We Bought a Zoo
Chuck it all in and buy a zoo? Why not? thought Benjamin Mee, unaware of the grim living conditions, creditors and escaped big cat that lay in wait…A few years ago, Ben and his wife, Katherine, sold their small flat in Primrose Hill and moved to France to pursue their dream of restoring an old barn near Nimes.That dream then became much, much bigger for, last October, they moved with their two young children, Ben’s 76 year-old mother and his brother, into a run-down zoo on the edge of Dartmoor which they had bought, and found themselves responsible for 200 animals including four huge tigers, lions, pumas, three massive bears, a tapir and a wolf pack.Ben's new extended family now included: Solomon, an African lion and scourge of the local golf course; Zak, the rickety Alpha wolf, a broadly benevolent dictator clinging to power; Ronnie, a Brazilian tapir, easily capable of killing a man, but hopelessly soppy; and Sovereign, a jaguar who is also a would-be ninja, and has devised a long term escape plan and implemented it.But tragedy was to strike for, in the midst of dealing with escaping wolves and jaguars, and troublesome adolescent vervet monkeys, Katherine, who had developed, and had removed, a brain tumour while in France, began to experience symptoms again. The prognosis was poor, and so Ben found himself juggling the complexities of managing the zoo and getting it ready for re-opening, and at the same time having to care for his rapidly deteriorating wife, their two young children, and their ever growing menagerie of animals.Ben's story will both move and entertain – charting, simultaneously, the family's attempts to improve the animals’ lives, the build-up to the Zoo’s official reopening, as well as Katherine’s decline, her final days, and how the family went on.
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We Bought a Zoo
BENJAMIN MEE
The amazing true story of a broken-down zoo,
and the 200 animals that changed a family forever
HarperNonFiction
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
© Benjamin Mee 2008
Benjamin Mee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007274864
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007283767 Version: 2017-05-16
Mum and I arrived at Dartmoor Wildlife Park in Devon for the first time as the new owners at around six o’clock on the evening of 20 October 2006, and stepped out of the car to the sound of wolves howling in the misty darkness. My brother Duncan had turned on every light in the house to welcome us, and each window beamed the message into the fog as he emerged from the front door to give me a bone-crushing bear hug. He was more gentle with mum. We had been delayed for an extra day in Leicester with the lawyers, as some last-minute paperwork failed to arrive in time and had to be sent up the M1 on a motorbike. Duncan had masterminded the movement of all mum’s furniture from Surrey in three vans, with eight men who had another job to go to the next day. The delay had meant a fraught stand-off on the drive of the park, with the previous owner’s lawyer eventually conceding that Duncan could unload the vans, but only into two rooms (one of them the fetid front kitchen) until the paperwork was completed.
So the three of us picked our way in wonderment through teetering towers of boxes, and into the flag-stoned kitchen, which was relatively uncluttered and we thought could make a good centre of operations. A huge old trestle table I had been hoarding in my parents’ garage for twenty years finally came into its own, and was erected in a room suited to its size. It’s still there as our dining-room table, but on this first night its symbolic value was immense. The back pantry had just flooded onto some boxes and carpets Duncan had managed to store there, so while he unblocked the drain outside I drove to a Chinese takeaway I’d spotted on the way from the A38, and we sat down to our first meal together in our new home. Our spirits were slightly shaky but elated and we laughed a lot in this cold dark chaotic house on that first night, and took inordinate comfort from the fact that at least we lived near a good Chinese.
That night, with mum safely in bed, Duncan and I stepped out into the misty park to try to get a grip on what we’d done. Everywhere the torch shone, eyes of different sizes blinked back at us, and without a clear idea of the layout of the park at this stage, the mystery of exactly what animals lurked behind them added greatly to the atmosphere. We knew where the tigers were, however, and made our way over to one of the enclosures which had been earmarked for replacement posts, to get a close look at what sort of deterioration we were up against. With no tigers in sight, we climbed over the stand-off barrier and began peering at the base of the structural wooden posts holding up the chain link fence by torchlight. We squatted down and became engrossed, prodding and scraping at the surface layers of rotted wood to find the harder core, in this instance, reassuringly near the surface. We decided it wasn’t so bad, but as we stood up were startled to see that all three tigers in the enclosure were now only a couple of feet away from where we were standing, ready to spring, staring intently at us. Like we were dinner.
It was fantastic. All three beasts – and they were such glorious beasts – had manoeuvred to within pawing distance of us without either of us noticing. Each animal was bigger than both of us put together, yet they’d moved silently. If this had been the jungle or, more accurately in this case, the Siberian Tundra, the first thing we’d have known about it would have been a large mouth round our necks. Tigers have special sensors along the front of their two-inch canines which can detect the pulse in your aorta. The first bite is to grab, then they take your pulse with their teeth, reposition them, and sink them in. As they held us in their icy glares, we were impressed. Eventually, one of these vast, muscular cats, acknowledging that, due to circumstances beyond their control (i.e. the fence between us), this had been a mere dress rehearsal, yawned, flashing those curved dagger canines, and looked away. We remained impressed.
