We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

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       Chapter Three

       The First Days

      From the outset, we knew that it was going to be tough. Employ 20 staff, when we had never employed staff before? Take care of 200 wild and exotic animals? The house we had moved into was as rundown as the zoo over which it looked. Though once a grand, 12-bedroom mansion, now its plumbing groaned, its paper peeled, its floorboards creaked – but it was home. Most people, especially at mum’s age, are looking to downsize their lives, but we were upsizing dramatically, into an utterly unfamiliar avenue of work, and the stakes were high. Everything, frankly, that my mum and dad had worked for over fifty years together was on the table. And still we needed more – half a million more – just to be able to take the chance that the zoo might be able to reopen, and that when it did, it would work. Normally this level of uncertainty over something so important would seem impossibly crazy, but the late legal challenge from our own side had forced our hand, leaving us uncertain, penniless and paddling like mad to find some money. But, in the context of the last six months negotiations, it just seemed like yet another bad, but, probably, weatherable development.

      We were also comforted by the fact that although we hadn’t done anything like this before, and we didn’t have a licence to trade, nor even a particular curator in mind (Suzy in Australia was having health problems which put her out of the frame), at least we owned the entire place outright. This, surely, stood us in good stead with creditors. Plus we had a whole £4,000 left over.

      The meticulously researched business plan I had evolved with Jim – or more accurately, Jim had put into spreadsheets based on his business knowledge and rumours I’d picked up from the twenty or so leading attractions in Devon – was now very much hypothetical. The urgent spending which was due to commence as we arrived was now delayed as we searched for new lenders, who circled again, sniffing with renewed interest as we had lurched to a new status with their back-room boys, as holders of actual assets.

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their brows, but the calculators were quickly deployed, and though some offers were tentatively made, all were swiftly withdrawn.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

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

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

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

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