what a difference the sun makes. i have a theory that adisproportionate number of expatriates who leave thiscountry to seek a place in the sun have seasonal affectivedisorder (sad) to some degree. i’m sure i’m on thecontinuum somewhere, as i crave the onset of spring fromthe first moment the leaves turn brown in autumn. when thesun finally did start coming out, in late april and may,everything looked a hundred times better. the liberalsprinkling of snowdrops gave way to a host of daffodils,and the optimism in the air was palpable, and no longeronly coming from me.
the workshop was churning out newly welded metalenclosure posts, big machines were laying new pathwaysbefore our eyes, and the restaurant was a teeming hive ofactivity. spring was definitely in the air, and with it came theneed for some reversible vasectomies, as we didn’t yethave the paperwork or facilities for many of our animals tobreed. first in line was zak, the elderly alpha wolf, whoseproblem actually looked more serious. one testicle hadswollen to the size of an avocado, and though this canhappen to wolves for short periods, zak’s had beenengorged for several weeks and the vet thought he neededto be opened up. the vet room was still a work in progress,so the shop beside the restaurant was sterilized and sometables pushed together. on the allocated day, zak wasdarted and went down easily. though the van was inposition, the vet and steve decided it was just as easy tocarry him the hundred yards or so to the mocked upoperating theater. in truth, if zak had managed to get upand do a tammy, no one would have been very scared. atnineteen years old, even on his best day you could probablywalk faster than he could run, and he maintained his grip onthe pack now, not with brute force, but through sheercharisma and experience.
they arrived slightly breathless, and zak was placed onhis back, cradled by two large plastic blocks with asemicircle cut out of them, a bit like a headsman’s block,specifically designed for keeping animals with ridgedspines steady on their backs. the blocks were well worn,and this procedure was fairly routine, though i asked howmany actual wolves the vet had done. “oh, quite a few bynow. don’t worry. no different from an alsatian.” likeanyone being prepared for an operation, zak lookedpainfully exposed and vulnerable, and as he was shavedand washed in the relevant areas, waves of empathy fromthe men watching went out to him. the women presentfound our discomfort hugely amusing.
once he was opened up, the avocado-size testicle wasinstantly declared cancerous, and its black and purplestriations clearly indicated the presence of this malignnemesis of so many animals and people. luckily, evenwhen advanced, dogs and wolves hardly ever getsecondary cancers from the testicular region—unlikehumans. but the sound of a vas deferens, the small strandof connecting tissue between the testicle and the bodycavity, being cut, is not a pleasant one. there is muchcrunching of gristle, and much wincing and crossing of legsin the audience. his other testicle, pinkish white and normalsize—more like a big conker in the shape of a kidney bean—was also declared a potential health hazard, since itcould have been contaminated by its neighbor, and thesecond set of crunching and cutting was far worse, as itwas into healthy tissue. when the second ostensibly healthytesticle clanged into the metal dish, it was a poignantmoment, and every man present felt something, thoughexactly what, it was hard to pin down. mainly, probably,never to let the medical profession anywhere near yourgonads. though we had saved zak so that he could live tolead the pack another day, it could hardly be described asa good day for him. but he made a full recovery, andworries that his empty scrotum might impinge on hisleadership abilities were unfounded, as zak went on toprovide his pack, and his successor in waiting, the slightlypathetic parker, with guidance and leadership for severalmore months.
next in line was solomon, king of the beasts, the hugelyimpressive male african lion. this really was a routinereversible vasectomy, as one day we will probably try tobreed from him, but at the moment the production of a lioncub would have been seen by the zoo world asirresponsible. although slightly smaller than vlad, solomonis arguably the most impressive cat we have. at around230 kilos, or more than five hundred pounds, he, his mane,and his roar are truly epic. tigers don’t roar, but thisawesome sound is high in solomon’s arsenal of weaponsof terror. i feel it is worth reiterating that, in nature, you don’tgenerally get to hear this sound from so close and live. assolomon blasted steve with his death roar from theconfines of his house, his lips curled back revealing daggerteeth, presenting highly alarming visual as well as auditorystimuli, i watched steve brace himself and resist thetemptation to back to the far wall of the narrow corridor.
steve bided his time and soon got the dart in solomon’sflank. when i next visited the scene, solomon was out cold,the door was open, and the vet was stitching up the lion’sback end, utterly undaunted by the sheer scale of hispatient. i was not undaunted, however. solomon’s flankswere absolutely huge, and the gory procedure going on inhis most intimate region would surely be a source ofdispleasure should he wake up. john was there on firearmsduty, but otherwise there was an open door between himand the park. when kelly, positioned at the head endinside the enclosure (the other lions were locked away intheir parts of the house), started to report that he wasblinking—i.e., that the anaesthetic was beginning to wearoff—i looked for signs of panic, or at least increased workrate from the vet. after all, doing what he was doing, he’dprobably be number one on solomon’s hit list should hecome around. but the vet remained unperturbed, andcontinued his methodical stitching as if he were operatingon a house cat in the comfort of his practice. a few minuteslater, it was done, and the vet and others stepped in withsolomon to microchip him and move him clear of the door.
this was also performed with nonchalance, though perhapsnow just a hint of urgency. then, mission accomplished,everyone stepped clear, the door was closed, and normalsecurity levels were resumed. and solomon bounced backfrom his ordeal to happily fire off his blanks, in accordancewith our license requirements.
the final vasectomy, which i didn’t witness and was alittle uncomfortable about, was vlad’s—again, carried outin his house, decreed from on high in case he impregnatedhis two sisters, the absurdly named blotch and stripe.
these three tigers were bred illegally and hand-reared,despite an obvious genetic defect in the line andoverrepresentation of this strain of siberian tigers in thegene pool. this was one of the reasons ellis, the previousowner, had run afoul of the authorities, and all three tigerswere classified as “display only,” and not to be bred from.
this i didn’t mind, but what bothered me was that tigers areparticularly susceptible to dying under anaesthetic. vlad’sbrother, ivan, had died during a routine procedure someyears before, and tasmin’s heart had stopped somemonths before, while she was being investigated for anongoing kidney problem. in that instance, only duncan’sfast response in alerting the vet, who was walking back tohis car at the time, saved her, and she was quickly giventhe antidote to bring her round. as vlad’s amorous effortswith his sister had so far, in seven years, resulted in noillegal offspring, i was reluctant to have him tampered withat the possible risk of his life. i liked vlad a lot—he is anice, friendly boy—and the machinery of state intervention,coupled with a mild snobbery about his lack of strictzoological value, i felt, was exposing him to unnecessaryrisks. but by now i was a bit battle weary, and with my standon the wolves and monkeys and various other issues, itwas probably a good time to let a few slide past. theoperation was a success, and vlad returned to duty thenext day.
the money was ebbing, but at last we had an inspectiondate, set for 4 june, which gave us an all-or-nothingdeadline to work toward. everybody pitched in,occasionally getting a little high on resources, sending outfor new tools or equipment with relative abandon. the corestaff we had inherited were brilliant improvisers—they hadhad to be for many years as the fortunes of the parkdeclined. instead of buying new metal bars, for instance, iencouraged salvaging existing ones that were liberallyscattered around. there was an estimated acre of scrapbehind the restaurant, for instance, containing old cars,even lorries and the long-forgotten husk of an old dumpertruck, as well as perhaps twenty fridges, innumerable tiresand wheels, bits of wood, and a thousand other things“stored” for future use at some indefinite time in the future,which never came. we did a deal with a local scrapmerchant, who arrived with a large flatbed truck with agrabber on it and a mini digger (which he kindly lent to uswhen he wasn’t using it). the deal was that he could haveeverything, except the choicest bits of metal that we couldrecycle, in exchange for clearing the site. “no problem,” hesaid, delighted. “it’ll take about five days.” nine weeks later,he was still loading up his lorry every day with more metalobjects dragged from the ground. although 95 percent waspure, unadulterated rubbish, in the meantime we hadsalvaged all kinds of useful things, including double-glazedpanels of glass miraculously unbroken, some perfectlyuseable fence posts, and enough scrap angle iron tofabricate a small enclosure. the first object fabricatedentirely from the salvaged scrap was a trailer for thekeepers’ new quad bikes that john made in less than aweek, using wheels from an old sit-on mower. that trailer isstill in service today.
the quad bikes, however, are not. or rather, one of themis, just. duncan’s idea to buy cheap quad bikes as amorale booster for the staff backfired at first, when thewrong people ended up using them for the wrong reasons.
instead of hannah and kelly’s workload being lightened,they still seemed to be pushing heavy barrows of meat orbedding up steep paths, while junior maintenance staff andcasual employees thrashed around the park on the bikesdoing minor errands. the quad bikes deteriorated rapidly,and spent more and more time being fixed or waiting forparts. this caused a lot of bad will, and several meetingswere held where strict protocols were implemented for theuse of the quads. the person who was least happy about itwas probably rob, head keeper and long-sufferinggrandson of ellis. “what’s wrong with walking?” he’d ask.
“it’s part of what working in a place like this is all about.”
though well-intentioned, the purchase of the quad bikestaught us a lesson about tampering with the ecosystem wehad inherited.
my own gift to the keepers was on a smaller scale, andcaused less controversy. ten headlamps, distributedthroughout the staff, had made working in the dark winterevenings, in the absence of exterior lighting (and evenlights inside some of the big cat houses) safer and morebearable. “i haven’t heard a word said against them,” saidrob. though by spring, every one of them had been lost orbroken. on a lighter note, in the lighter evenings we didn’tneed them.
the peacocks were another welcome part of that spring,pouting and preening their quite unbelievably over-the-topplumage for all they were worth. peacocks seem to havebeen designed by a flamboyant madman, probably ofindian extraction given the fine detailing, though with morethan a nod toward the tastes of liberace. even in reposethey are stunning, their impossibly blue heads and neckssuddenly giving way to equally unlikely green and goldfeathers laid like scales from halfway down their backs.
these in turn abruptly change into their famous long tailfeathers, many of them around a meter, easily three timesas long as the males’ bodies. as if this is not enough, as anafterthought their heads are embellished with more bluetippedfeathers on narrow stalks, which blossom out in ananimal parody of a roman centurion’s helmet. and why thehell not? you think. they’ve gone this far. it seems the onlylimit to their opulence is the almost boundless confines ofthe imagination of their indian liberace designer.
in the sunshine, watching these extravagant birds, i found,was uniquely cheering. their sheer physical beauty wasuplifting, a symbol that, even striding around with a mobilephone stuck to my ear, i was somewhere unusual,worthwhile, and with a hint of the exotic. and they werehighly amusing, too. these pea brains would launch theirshimmering fan at anything that moved, and quite a fewthings that didn’t. the older males, with their magnificenttails, shimmered in the sunlight, flashing their wares at theducks, cockerels, and moorhens, who studiously ignoredthem or walked away embarrassed. but they also targetedpicnic benches, footballs, plant pots, and even the cats(which upset these still slightly nervous felines no end). onlyoccasionally, it seemed, did they actually display theirwares to the correct subject, a peahen, who is supposed tobe so impressed with this array that nothing less will do. butthey didn’t seem impressed either, and often wandered offleaving some hapless male shimmering away at nothing,abandoned as if halfway through a promising first date. inthe whole mating season i think i witnessed only onesuccessful copulation, and there was certainly only onepregnant female by the end of it.
i also loved the peacocks because of their place inevolution, or rather in the explanation of it. as an occasionalwriter on evolutionary psychology, particularly regardingmale behavior, i often used the peacock’s tail as shorthandfor some elaborate and expensive male display designedto attract females. there are strong arguments in favor ofthe idea that the entire human cortex—metabolically themost expensive organ we possess— evolved with mateattraction in mind. similarly, humor, hunting, risk taking, andred porsche 911s can all be shorthanded as peacock’stail–type phenomena. you look for other examples, oftentoward the birds of paradise, but their elaborate displaysand one-off shock-tactic plumage, though certainlyridiculous, have nothing on the sheer extravagance of theencumbrance the peacock has landed himself with. thepoint of the tail is that it is very expensive to produce andmaintain—like the porsche, or cortex—and having one is adefinite drain on resources. a human neocortex requires 40percent of our calories, and a porsche costs a lot to buy,and, subject to legal action pending at the time of writing,may become almost as costly to drive in central london,where most of them surely live. but the peacock’s tail reallyhampers him, drawing massive attention from predatorsand making evasion much more difficult. the weightimpedes take-off, and you rarely see them attempt morethan a wing-assisted hop when in full plumage. this pointwas illustrated graphically a few years previously, when,according to robin, the bears were moved into their newenclosure in woodland frequented by peacocks. “yes, ittook them a while to get used to the change,” said robinmildly. “the bears ate mainly peacocks in the first week.”
having landed, the birds were startled by and then poorlyequipped to evade the three fast-moving, voraciouspredators, and this lesson in natural selection is fascinatingto me. watching them parade this incredibly expensivedisplay so poorly, and at such inappropriate objects, whilechildren play football around them, i have to think that,having gone to all that trouble, squandering the display on acamera bag or a tree stump seems marvelous in itsprofligacy. it really does say to me, to borrow dawkins’
phrase from his famous book on darwinian theory, that thewatchmaker was blind. just an extra gram of neural tissue,you would think, would be a better investment, but not whenthe market, evolved through rigorous sexual selection, is inexpensive tails. i had a soft spot for the peacocks. so i wasdisturbed to learn that owen, our star bird keeper, hadtaken it upon himself to cull four of them, citingovercrowding. i suspected there was more to it than this,because owen, like sarah, had told me that he didn’t seethe zoo as a place where non-exotic animals, or morespecifically, “animals of no zoological significance,” shouldbe kept. most of the hundred or so birds in the walk-inenclosure—mainly chickens, geese, and ducks—hadgradually disappeared—culled apparently by somesystemic parasitic infection that was too advanced to treatand that was a health risk to the more zoologicallysignificant rare birds we had and planned to acquire in thefuture. but several neighbors and farmers were contactedand invited to take the birds, subject to their own healthcheck, and many were saved, going on to produce manyeggs for many other people. adam in particularoccasionally taunted me that he enjoyed a particularly fineduck egg for breakfast. this culling, deemed necessary,particularly upset mum, who had enjoyed being followedaround by this raggedy brood while feeding them, anexperience, standing in her own park, which seemed adaily reminder of the remarkable distance she had traveledin her life since childhood. it upset me too, and indicated alevel of disagreement with the new keeper-staff, which wasto culminate in a fiery meeting about the direction of thepark a few weeks down the line. more of that later.
in the meantime, i went along with this and other, to me,quite radical measures, simply because there wasn’t timeto contest everything, and nor was it wise to challenge theorthodoxy on everything i felt uncertain about. zookeepersare a little bit like paramilitaries. they wear big boots andcombat trousers, they communicate with walkie-talkies, andthey do a dangerous job that sometimes involves firearms.
to come up through their ranks requires a lot of disciplineand dedication, as well as conformity to the establishedorthodoxy. i couldn’t do it. arguably, i have a modicum ofself-discipline (though i can imagine my dad snorting withderision at this assertion), but external discipline oftenseems to rankle with me. duncan tried to be a zookeeperonce, for about six months in the reptile house at londonzoo, and it wasn’t for him either. “i remember my first day,”
says duncan. “the man in charge of me held up a broom,told me what it was, and then showed me how to use it, byputting the head on the floor and then pushing it out in frontof you repeatedly. it took a while for it to dawn on me that iwas standing here being shown by a grown man how tosweep a floor.” having been fully trained, he thought, inthese esoteric cleaning arts, after a few days he made aninnovation. “the head of the broom kept falling off, so ipopped a nail into it and trebled the efficiency. but thebloke was livid. ‘who told you to do that?’ he yelled, andwith good reason, it turned out.” apparently the head wasleft loose because it was sometimes necessary to go inwith the alligators to clean around these slow-movingthrowbacks, and the broom was the keeper’s maindefense. “the idea is that if an alligator ever made a movefor you, you offered it the broom and it would bite the headoff and retreat, thinking it had got something. and then atleast you still had the handle, instead of it being yanked outof your hand and thrashing about the place.” so there wasmethod in this apparent madness (though this arguablymost important part of the training had been lacking), butsome of what duncan encountered just seemed like plainmadness.
“the galapagos tortoises had beak rot and weren’tbreeding, so i decided to use my lunch hours to look into it,”
he says. london zoo is home to one of the mostcomprehensive zoological libraries in the world, but as atrainee keeper in the early 1980s, duncan wasn’t allowedaccess to it. “they made it really hard, and it was as if theygenuinely didn’t understand what i wanted to do in there.”
eventually duncan got in, and found that the only zoo tosuccessfully breed these huge, long-lived reptiles—one atlondon at the time was thought to have been brought backby charles darwin—was san diego. reading their papersand contacting their staff, he learned that the beak rot wascaused by eating bananas, which stick to the lower part ofthe jaw. in the wild, such matter is brushed off by the longgrass through which the tortoises walk, but in london theyweren’t, so the beak rots. duncan took his findings to thesenior keeper in charge of the reptiles, expecting to beable to implement the necessary changes, and possiblyeven be thanked for his efforts. in fact, the old man said,“i’ve been doing this job for twenty years. who are you totell me how to do my job?
fuck off.” science, they say, advances funeral by funeral.
duncan isn’t the type to wait around, so he left to becomehis own boss, importing marine fish from the tropics.
now we both found ourselves running a zoo—or trying to—and while we knew we had to listen to and closely followwhat we were told by our advisors, from keepers to curatorto council, we also knew that there would be times when wewould be able to innovate. business managers know thatoften the best innovators are not insiders. our trouble wasthat we weren’t really business managers either. but atleast we were outsiders.
we also knew that, for now, we all had to work together,and to use the environmental health officer peterwearden’s phrase, “ticking the right boxes,” was whatcounted most in the run-up to the inspection. sometimesthose boxes could be ticked, after a struggle, via a differentchain of events from those prescribed or recommended,like with the wolf dispute, or the monkeys, but this alwaystook time, and invariably, during the hiatus beforeresolution, our fragile credibility would be eroded. until thebox was actually ticked, when it became an invisible issue,and everything moved toward the next box. time we did nothave, and we had to get as many boxes ticked as possiblebefore our inspection, now set firmly for 4 june. we had toenter into a box-ticking frenzy, otherwise the bankers andthe lawyers would gleefully produce their own clipboards,offering much less room to maneuver, and with much lessfriendly boxes.
there was an exhilarating sense of teamwork—a trulyflexible, skilled, and dedicated team working together toachieve a common aim. on paper, this was our business,and everyone was an employee contriving, in the long run,to produce profits for us. in actuality, i don’t think anyonethought like this—least of all us. day in, day out, it felt likewe were all battling to save a beleaguered public resource,and most important, a collection of beleaguered animals,safe for the future. and if we failed, the consequences wereunthinkable. tourette tony did an excellent job, swearinghis way through countless setbacks, dancing his diggerthrough ridiculously skillful and efficient maneuvers, andworking himself and his team as hard as was humanlypossible. anna and steve were absolutely invaluable, annahandling the complicated paperwork, feeding back to usexactly which boxes we needed to tick, and exactly how,while steve deployed himself as laborer, keeper,supervisor, roller driver—whatever he needed to be.
hannah, kelly, paul, john, and rob alternated betweenkeeping and maintenance tasks, and a crew of temporarylaborers got stuck with unpleasant tasks like dredging slimymoats, sweeping acres of wet leaves, and tensioninghundreds of meters of new fence mesh, which bites into thehands, made more painful by the chilly breeze. owen andsarah led their troop of junior keepers from the front,working incredibly hard, leading, training, and instillingappropriate modern practices, though a little harshly itseemed to me at times—owen told me that to train anovice you had to “break them down and build them upagain, sometimes.” this didn’t chime with my preferred(though admittedly made-up-as-i-went-along) managementtechnique, but then i wasn’t from that culture. inevitably, thison going process had its occasional rows and threatenedwalkouts, but the overall atmosphere was of everyoneknuckling down and doing whatever was necessary. it wasgoing as well as it could. and then came the rain.
after the exceptionally sunny and buoyant may, weentered the wettest june in the uk for a hundred years. thesouthwest suffered just over twice the averageprecipitation since records began in 1914, but it felt like itrained every single day. the gnawing doubts of whether wecould accomplish the task in the allotted time returned.
working in waterproofs, many tasks like fencing and barrierreplacements could still be achieved. but things likewelding outside, concreting, chain-saw work, and often,using the digger, were out of the question.
the peacocks, so recently a symbol of hope, now lookedbedraggled. one female sat on the grass verge outside thetoilets for several weeks, and when i asked the keepers ifshe was okay, it turned out that she was roosting someeggs. in the rain. within a few yards of where she sat was aperfectly viable bush, which would at least have providedsome cover from the elements and, at least as important,foxes. but this dumb-assed bird—apparently the only oneto succumb to the male’s elaborate, evolutionarilyexpensive spring display—persisted in trying to rear herdelicate brood fully exposed to the elements and predators.
eventually three eggs hatched, and she wisely moved herlittle ones around each night, but as they grew and sheroamed further afield—she and her little trio of actually quitepretty chicks, desperately trying to keep up with their mum—we gradually lost track of them, and i can’t honestly saywhether any of them survived or not.
even in the rain there was much to do, both inside andout, and i threw myself into work. by now, less than threemonths after katherine’s death, i could notice significantphysiological changes in my response. mainly, i didn’t feelso leaden, as if the life had been sapped out of me with herpassing—though my stella artois diet, much reduced butstill a significant part of my routine to get to sleep afterputting the kids to bed, was expanding my waistline so that,in reality, my physical leadenness was actually increasing.
but the energy within was beginning to return. the manydaily triggers were becoming more recognizable and morebearable, i was much less likely to be wrong-footed bysomething unexpected, and the amount of crying i neededto do gradually reduced. i would occasionally beoverwhelmed by dipping into the enormity of what we hadlost. a couple of brief but necessary trips to london, everypart of which i seemed to have visited with katherine,during this period were particularly horrible. but generally, icould feel it was getting better. and the children seemed tobe thriving at the new school, and adapting with themalleable resilience of the very young.
obviously they were still profoundly affected, and i madesure that i kept talking to them whenever they wanted me to.
increasingly, though, they seemed to be protecting me—and themselves—from my grief, which must have beenalarming for them, but was impossible (and i thought,inadvisable) to hide in the early stages. they confidedoccasionally to friends and neighbors, and amelia, whotrickled their concerns back to me. once they both came upwith the idea of wearing one of katherine’s jumpers in bed,and as i rummaged through her drawers of neatly foldedclothes, last visited during those all too memorable weeksof dressing and undressing her, i felt myself becomingincreasingly upset. milo, watching closely, smiled andwagged his figure at me, saying good-naturedly, “uh, uh,uuh, daddy. don’t turn on the tears.” it cheered me up noend and i promised him that i wouldn’t, and reassured himagain that whenever he wanted to talk about mummy iwouldn’t cry. which is where we are now.
outside in the park, the inspection date loomed, and therain often made it impossible to see farther than a fewyards. we persevered, and even a few weeks before theinspection, the mood on the ground was lifting; theconsensus seemed to be that we had “ticked enoughboxes” to show willingness. it is almost unheard of for a zoothat has had its license withdrawn to haul itself back fromthe abyss, but the feeling was that we were probably goingto do it—though we couldn’t afford to slack off for an instant.
our short resumé looked good. we had the right people,the right intentions, and if not quite the right amount ofmoney, at least we were spending it in the right way. one ofthe most important parts of our license requirement was theconservation measures we were going to implement. steveand anna have good contacts with an endangered speciesprogram in sri lanka, and owen and sarah’s back catalogof successes was filtering through to us with promises ofbreeding programs for the future, which also scored uspoints. as did creatures like ronnie, the officially“vulnerable” tapir, and sovereign, our prize stud-book jag.
but increasingly, local conservation measures are seen asat least equally important. fortunately, we were in a goodposition to implement many. on the edge of dartmoor,itself a thriving habitat of many species that are decliningnationally, we were perfectly placed to help endangeredanimals of the much less glamorous variety. like dormice,horseshoe bats, vulnerable ground-nesting birds, newts,snails, and even certain mosses and lichens. one species ialready knew a tiny bit about was a certain kind of fritillarybutterfly thought to have one of its last toeholds in thecountry in dartmoor, which i happened to have writtenabout briefly for the guardian. i called the butterflyconservation society (“butterfly conservay-shun, how canwe help you?” they cooed), who informed me that we couldwork to provide habitats on our land that could be suitablefor butterflies. we already had a couple of acres ofdedicated conservation woodland, but the requirements forspecific plants may have been detrimental to what wasalready there. they would welcome a donation. er, maybeone day.
another thwarted effort was the dartmoor pony, down tofewer than nine hundred breeding mares (making it evenrarer than that conservation figurehead the giant panda),and subject of a concerted local campaign to protect themfrom ruthless landowners who sometimes shoot them orsell them for meat rather than pay the newly introduced ￡20fee for a horse passport, now required under europeanlaw. the idea is to register animals that may pass into thehuman food chain so that any veterinary drugs they haveconsumed can be monitored. the reality is that a dartmoorpony can be sold for as little as a pint of milk, and manyhard-pressed farmers simply can’t afford to comply with thepassport law. charities are looking for landowners who canoffer paddocks to small herds of ponies, who areperiodically transported back to certain areas of the moorto graze and manage it as only these tough little indigenouscritters can. my sister melissa researched and promotedthe scheme, having once kept a dartmoor pony—aphrodite—who had a stubborn but gentle temperament. iremember aphrodite fondly, nonchalantly standing outsidein the snow, with icicles clinking from her whiskers, trying toreassure a namby-pamby semi-thoroughbred in its heatedstable, wearing a thick horse coat, who had caught a cold.
this local project sounded perfect, and i brought up plans todevote eight acres, which would support about eight totwelve small ponies, to this admirable aim. but i hit a brickwall: it didn’t tick any boxes. dartmoor ponies may beendangered, but the actual species, horse (caballus), canonly be described as thriving. dartmoor ponies wereartificially bred by humans a few centuries ago, probably towork in the local tin mines, and count as a breed, ratherthan an endangered species. it’s like trying to save thesiamese cat, or the staffordshire bull terrier. of interest tolocal breeders perhaps, but zoologically insignificant. thisseemed to me a particularly irritating pill to swallow, butagain, time was not on our side, and we had to do whatwas necessary to get our license, rather than what wethought we might like.
one local scheme, which i did manage to include as acentral plank of our conservation strategy, was reinstatinghedgerows. there are an estimated couple of kilometers ofhedgerow bordering and crisscrossing our thirty acres,most of it depleted and sparse, providing little of the richhabitat for local wildlife it once did. some hedgerows(though not, it has to be said, ours) are more than sevenhundred years old. properly maintained, hedgerows aregiant elongated ecosystems in their own right, acting ascorridors for wildlife to pass along, and protecting manywildflowers, plants, insects, birds, and mammals thatexperience difficulties when out in the open. we also hadpockets of different kinds of hawthorn, which could betransplanted from other parts of the site, and this project,fortunately, was given an enthusiastic thumbs-up by theauthorities. it also ticked my own personal box for a longterm,slow intervention, a gradual enhancement of thebroader ecosystem of the park, unlikely to provide shocks,but very likely to provide long-term benefits and educationalopportunities—and security, as thick hedgerows are agood barrier against intruders, as well as certain errantexotic animals. and—and—where we took out hawthorn, itfreed up space for other uses, like public viewing areas. itwent into the plan, and we set about putting out feelers forthose wise in the ways of the hedgerow to train us up.
fortunately, in this area of devon, these old countrysidepractices still go on, and i looked forward to one day beingable to lose myself in the ancient art of coppicing for a fewhours a day before too long.
meanwhile, over at the restaurant, the ringmaster adamwas gradually drawing everything together, though it tookan experienced eye to discern through the chaos that somecoherence was emerging. the kitchen was still“shambolic,” as was the eating area and the shop—covered in sawdust and work tools—which somehow hadto be transformed into clear public access or commercialspace. but there were signs that it was changing for thebetter. the vile ceiling had been covered with crisp newplasterboard, then skimmed with plaster to an almostethereal smoothness by three men in less than a week,which at four hundred square meters was pretty goodgoing. mind you, it had to be. it had to dry, be painted, andhave the lovely, new, brushed-chrome flush spotlights(katherine would have approved) installed.
there had been much talk of off-whites, even strongcolors, being used on the walls, but mum and i stuck to ourguns: everything was going to be white. with the oak floor,oak counter and bar, and brushed-steel details, this vastroom was going to give posh london restaurants a run fortheir money.
remember that design meeting i was in when the wolfescaped? we didn’t use those people for our leaflets in theend, as their mock-ups were much too fussy. (instead afriend from london volunteered to finish off what katherinehad started, much more in her style; thanks, paul.) butsomething good did come out of the meeting. when ioutlined my ideas for the overall aesthetic for the restaurant,and ultimately the park, mentioning terence conran as aguiding principle, one of the designers came up with theexcellent description “conran meets out of africa.” ijumped on it readily. (pretentious? moi?) howeverpompous this model may sound, if we could pull it off i wascertain it would work in the market we were aiming for.
good design is becoming more mainstream, and modernbuildings are springing up in zoos as fast as they areanywhere else. bristol zoo recently spent ￡1,000,000 on anew monkey house that looks like it could feature in aswedish grand designs program. people who regularlyeat at mcdonald’s won’t actually be put off by understatedgood taste (well, “good taste” in my humble subjectiveopinion anyway), nor will they be put off by good food, aslong as it is reasonably priced. besides, my mostoptimistic interpretation of our business plan was that we(and the surrounding roads) could probably only support amaximum of 200,000 to 220,000 visitors a year, and oneday we may have to raise prices to limit the numbers. whynot prepare for that market now? it was easy to get aheadof yourself (our most pressing aspiration, to just breakeven, with 60,000 visitors, was thought by many to beoptimistic) in the upbeat atmosphere of the restaurant,particularly with adam in “can do” mode, still jugglingquotes and materials, and interviewing catering staff on avery tight timeline. looking at the progress, and looking atadam, i knew he was going to succeed. this wasabsolutely vital, as the restaurant was going to be thefinancial engine of the zoo—and, ideally, somewhere icould eat without having to worry about cleaning up for thenext twenty-five years.
as another vital part of the business plan, we had to haveat least one good kiosk, ideally two, or if the hugelysuccessful nearby paignton zoo was anything to go by, oneevery fifty meters. adam rejected a ready-made buildingnext to the future petting zoo, a configuration of facilitiesthrough which i have been milked for tea, cake, and icecream many times since becoming a parent. owenpounced on the building to incubate birds’ eggs on publicdisplay instead, while adam made a strong case forfocusing on a purpose-built kiosk at the top of the picnicarea. obviously this site needed a kiosk one day, but i wasdisappointed that he was eschewing an existing building,and i took some persuading that we should initially obtainwhat sounded like a quite expensive shed, instead ofwaiting and putting in a modern, curvy model that had justwon the award for best leisure facility kiosk in denmark(so many awards, so little time). but adam was adamant:
the outlay of ￡2,000 would repay itself in a single goodsummer’s day by keeping people in the best part of thepark, marveling at the proximity of the tigers on tigermountain, being treated occasionally to the lions’ roar andthe wolves’ howl, and buying tea, cake, ice cream, and, aswe are in the southwest, pasties like there was notomorrow.
as an aside, i have learned two things about pasties, ormeat pies, since i came here. one is that the thick outer rimof crust, which in an authentic pasty clogs up your mouthlike a packet of cheese crackers, is not actually meant tobe eaten, because it was designed to be the handle bywhich the meal was held in the grubby hands of miners ontheir lunch break. sorry if you already knew this, but ienjoyed the discovery because it makes me feel less guiltyabout leaving that dehydrating arc of carbohydrate, orthrowing it away to be eaten by ants. organic,biodegradable handles and food packaging, generally, arethings we should be thinking about now, but they werealready being addressed as early as 1510. which bringsme to the second thing i’ve learned. the “cornish pasty”
was invented in devon. yeah, where i live. it was recentlydiscovered that 1510 was the first recorded date when apasty was mentioned, in the accounts of the council for thecity of plymouth. which is in devon. across the tamar river,“there be monsters,” and this can be proved by the nextmention of the pasty, in 1746, when this devonian recipewas allegedly stolen by pirates and introduced to cornwall.
what kind of pirates were these? outriders for somedespotic, early martha stewart? the irrefutable factremains, at the moment, that the pasty came from devon.
so get used to it, cornwall. and yes, everybody alreadyknows that pasties originally had two chambers, one savoryand one of fruit filling, the world’s first two-courseconvenience meal. even i knew that.
the great pasty debate apparently continues to rageacrimoniously between the two counties, though i mustadmit, in eighteen months here, i have never overheard asingle word of it. and frankly, now, i’m getting a bit sick ofpasties.
so adam persuaded me that the new structure would bea good use of our rapidly depleting funds, and called meover the radio to watch it arrive. i still had my reservations,in the driving june rain. it still seemed an expensive optioncompared with refitting the existing building a hundredyards away, and, to me, a bit too square. the team thatarrived to erect the prefabricated structure was resolutelyprofessional, working efficiently through the rain on a smallsite we had paced out and leveled to the kiosk’srequirements. once again i had a small opportunity to getinvolved in some diy construction, supplying the oddhammer blow here, lifting a panel or two there, and irelished it. but once the structure was up, the teamswarmed around it, fitting it out with internal panels andhammering down the roofing felt, and there was nothing forme to do, apart from stand back in the picnic area andmarvel at how good it looked. square or not, it looked like ithad always been here, like it definitely belonged, and it waseasy to get excited about the possibility of queues ofpaying customers lining up outside it. though not in thisweather . . .
the kiosk was a very important part of the overall planand, as the business side of the venture, absolutely had towork. the animals, obviously, came first, but withoutsatisfied customers— and lots of them—they faced anuncertain future. the inspection was only days away, andthough it would focus on animal welfare, some attentionwould also be paid to the facilities for the public. thenumber of toilets, the state of the paths, disabled access,adequate stand-off barriers to prevent people’s limbs beingsheared off by giant carnivores, that sort of thing. what theinspector would not do—could not do—is tell us whether itwas going to work as a business. that was down to us, theweather, an element of luck, and whether the localreputation of the park was already too irretrievablytarnished in the public mind. and that was a bit scary.
inspection day dawned a rare sunny morning, whichaugured well, though the pre-exam nerves infectedeveryone. as i met the keepers before the inspectorarrived, they were barely recognizable. smartly dressed—and clean! normally mud spattered and sweat drenched,this crew of hardened workers who would think nothing ofthrowing themselves into a mire in pursuit of an injuredanimal, shoveling barrowloads of excrement, or coveringthemselves with blood while stripping down a horsecarcass, suddenly looked like normal people, like you mightmeet out on the street. i didn’t even know that steve had asmart jacket, but here he was, looking slightly ill at ease init, chain-smoking roll-ups while we waited for the examinerto arrive. i was particularly nervous, which took me bysurprise, because i had taken soundings from everyoneinvolved and had been persuaded that we had “almostcertainly” done enough to pass. it was that “almost” thatsuddenly came home to roost as we waited.
the government-appointed inspector arrived with peterwearden, who would actually issue the license, should thatbe the recommendation. peter winked at me, which wasslightly reassuring, but the matter was out of his hands. theinspector, nick jackson, ran his own small zoo, a secondgenerationfamily operation with an international reputation,in wales. so, he knew how to run a good zoo. we justhoped that he could discern the seeds of one in what wehad done. the walk-around—normally an unequivocalpleasure, showing people what we had got and what weaimed to do and watching them transform from wide-eyedskeptics to energized enthusiasts by the end of it—suddenly became deadly serious. mr. jackson was beingpaid to ask difficult questions, from a position of extremeinsight, and nothing was off-limits. he went into every singleanimal house, exposed every single area where we werelacking, and asked the most difficult questions. meanwhile,peter, in his role as health and safety officer for southhams council, had some criticisms of his own. “robin’snest,” for instance, where robin had retreated to carry outhis enclosure design work and the construction of signs,was a loft that, no one had seemed to notice or thinkstrange, ended with an abrupt drop, next to his desk, oftwenty feet down to the concrete floor of the workshopbelow. obviously, robin was aware of this and knew to stayaway from the edge, but equally obvious was the fact that itwasn’t safe. “i want this addressed immediately,” he barkeduncharacteristically. “and i mean today.” other obviousoversights were the lack of signs on the doors of thedangerous animal houses for when people were working inthe enclosures. “if i was working out there, i’d like to knowthat there was a sign on the door telling the keepers not torelease the cats, just in case of a breakdown ofcommunication,” said mr. jackson. though our operationwas small enough and tight enough for everyone to knowwhat everyone else was doing, it was a fair point, andduncan radioed to robin, who, his dangerous nest alreadybeing worked on, immediately began implementing thisrecommendation. i didn’t help; for want of something to saywhile we waited for the keys to arrive to the tiger house, ipointed out that there was blood on the padlock of theexternal door. the inspector looked sharply at me andsmiled. “i hadn’t noticed that,” he said. “poor workingpractices.” and he made a note. damn.
at about five o’clock the inquisition was over, and rarelyhave i felt so relieved. but the day wasn’t over yet. wemoved to the office, where everyone sat down and endureda full two-and-a-half-hour debriefing, going over every pointraised and being given some indication of our score on it. itwas almost as grueling as the inspection itself, andalthough it was useful feedback in that we had scored quitewell, it still wasn’t conclusive, as the final report wouldcontain extra material. i was relieved that my padlockremark, though drawing attention to our deficits, hadactually played quite well, and was singled out by theinspector as part of “a culture of openness,” apparentlyquite lacking at previous inspections over the years. hehad also asked for private interviews with keepers andother staff, away from their employers breathing down theirnecks, and had been impressed by what he had heard fromthem about their interpretation of what we were doing andwhere we were going. so no need to sack anybody there,then (just kidding). unless, of course, the result came backwith “application declined,” in which case everybody wouldbe looking for new jobs.
i remember the next day vividly. i was (stupidly)unexpectedly exhausted, sitting on a bench outside thehouse with the children, when rob came up to me. “i can’twork any longer with steve,” he said. rob was headkeeper, steve was the curator, and their relationship wasvital to the smooth running of the zoo. this should havebeen a bombshell. i should have felt panicky, or at leastalarmed, but instead i felt, from very deep down, whatever.
i felt that we owed a lot to rob. he had held on to the park,keeping it out of the developer’s hands by taking on thecollection under the dangerous wild animals (dwa)legislation when the license to display the collection held byhis grandfather was withdrawn. i had spoken to him andexchanged many e-mails during the negotiating periodwhen i was in france. rob was one of the most importantpeople involved in us getting the park. i didn’t want to loserob, partly because we owed him, and also because hewas multi-skilled, and had a depth of knowledge about thepark that would be impossible to replicate.
i waited. he suggested moving to working on thegrounds instead, which, after brief consideration, i thoughtwas a very good idea. with thirty acres to tend, we neededa dedicated grounds person (though we couldn’t reallyafford one), and rob was a qualified tree surgeon whoknew the park as well as anyone. he needed a lessstressfuljob due to a change in his personalcircumstances, as he was now single-handedly lookingafter a daughter he hadn’t seen in four years. moving togrounds would take him from under the direct control ofsteve, with whom he had a stormy relationship that seemedto reach the breaking point roughly every two weeks. undertony, with whom he had a less-uneasy relationship, hecould work outside, not worrying about other people’s rotasor changes in procedures he had grown up with beingimplemented by the new regime. he also knew a bit aboutthe many exotic plants that flourish all over the park, mostlygrown from cuttings by the green-fingered ellis. (i havebrown fingers; any plant in my care automatically shrivelsand dies, though rob told us early on that one rare plant, akind of creeper, had thwarted ellis for forty years, but thatas soon as we arrived it had started to sprout leaves. thiswas a strange, apocryphal tale that was nevertheless niceto hear.) it would be a simpler life for rob, and i almostenvied him.
steve was also delighted, and suggested that he wouldspend more time out in the park with the staff,encompassing the head keeper role, leaving more of theadministrative side of his job to his eminently capable wife,anna. everybody seemed to be pleased with this newconfiguration, and i felt a bit like a soccer manager who hadcome up with a new way of deploying players; instead of 4–4–2, we were going for a radical 1–1–8. or something. ihave to admit i’m a bit shaky on soccer, but that’s roughlywhat it felt like. probably.
so, oddly jaded but also rejuvenated, we all set aboutfilling the time until we heard our fate. we had to assumewe would pass the inspection and open soon, but when,exactly, we could not predict. this was a complicatedissue, because publicity material needed to be printed withdates and opening times for distribution all around thecounty. when the printers, up against their last possibledeadlines, pressured us for information, we simply didn’tknow. in the end we went for “opening summer 2007.” wehad better be.
finally the day came when peter wearden summonedme to appear at the council offices in totnes to hear theresult. i drove with steve and my mum (maybe peter wouldbe more lenient with an elderly lady present). the last time ihad been there was to register katherine’s death threemonths before with ella, when i had played with herafterward in the small maze in the courtyard. but i tried toput this out of my mind because, as the king of swampcastle says in monty python and the holy grail, about thewedding disrupted by the slaughter of many guests by theexuberant lancelot, “please! this is supposed to be ahappy occasion.” peter smiled, i smiled, everybody smiled.
it was looking good. he handed me the report, which waslong but fortunately had a covering letter. “i recommend thatdartmoor zoological park be granted a license to trade asa zoo . . .” wow. at last. we had done it. we thanked peterand drove back elated, and presented the news to all thestaff, some of whom shed tears. we set a definite date forour opening, two weeks away, on 7 july—07/07/07—whicheverybody agreed was somehow auspicious.
most important, it was just before the school holidays, atthe beginning of the busiest period, though it meant wewould have to hit the ground running. it would have beennice to have a gentler opening in june, to get a bit ofpractice at actually dealing with the public before exposingour newly revamped infrastructure to the (ideally) swarminghordes of july. if those hordes found any holes in our planthey would burst through them, impelled by market forces,and puncture the whole damn balloon. but 07/07/07 wasset in stone. we really were opening on that date, no matterwhat. if the restaurant wasn’t ready, there would besandwiches. if the kiosk wasn’t wired up properly, we’d runan extension lead. if the play area was uninstalled, we hadbouncy castles, lent to us by adam’s bouncy castles, asecret part of our customer services manager adam’sformer life. it was going to happen.
but the money had run out. we had tried—in vain, as itturns out—to keep track of our reserves. but by the timejoanne, our bookkeeper, had got a grip on the situation, itwas to tell us that we had about ￡60,000 left, and about amonth to go before opening. an endangered zoo eatsmoney like a specially designed money-eating machine,and for the valiant army of dartmoor zoological park,￡60,000 was a pittance. an industrial shredder speciallyadapted for banknotes couldn’t get through money anybetter. as well as hungry mouths to feed—lions, bears,tigers, monkeys, and otters, to name but a few—all thoseanimals require expensive veterinary dental checks, fecalscreening programs, routine vaccinations, microchipping,and a whole gamut of other services, which for a custodianof exotic animals, is the first priority.
but these are so unequivocally part of what the zoo isabout that they present no dilemma. the day of the dentistwas a memorable, and memorably expensive, inaugurationof just what is needed to responsibly maintain so manyexotic animals. fudge the bear, as well as needing asecond go at cutting her claws, which had grownsemicircular and impeded her walk, looked like she hadtoothache. at twenty-nine, she could be expected to liveperhaps another seven or so years in captivity (though shewould have been long dead in the savage wild where herkind are down to perhaps five examples in the pyrenees,and are still being hunted for sport in eastern europe). herclaws were one issue, but she seemed subdued and slowmoving, and the occasional glimpses into her mouth sheoffered revealed a horrifying set of broken gravestones,cracked and covered in brown grime, as well as whatlooked like an abscess. it was enough to slow anyonedown, particularly a venerable old lady.
one of the pumas was also ailing, and dribbling, whichhad been consistently diagnosed as gingivitis and treatedas such periodically over the last several years. the troublewas that gingivitis is usually an acute condition—very rarelychronic—but this puma rarely showed her teeth to thekeepers, and was in fact recently revealed to be an entirelydifferent puma from the one we thought we had. an x-raytaken a few months previously showed that she had a metalplate in her leg, which she was not supposed to have, andmeant that she was someone else entirely. we had to findout who she was and what was wrong with her.
the third, and arguably most important, client wassovereign, the ninja-escapist jaguar and the mostendangered animal of the three. he had somehow crackedboth his upper canines, one of which was flat at the end. ithad been suggested that both these teeth might need to beextracted, which bothered me, because sovereign was stilla young adult and these teeth were the tools of his trade.
obviously he didn’t need them for hunting at the zoo—wecould feed him mince, if he needed it—but i was concernedfor his psychological well-being if these teeth were lost. hewould feel the loss. and i was concerned thatpreoccupations with preventing future abscesses would notinclude this in the calculations. i wanted to be there whenthese decisions were made.
so the day of the dentist was set, and we prepared.
how we prepared. peter kertesz is the uk’s leadingspecialist in exotic animal dentistry, and is also, mainly, aharley street practitioner on humans. he happens to havetaken an interest in animal dentition, and has become oneof the world’s leading experts. nick masters, from the izvg,was going to handle the anaesthetic and carry out generalhealth checks on each animal while it was under. both ofthem were booked, and we had to be ready.
in the predawn darkness of 6 am the team started toassemble at the park, and most of the normal routineprocedures and feeding began. by 8 am, steve hadendured his increasingly familiar dance with sovereign,who had been darted successfully and transported to thepark’s shiny new vet facility. sovereign made a spectacularfirst patient for the vet room, his beautiful markingscontrasting with the sterile white environment and greencoatedmedics. on examination, both sovereign’s twochipped upper canine teeth exposed some of the pulp, sothere was a real possibility he might lose them. but peterwas unfazed and simply trimmed them, using a terriblyefficient little grinder which makes all the worst noises thatyou don’t want to overhear during human dentistry. havingstabilized the external structure of the teeth, he set aboutperforming root-canal work. for us, this involves a specialpipe cleaner about two inches long, which is inserted intothe hole in the center of the tooth where the dentine oncewas, and shuffled back and forth to clean all the residualtissue out of the cavity deep in the bone. thank god foranaesthetic. for sovereign, the pipe-cleaning probesneeded to be at least five inches long to get deep enoughinto his enormous roots, but also to travel the extra inchesof the length of the teeth themselves, for peter to dig out allthe pulp. fortunately, for such a dangerous patientsovereign was as good as gold. nick masters ensured thathe was under a closely monitored general anaesthetic;there were tubes in his mouth, monitors on his heart, andmachines that went beep. after some very in-depthreaming, and then a similarly comprehensive filling,sovereign’s root-canal work was complete, and he wasreturned to a bed of straw in his enclosure.
then it was the turn of a female puma, who we thoughtwas probably holly, who had been dribbling saliva in anunusual way. we carried the prostrate cat on a stretcherthat had been lent by another zoo for the occasion. it was ashort haul, with a relatively small cat, and the drugs wereinternationally recommended, so i didn’t feel tooapprehensive about this. the transfer went well, and onceshe was on the table, peter immediately saw that theproblem was a couple of premolars on her lower jaw, whichhad nothing above them to chew against. for the lastseveral years she had been biting against her gums, whichwere bleeding and causing the dribbling, and nowextraction was the only option. but this was all routine topeter, and forty-five minutes and two extractions later, theprocedure was completed, and holly was on her way backto her enclosure to recover in her bed of warm straw.
everybody broke for a late lunch, and a refreshed teamfaced what they hoped would be a simple task of clippingthe over-grown claws of the park’s oldest mammal, fudge,the twenty-nine-year-old european brown bear. fudge wastricky to sedate. her weight was unknown (it turned out tobe 147 kilos on the scales in the vet room—she’s a smallbear), so it was difficult to get the dose right. and she wastough. eventually six people managed to transport asleeping fudge to the operating table, where wemanhandled her into position for peter and nick. nick, asanaesthetist, had priority initially, to stabilize her, and hisarray of beeping machines ensured that she was safelyunder, with all her vital signs monitored. as soon as thiswas established, peter took over with a flourish. neithernick nor peter are tall men, but both are fit and extremelyprecise in their movements—archetypal medicalprofessionals—and it was a real privilege to watch themwork. they looked the part too, both choosing blueparamilitary-style boiler suits with leg pockets, peter’s tocarry the rechargeable battery pack for the elaborateheadlamp he wore throughout, sometimes fitting it withextra optical devices, like a sort of jeweler-surgeon. which,i suppose, an exotic-animal dentist probably is. peter isperhaps twenty years older than nick, and though in theglamorous role of specialist, he gracefully deferred to theanesthetist whenever he needed access to check the tubesgoing into fudge’s mouth or made recommendationsabout how long he could take. he’d stand back, tools in theair with all the time in the world, saying, “you do what youhave to do. i’m just the technician.” but though peter wascharming, he also constantly supplied a monologue aboutwhat a superb job he was doing. “look at that,” he’d say,cutting around the gum and deftly extracting a minor rottingtooth, then stitching up the gum with one hand. “i’m probablythe only person in the world who could do that. fromdiagnosis to extraction in under twenty minutes. good jobi’m here.” there had been rumors that peter would arrivewith a new, attractive female assistant, and he did (healways does). unfortunately, though extremely competent,she was not quite as fast as peter demanded, and he gaveher several ruthless dressing-down. but of course, this wasa serious business. the bear could only stay under for solong, and all the people involved had been working formany hours, with several more to go, during which no onecould afford to make mistakes.
the more peter looked, the more bad stuff he found. inthe end fudge had five extractions, and the molars,particularly her remaining upper canine, were not twentyminutejobs. “bears’ teeth are built to last,” said peter as hestruggled with fudge’s well-rooted dentition, which involvedusing a small stainless steel hammer and chisel. it was allhands on deck as the dental nurse, anna, steve, duncan,and i all held fudge steady while peter tugged and cajoledthe teeth out and sewed up her bleeding gums. sovereign ihad met before under general anaesthetic, and his languidmusculature had been no surprise. “holly,” the puma, waspast her prime, and had seemed like just a very bigdomestic cat—though one you wouldn’t want to mess with.
but fudge seemed unbelievably solid, perhaps like the wildboar that leon had so wisely declined to pursue in france.
she felt like she could go through anything, and nick wasimpressed with the strength of her vital signs throughout. iwas totally impressed with fudge. she was really a beast.
and during these procedures, it became clear why fudgehad been moving slowly for some time.
peter uncovered and drained an abscess the size of agolf ball in her lower jaw, which if left untreated would sapthe immune system and could be fatal. one of the earliestexamples of a skeleton of early man was found by a lake inafrica and diagnosed as having died of a dental abscessthat had eaten at his jaw and killed him, probably verypainfully, in his prime. in the wild, fudge would have neverlived this long, as this abscess would probably have killedher.
three and a half hours later, the operation was over, andfudge was returned to her enclosure through a parkshrouded in darkness once more, as when we had begun. ithad been a long and fairly gruesome day, and though it wasimpossible not to reflect, at least for a moment, on the cost(￡8,000 vet bill, plus vet room, staff, etc.), it felt great tohave diverted some funds from the world in general andchanneled them into this hugely worthwhile cause. now atleast, if we ever did have to disperse the animals, thesethree would be healthier and a more attractive propositionfor rehoming. but it was more than that. the optimist in mefound it enormously satisfying to be able to provide suchhighly skilled, expert care for these amazing animals herein our own facility on the site. there was no doubt that nickand peter were, quite literally, world-class professionals.
and we had managed to deploy them to address long-termhealth problems in three animals in our care who hadn’tpreviously been treated.
i looked on peter’s web site and there he was, with arange of animals and in locations far more exotic than ours:
the most impressive shot was an elephant on its back, with,i counted, twenty-nine people hauling it into position so thatpeter could perform an extraction, probably of a tooth thesize of a rugby ball. compared to that, six people onstandby for fourteen hours and a man with a large gunposted outside was small potatoes, and it was an honorthat he asked if some of the pictures taken could go on hisweb site with the others. but it had been exciting for usnonetheless.
all three animals made excellent recoveries, and far fromseeming subdued by their day at the dentist’s, all threeanimals seemed to have an extra spring in their step astheir long-term painful conditions were finally addressed.
the next day sovereign eagerly stripped a huge piece ofmeat with his newly filled teeth, holly the puma ate somediced chicken, and fudge happily crunched through abucket of apples, despite the many stitches in her gums.
vets’ bills make up just one column on the spreadsheet.
in the bigger picture, it’s just a necessary expense in therunning of the business. the trouble was, there still was nobusiness. several potential lenders had pointed this outearly on, and some had even cited it as a reason not tolend us money. how unreasonable, i’d thought at the time.
but i was beginning to see their point.
obviously, we had now passed our license inspection,and we could soon open to the public and begin trading.
but unfortunately, the date for this to happen had keptslipping further down the calendar—april, then easter, thenjune—until it had hit the very worrying month of july. sixtyfivepercent of the year’s trading in a seasonal attractionlike this takes place in july and august. if any of july wentmissing from the figures, we would be in serious trouble.
and we still weren’t there yet. we had enough to pay thewages and essential creditors until october, then that wasit. people had to come in july and august, and in significantnumbers. if they didn’t, we could close at the end of our firstseason. it was sobering, but we ploughed on, using thingswe already had in stock, recycling existing materials, andenthusiastically turning off lights at the end of the day,though this probably had little impact on the staggering￡6,000 monthly electricity bill.
the license had come with a few conditions, mostlythings we could address over the next twelve months, butone or two things—like the restaurant—needed to bebrought up to standard before we opened. it was all inhand, though, and probably on about 1 july, adam happilyinformed us that the bar was now fully functioning, able toserve wines, spirits, and draft cider and bitter, our very dryale. and stella artois. as adam’s taillights disappeareddown the drive that night, duncan and i and max, acameraman with whom we had bonded particularly well,opened up the bar and began sampling this importantcommodity, for quality control purposes, of course. the barbecame a convenient place to meet at the end of the day todebrief each other and discuss story lines that neededfollowing up with max. strictly business meetings, ofcourse. ten days later, the eighty-four-pint barrel wasempty, adam having sold about six pints to the payingpublic. “i can see that in order to make a profit on the stellai’m going to have to charge about ￡12.50 a pint,” helamented, perhaps slightly tetchily. we sniggered likenaughty schoolboys as he walked away—though i am sixyears older than adam, and duncan and max areconsiderably more. of course we realized that this was noway to run a business, though it seemed necessary at thetime.
with one day to go before opening, the restaurant wasactually ready, the shop was stocked with appealing fluffytoys and dzp-printed merchandise, the meat andvegetable rooms for the animals were gleaming, the newpaths were surreally flat and groomed, and the picnic areawas dotted with restored picnic tables in front of the newkiosk, whose power and water supply was almost completein anticipation of the hordes who would, we hoped, soon beswarming around it. even more striking were the staff,newly kitted out in their pristine uniforms, green for keepers,blue for maintenance, white for catering and retail. eachshirt was emblazoned with katherine’s logo of a tigerstripeddzp, the last thing she ever designed, destinednow, apparently, to outlive her by many years.
the only thing that wasn’t playing ball was the weather.
having passed through the wettest june on record, earlyjuly showed no inclination toward becoming summereither. the rain was relentless, and we even had prolongedperiods of fog, making it impossible to see more thantwenty yards. as kelly succinctly put it on the eve of our bigday, “we’re opening tomorrow, and we’re living in a fuckingcloud.” there was nothing to do but have one last tidy-up,one last walk-around, then turn off the lights and see whattomorrow was going to bring.