know that John would have raised the rifle ready tofire, and I did my best to remain utterly motionless. Thereare people who claim to be able to withdraw their aurainward and become almost invisible, certainly lessnoticeable, an idea I had previously thought was ridiculous.
But under the circumstances, I was willing to give it a try. Infact my brain did it for me, because I was not afraid. I wasbeyond fear, to total calm, as if something even moreprimitive than the fight-or-flight response had beentriggered, and my body knew I couldn抰 be trusted with therelease of that much adrenaline; perhaps it would causeme to move, or some sensitivity in the tiger would pick upthe increased electromagnetic activity from so close. Iconcentrated on seeming like part of the stand-off barrier Iwas leaning against, or maybe a tree, or some other inertand routine stimulus. It seemed to work, because Tammy抯glazed gaze swept across me without registering, and shewobbled slowly off down the path towards the van.
John, as firearms officer, was responsible foreverybody抯 safety, and he would have been within hisrights to kill Tammy the moment he had a clear shot. I washalf-expecting this, though my perception of the situation ona second-by-second basis was that there had as yet beenno need. And he didn抰. John held his nerve, as I knew hewould, and maintained eye contact communications withSteve the curator and the vet, who fed back that he shouldhold off. Everyone held their nerve. Tammy staggered a fewmore paces, then lay down, unfortunately right next to thedart gun, which was the only means of administering moreanaesthetic. There followed a tense few moments as thevet prepared a dart and Steve crept towards Tammy,covered by John, to retrieve the dart gun. With animalstealth梚t doesn抰 get more animal than this梙e moved towithin four feet of her, conscious that as the seconds tickedby, the drugs were wearing off. Without the dart gun wewould have no choice but to shoot to kill as she becamelivelier. Steve reached the gun, tiptoed over to the vet, andgave Tammy another dose.
Now we had to wait again for it to take effect, this timeout in the open, a stark period which could have been aminute or twenty, but was probably nearer five. By the timeTammy was declared under (again), my adrenaline hadkicked in. But we desperately needed her in the crate in thevan, and no amount of fear could prevent that happening. Iremember feeling decidedly uncomfortable as we hauledthis incredibly dangerous thing, the trigger of so manyprimal fears, who had already demonstrated that she couldwake up, into the crate. Once again I had the head end?
though not alone this time梐nd I didn抰 like it. Tammy抯head is bigger than a very big watermelon, and though themove only took about thirty seconds, I was constantlyexpecting her to show signs of life with disastrousconsequences. As soon as I had pushed her head clear ofthe crate door, which slid down and bolted her to safety, Ifelt the anger rising. Anger that I, and all the staff, had beenput through this.
The lessons learned immediately were that a move can抰go ahead unless the vehicle梚deally a four-wheel-drive梚sright next to the animal抯 house; and other animals in thearea should also be shut away, every time. Then Anna, ourZoo Collection Manager, and Steve began investigatingthat most salient question: why had Tammy been able tostand up? Exhaustive enquiries to about thirty zoo vets andother professionals revealed a universal consensus on thedrug of choice to sedate big cats during these procedures.
Unfortunately, it wasn抰 the one the vet used. He had chosena horse tranquilizer, which can work, but is thought lessreliable. And so it had proved. Anna and Steve lobbiedhard (though they didn抰 have to) that in future, all majormoves and medical procedures should be managed by anexternal specialist organization, the International ZooVeterinary Group (IZVG), a freelance organization thatdoes only exotic animals. What they don抰 know about zooanimals, nobody knows. Obviously, they were decidedlymore expensive, but this was not a consideration, and Iagreed wholeheartedly. The next move we were going toattempt, when the vet room was ready, was transferringthree big predators in one day for long-overdue dentalprocedures, and we couldn抰 afford for any part of it to gowrong. Regardless of the cost, we were going to use theIZVG.
In the meantime, on the back of so many other unsettlingincidents, this one was probably irrevocably formative.
Duncan and I discovered that we were no longer fullyrelaxed out in the open, particularly around here. Once, wewere up at the reservoir for the zoo, a misnomer since itreally is just a big manhole cover at the highest point in thepark, above the bore hole that supplies the water at the rateof about four thousand liters a day. Unfortunately, it leaks,which means that every ten days to three weeks the waterpressure drops, so that the otters?supply dries up, one ofthe artificial ponds starts to drain (through another as yetunidentified leak), and the pressure in the restaurant dropsbelow what is needed to keep it running. But far moreimportant to me, at eight in the morning when you tend tofind out about it, is that the shower doesn抰 work. Theshower, as described before, is not a haven of luxury evenwhen it does work. A yellowed, fractured plastic uprightcoffin installed in a shower-wide, partitioned room directlyin front of the only window, the mechanism is fine (thoughfestooned with live mains wires immediately behind it), andonce you are in it, when it is working, this can often seemlike the best part of the day梐 short period of time in touchwith our aquatic roots, almost guaranteed not to beinterrupted. Almost. Milo and Ella still regard you as fairgame in the shower, and I have also been called out from ita few times to attend to various emergency meetings, butgenerally, this imperfect sanctuary is as good as it gets.
Until it doesn抰 work. When it fails to deliver hot water, oreven any water at all, the denial-tinted spectacles come offand you see it for what it is: a miserable piece of shit thatwe can抰 afford to replace yet. Like a TV or laptop thatsuddenly doesn抰 work and is no longer a conduit to thecenter of the universe, but just a shoddy plastic box.
What you have to do when the water dries up is go intothe woods behind the wolves and above the bears to thereservoir, armed with two yard-long wrenches, and tinkerwith some heavy duty valves to bleed the system. Early inthe morning, before school, this can only be described as abummer, so we try to pre-empt it, which is how Duncan andI found ourselves up there one Sunday evening, chattingabout the day抯 events, relaxed as we tried to rememberthe exact sequence of things to turn and pipes to connect toeach other. Suddenly there was a large animal rustlingaround less than twenty feet away, and we both spunaround, gripping our wrenches and ready for mortalcombat. Both our stances were wide, ready to fight or flee,and we cast wide-eyed glances around looking for goodtrees to climb in the nanoseconds before we assessedwhat we were up against. It was a cow, on the other side ofthe fence. At the edges of the park, we forget, other peoplehave large animals like cows, horses, and sheep, that arenot about to rip your limbs off and eat them. But you can抰be too careful, and it took us a few moments to relax andget back to the job in hand.
Another time I was out in the open crossing a carefullyassessed empty field belonging to a neighbor, when aplastic bag reared up out of the long grass and sent me intoa similar spasm of panic. But the scarier moments are atnight. The first time was while collecting wood for the fire, inwhat I抎 vaguely remembered was a virtually emptyenclosure containing some ground-based birds, thebiggest of which was a turkey, who was sometimesaggressive but not insurmountable. I looked up from mybow sawing to see several sets of mammalian eyesreflected in my headlamp, all small and narrowly spaced,indicating little animals. But if they were little cats, I had abig problem. Then I remembered that we don抰 have anylittle cats, apart from Jilly, the elderly serval whoseenclosure was some distance away, and that these were infact the innocuous miniature muntjac deer who weredesperately more afraid of me that I should be of them.
Even so, my rattled reasoning told me, they have little spikyantlers, and I was careful not to upset them as I completedmy foray for fallen wood.
The most recent occasion of nocturnal fear was whilewalking the dog, Leon (more on him later). Out in the cornerof the giraffe (all right, small cats) field, which backs on tothe pumas, on a clear but moonless night, I heardsomething big moving very slowly toward me. The dog wasbusy some distance away, but my anxiety was based onthe fact that the female pumas were in season and callingout with their giant, strangulated miaoww, which is thought,along with their pheromone incentive, to draw young malepumas from the moor. And that was the direction thisanimal was coming from. I hesitated, hoping that the idiotdog would pick up on it, and, ideally, challenge it and beeaten by it rather than me. But he remained oblivious,selfishly snuffling around the many animal scents of the longgrass a hundred yards away rather than volunteering tosacrifice his life for me. There was a firm breeze comingfrom behind me, so I knew the animal knew exactly whereand what I was, and still it slowly crunched through theundergrowth in my direction. Finally I cracked and snappedon my headlamp, half-expecting to see a fleeing puma andpartly dreading the other alternative, that it wouldn抰 flee.
The eyes that stared back at me were wide spaced anddidn抰 flee. They didn抰 do anything, which I gradually drewcomfort from, because predators tend to make snapdecisions. Taking my time, and finally enlisting Leon asmoral梐nd potentially sacrificial梥upport, I moved towardit. As I did so, it gradually became clear that this wasanother harmless, dumb-assed cow, newly introduced tothis normally empty field, stalking me because itpresumably thought that I was the farmer, breaking the habitof a lifetime by bringing it food at 3 AM.
These sorts of incidents, though actually quite exciting,serve to reinforce the sense that to live here is to exist in astate of perpetual impending emergency. For the timebeing, though, most of the emergencies were false alarms,or at least manageable, all made more bearable by theinflux of money from the NFU. Now the sensation was morelike riding the rapids on the way to a waterfall, as the moneyflowed out and the deadline of the inspection for our licenseloomed inexorably nearer.
With the vast amount to be done, we were working at afrantic pace, and every problem that came up seemed torequire an expensive solution. The van, an old transit thathad done a remarkable 260,000 miles, suddenly gave outwhen a strut from the chassis snapped and punctured thefloor in the back. There抯 no coming back from that, so agleaming new (well, with only 80,000 miles on the clock)replacement was bought. The dumper, a giant yellowmonster with the wrong engine and a gearbox that lookedlike it had come from prehistory, blew up one day,necessitating further outlay. These two vehicles are thebackbone of the operation, used for fetching anddistributing food for the animals and materials of all kindsthroughout the park.
The new dumper, on hire, was enormously popular,mainly because it actually worked, and did a great deal toimprove not just the work rate but also morale. But the costof everything loomed into focus sharply and again mademe miss Katherine, because I knew her budgetmanagementskills would have saved us money, but shewould also have brought a sense of control that in herabsence, seemed to be slipping away. However, it was aone-way journey we were on, and most of the problems wefaced, for once, really could be solved by throwing money atthem. I was just acutely aware that once the money wasspent, there wasn抰 going to be any more. And if we failedto get the park open with it, the level of disaster would beunthinkable. Probably many animals would die, and manypeople (including those who had left good jobs to work forus) would be unemployed. And the family assets, which myparents had worked so hard all their lives to build up, wouldbe in tatters.
揃ut at least no one抯 shooting at us,?my mum would say.
Brought up in Sheffield during the war, as a child she hadendured nightly air raids, culminating in one where sheemerged from the cellar to find that the family house,indeed the whole street, had been destroyed. The familysimply walked to their nearest relative抯 house, an auntyseven miles away, past the rows of bodies laid out on theroads until they could be dealt with. These sorts ofexperiences gave my mum抯 generation a profound grip onreality, and though she had spent the last thirty or so yearsin relative suburban opulence and didn抰 relish the grimliving conditions and constant stress of gambling everythingon a crazy venture that was in no way dead certain, Mumknew from direct personal experience that things could beconsiderably worse.
Mum抯 strength and sense of adventure were absolutelyvital in pursuing the zoo in the first place, and in continuingto fight for it once we were there. We were always mindfulof the sacrifice Mum had made in buying the zoo, and didour best to make her comfortable and reassure her. Butshe didn抰 need mollycoddling. The plan had been that shecould continue her life of making pots and painting, with thezoo as a sort of thriving backdrop. But when Katherinedied, when Duncan was away, she ran the place. This wasno small step up for a recently widowed lady whosehusband had impeccably run the family affairs for theprevious fifty-three years. Dad used to marvel at Mum抯lack of proficiency with figures梙e would read books likeMathematics Made Difficult, and pass his thirty-minutecommute doing complicated mental arithmetic. But Mumwas not entirely alone. Adam had put us in touch with Jo, aclear-eyed, perspicacious, and matronly bookkeeper whogradually wrestled the accounts under control, skillfullyjuggled creditors, and provided daily bulletins on ourfinancial health.
With so many unexpected expenses梡articularly in therestaurant where everything from crockery to cookers hadto be replaced梞any projects became too expensive andhad to be shelved. Like replacing the demolished jaghouse, which had been priced at ?7,000. By simply notdoing this we could afford all kinds of other things, like anew lawn mower, a forest of new fence posts, and the staffwages for another month. Mum抯 determination to get togrips with the nitty-gritty of the business undoubtedly savedit at a difficult time, and won her the respect and admirationof the staff and many more. As I emerged from my selfimposedexile, I found that Mum was at the center of mostthings that were going on, despite recent doctor抯 orders toavoid stress, following a heart scare. One of the few placesin the house where we spent money was in fitting out theold kitchen (the formerly smelly one) with a new floor andturning it into a pottery studio. When it was finished, wetried to get Mum interested in going back to her lifelonghobby, at which she excels, talking in detail about sellingher pots in the shop. But she wasn抰梐nd still isn抰梙avingit. While ever there is work to be done, Mum will do it. Andtrying to ease her out of the loop of stressful decisionssimply doesn抰 work. She has spies everywhere. If she feelsshe抯 getting bland reassurances from management and atdepartment-head level, she just taps into another staffnetwork to find out what抯 really going on. Although thetelevision series was called Ben抯 Zoo, in more ways thanone, it should have been called Amelia抯 Zoo.