by Benjamin Mee
The day after his return to his house, Sovereign’s anaesthetic had had time to fully wear off, and the fateful sliding gate was lifted. Sovereign, the epitome of stealth, committed his weight incrementally in ounces at a time across the threshold, slowly rolling forward on the lip of the sliding gate. His squat forelegs and bulky shoulders gradually bulged with the effort as he edged towards the outside—and food—ears flicking and eyes scanning the assembled personnel for signs of a dart gun or some other danger. “Sovereigngate,” as it has never been known (and must never be in the future), was over, and the ramifications would begin. Our dream could have ended there but for the local council endorsement of our handling of the incident, which commented specifically on the professionalism of the keepers. I also was greatly impressed by their composure throughout a very difficult situation. I’ve never been in a war zone, but this definitely felt like seventeen hours on the front line, and with people you could rely on.
But as a family, our lack of euphoria was confirmed. In fact, a period of intense anxiety would ensue, as the grim living conditions, bad weather, and lack of money came home to roost. Dartmoor has one of the highest rainfalls in the country, and although we are in a slightly sheltered microclimate, the continual winter rain was an unwelcome contrast to southern France. My brother and I regressed to our roles from when we lived at home in the late 1970s, as we chopped wood for the big fireplace and jokingly did our best to undermine each other in front of our mum—”I picked you some of those flowers you like, Mum. Duncan didn’t.” “You only did it because you’re adopted . . .”
But this became an increasingly difficult time. I swapped my role as negotiator for the zoo for the full-time job of fending off creditors and trying to raise money. We owned the place outright, but development funds of around £500,000 were urgently needed. The bankers and lawyers had a great time spinning it out, asking for yet more expensive surveys and more detailed predictions of our expenditures. “Can we have a specific breakdown of routine maintenance costs for August 2008?” asked the Royal Bank of Scotland, though that was more than eighteen months away, and utterly dependent on events between now and then. We’d made provision in our forecasts for £15,000 to be available for that month, but they wanted to know if it would be spent on paint, wood, tarmac, or lawn mowers. I could have made something up, but I told the truth: that there was no way of knowing the precise breakdown so far ahead, but that we had arrived at the £15,000 figure in consultation with other zoo and leisure facilities and with an on-site maintenance team (and relying on my experience in the building trade and as the author of The “Which?” Guide to Getting the Best from Your Builder), and that this amount would go a long way. But this became their sticking point, and after six or eight weeks of detailed and time-consuming negotiations—during which they sidelined other lenders with potential offers of reduced interest rates—they pulled out. So it was back to the beginning with someone else.
But all this was ahead of us. We still had the first week to get through, and the excitement hadn’t stopped yet.
Driving Duncan and his business partner, Cameron, to the park from Plymouth station at about 11:30 PM on our seventh day, I slowed down just outside the village where the road narrows and is banked by stone walls, five to six feet high, backed by woodland. The problem seemed to be a deer in the head lights, leaning over the wall about twenty feet away, looking like it might be about to jump. Deer are silly enough to jump in front of a moving car, so I stopped to see what it was going to do. It was then that all three of us noticed simultaneously that this wasn’t a deer. It was a puma. The human visual system works initially on a template system, drawing up a 2.5-dimensional sketch based on the available evidence, then finds a suitable template from a huge store in the brain, based on the individual’s previous experience and the likelihood of a match within the context, which is why I’d thought the brown animal ahead was a deer. This is how many illusions and “tricks of the eye” work, eliciting the wrong template until your more detailed double-take sorts out what is going on. In this instance, the double-take took less than a couple of seconds, during which the harmless deer morphed into a muscle-bound, round-headed, cat-eared puma, including a distinctive gray dusting on the reddish coat, which deer do not have. “It’s a ____ing puma,” we all said, more or less together, and then it vanished into the woods. We burst out of the car and ran to the spot on the wall where it had been, in time to hear it padding off (not clip-clopping like a deer) into the undergrowth. We quickly ruled out trying to pursue it in the dark without flashlights over unfamiliar terrain, and raced back to check on our pumas. So soon after the jag escape, we were convinced of the much-talked-about possibility of animal rights saboteurs cutting the wire, like they had in the bottom deer enclosure six months before.
Heading straight into Code Red mode, we tore back to the park half a mile away and ran to the puma enclosure, armed with our biggest flashlight. And they were both there. But they were both definitely what we had just seen. There are many sightings of big cats out in the country, some cranks or mistakes—probably problems with their 2.5-D sketch—but some, I am now convinced, are real. Probably uniquely, we were in a position to confirm what we had seen with two examples of the exact same animal, because we had access to our own pumas.
The next day I told Rob, and Robin, who also acts as a volunteer of the Big Cat Sightings Society, expecting them to laugh in my face and mark me down as delusional. “Oh, there are pumas round here,” said Robin. “You’re lucky to have seen one so soon. I’ve been here seventeen years and only ever seen the tracks.” Rob had more direct confirmation. “When I was living on site sixteen years ago, I opened the door of my caravan at about six in the morning and there sat a puma, watching me. I closed the door, opened it after a moment, and it was gone, but my God, it was definitely there.” In captivity, pumas can live to sixteen, but in the wild the life expectancy is several years less. Judging from the size and condition of the one we saw compared to our more elderly females, this was a young male. Which means they were breeding. A credible groundsman a few miles away claims to have seem a mother and two cubs a few years ago, and all the sightings of big cats around Dartmoor are of pumas—not lynx, panthers, or servals, but pumas—a fact that we had no way of knowing before the evidence morphed into one before our eyes. Apparently the males come in off the moor to visit our females when they are in season (last sighting in the park was in 2003), giving us a unique opportunity to gather evidence on these elusive animals. Cats of a similar size, the European lynx, were once indigenous in the area, feeding on rabbits, rats, birds, and fallen lambs. They need never come into contact with humans, unless they decide to seek them out. This gave a whole new perspective to walking around the park at night. That Code Red feeling just wasn’t going to go away. Never a dull moment in the zoo world, clearly.
4
The Lean Months
After that hectic first week, we had a little time to reflect. I spent my days on the phone standing on the spot in front of the house—a scene I had constantly imagined from France—with the walk-in enclosure sloping away in front of me down to the flamingo lake (albeit currently populated by only two elderly flamingos and a couple of rickety pelicans), and the tree line merging with the perfect rural English vista of rolling hills beyond, stretching like an organic quilt for five miles in all directions. The feel-good factor was—as I had told myself it would be—immense. But not quite enough to compensate for the content of those endless rounds of phone calls. Council officials, advisors, more lawyers, more banks and brokers, but above all, now, creditors, drip-fed my ear with increasingly bad news. With my feet planted firmly on my favorite spot, the thrilling and invigorating new zoo at my back, my mind raced ahead, scanning the possibilities and ever-decreasing options before me.
If my friends had been incredulous when I made the— admittedly surreal—announcement that my family and I were soon to live in and try to reinvigorate a run-down zoo, their bewilder
ment was nothing compared with our own in the first weeks we introduced ourselves to our new neighbors.
Back in France, the children hadn’t quite believed it when I’d told them what I was trying to do. With the phone stuck to my ear I was constantly shushing them away, for six months, with the same refrain: “Quiet. Daddy’s trying to buy a zoo.” I could see that they thought I was deluded—silly Daddy makes us live in a barn in a foreign country and now he thinks he’s buying a zoo. The trouble was, their naive insight struck a chord with a great many other people—pretty well everyone I knew—apart from my immediate family of brothers, sister, and mum. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this zoo idea,” one close friend had called to confide. “Are you still going on about that?” said another. “Les tigres? Sacré bleu, c’est pas possible!” said the entire village, in whose eyes my eccentricity had reached new heights. The trouble was that, having finally arrived, instead of being the smooth transition to spending our prearranged mortgage on clearly defined objectives, we were crisis managing on a shoestring.
But when the children eventually got there, after a couple of days of tiptoeing wide-eyed around the place, they adjusted much more quickly and fully than I did to the new life. Katherine brought them over from France after a couple of weeks, stayed for two days of huge culture shock (I already felt like a relatively old hand by this stage), and then had to leave for Italy for two weeks to be with her sister, Alice, who was having her first baby there. At first the children were tentative, and frankly a little afraid. I remember leaving them in the office playing with some remaindered stock toys while I cleared rubbish, and as I looked in at them through the window they were both square mouthed, howling with fear at being left alone. It was quite a scary place at first, particularly for them. But they soon adapted.
When I decided to gently break the news to Milo that, one day, the park would be open and we’d have to share all this with hundreds of visitors, he replied, “Yes, but Daddy, they’ll pay to come round.” At last that naive insight was working with me.
My mum’s two domestic cats, Pandit and Jow-jow, big black Bengals imported from Surrey, however, took much longer to see the wonder in our new life. Could it be the howling of wolves that troubled them? The bellowing of Solomon, our huge African lion, whose roar has been known to strike fear into golfers happily playing their course over two miles away? Or perhaps it was the time that they jumped up on a wall to discover the slobbering faces of three big brown bears staring back? Exploding into puff-ball parodies of frightened cats, they shot off back to the house at full speed.
Duncan, who had brought the cats down in his car, said that their first sighting of an ostrich was a unique opportunity to watch a process firsthand: their small, complacent brains burst with an overload of new stimuli as they desperately tried to adjust to the new concept of a bird bigger than a man. “Their necks stretched out as far as I’ve ever seen them go, and they darted their heads from side to side urgently scanning for as much information as they could gather from inside the car,” said Duncan. “I sat with them for a while to let them get used to it, but they were still just as agitated twenty minutes later, when I took them into the house.” The twenty or so peacocks who roam the grounds presented another psychological problem for the cats, who quickly developed a tactic of total denial of the existence of all these unsettlingly large and confident examples of a class of creatures they had only ever known as prey.
Of all the animals, my favorites initially became the three hand-reared Siberian tigers, Blotch, Stripe, and big Vlad, a male, and at more than three hundred kilos one of the biggest cats in the country. As I went around the back of the house in their enclosure for the first time, all three came up to try to cadge a stroke through the fence. No chance!
Tigers don’t growl or roar, they chuff, which is a noise that sounds a bit like blowing a raspberry using just your top lip. But if you chuff at them, they chuff back, and having a three-hundred-kilo cat a foot away trying to be friendly is a uniquely uplifting experience.
For Milo and Ella, it was the otters that captured their imagination. Quickly they became smitten with the creatures, who make the most ridiculous squeaky-toy noises whenever you go past. This, naturally, elicited equally high-pitched squeals of delight from the children, who jumped up and down with glee until the otters realized they didn’t have any food and scampered away. Sometimes the children do help feed them, but it’s hard to fit in with the routines, which are varied to prevent the animals from habituating. The ferrets, Fidget and Wiggle, however, fit around the children. Katy, our first education officer, was getting them used to being handled, and so several times a week she fitted them with dinky little ferret harnesses and walked them around the park with Milo and Ella.
But it was standing on my favorite spot looking out across the valley in the first few days that I began to home in on the smell. A terrible odor hung over the park, the smell of rotting carcasses, which I recognized from occasionally helping drag them out of enclosures. Operating with a “skeleton crew” for so long, the amount of old bones in with the carnivores on the park had accumulated so that every enclosure was littered with rib cages, hooves, and miscellaneous bits of fur and skin, which it seemed were the root of the problem. Decomposing vegetable matter and uncleaned feces from the herbivores surely didn’t help, but in fact the source was more systemic. It was the offal bins.
For food for the carnivores, the park relies on fallen stock— calves culled by local farmers, stillborn lambs, horses that have been hit by cars—brought to us and often prepared by the local “knacker” man, Andy Goatman, in our “meat room.” This is basically a concrete loading bay with a sink, backing onto a walk-in deep freezer. The carcasses are stripped expertly by Andy, often assisted by butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths cat keepers Hannah and Kelly. To see these two mild-mannered, animal-loving girls straddling a giant carcass, boot-deep in entrails, brandishing big, bloodied knives and cheerfully chatting as they shuffle a horse’s head into a freezer bin, was to understand fully that we had entered into a different world.
The bits that can’t be fed to the animals—intestines, spines, and general entrails—are classed as Type I Matter and stored in offal bins, three large stainless steel hoppers, which are collected weekly and incinerated by a local licensed firm. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been paid for quite some time, and wouldn’t even pick up the phone to us without cash up front. The last time the bins were emptied was six weeks before we arrived, and the stench emanating from them was all pervading. Worse, for Han-nah and Kelly, and everyone else who had to work in the yard, were the maggots. These writhing white grubs spilled out in a self-dissipating arc around the bins, crawling off toward the decaying matter around the gullies. Opening the lids of the bins, which I did a few times while helping to load them, facilitated the distribution of these maggots and opened up a world that Dante would have been proud to conjure. Empty skulls swam in a blue-gray fetid mush swarming with larvae, while the stench entered your bones. The keepers’ work in these circumstances was truly heroic, though having gradually acclimatized over several years they wore their burden lightly. “This is nothing. It’s much worse in the summer,” John reassured me. Our flimsy domestic-pressure washer was, gratefully, deployed, but an industrial version was added to our wish list of essential but unaffordable machinery.
The dampness didn’t help, coming up through the floor of the house via an ancient well—the ancient hand pump for which was now, sadly, defunct—to form mini-lakes on the worn topography of the stone floors. Many feet over several centuries had eroded the stones along the well-used pathways, and scuffed off the softer deposits to create valleys and dips, which now became tributaries and lakes in our living area. Water, and the effects of it, was everywhere. Overflowing cracked gutters, filled with years of mulch from overhanging trees, spread dampness into the walls. Mildew and algae blanketed everything outside the house with a dank frosting of green grime, symbolizing, and also actu
ally indicating, profound decay.
And then there were the rats. “A plague of rats” would not be an overstatement. Everywhere you looked, even in daylight, big fat, gray rats scurried out of sight, and sometimes, arrogantly, didn’t even bother. Right in front of your eyes they would dart into an enclosure and steal the food left out for the monkeys. Satisfyingly, these intruders received a terrible revenge exacted upon them by one or two of the enclosed animals, particularly Basil, the coatimundi (an amiable South American climbing animal related to the raccoon), whose powerful omnivorous jaws specialized in cracking the skulls of rats unfortunate enough to get caught in them. But this was an imperfect solution to the infestation. Rats carry disease, and also may be poisoned, if not by us perhaps by a neighboring farm. A few years previously an otter had died from eating a poisoned rat, so we had to tackle the problem carefully. We got quotes from three different pest-control firms, offering three different methods of gassing and poisoning, but the sheer scale of our problem—at least forty well-established nests over thirty acres, with a constant supply of food—was prohibitively expensive to address. Nine thousand pounds was the bottom line for the most thorough and exotic-animal-friendly method, and this was money we simply didn’t have.
Peter Wearden and others regularly reminded me that eradicating the rats was an urgent requirement for getting our zoo license. But they didn’t have to. I like all animals, including rats, particularly the ones in pet shops or those I worked with at university, studying social learning for chocolate rewards. Lab rats— at least the ones not exposed to vivisectionists—generally lead a happy and fulfilling life solving problems for rewards, and die with a substantially thicker cortex than their sewer-dwelling brethren. But wild rats give me the shudders. In my first encounter, in a flat in Peckham, I was filled with horror on discovering a big, brown, plague-infested rodent in a kitchen cupboard. And here they were again: in the kitchen, running over my mum’s hand on the stairs one night, and even once jumping onto her bed. Luckily, Mum’s cats, Pandit and Jow-jow, were also on the bed at the time, and the resulting commotion woke the entire household.