Island Zoo

MOST children at the age of five or six are full of the most impractical schemes for becoming policemen, or firemen, or locomotive engineers when they grow up. At that age I could not be bothered with such mundane ambitions. I knew exactly what I was going to do when I grew up: I was going to have my own zoo. This did not seem to me at the time, and still does not seem, a very outrageous ambition. True, it has taken me a little longer to achieve it than I had anticipated at the age of six — twenty-five years, to be exact — but I have got it, and before I am too senile to appreciate it. And how many of my contemporaries have become policemen, firemen, or locomotive engineers? None that I can think of offhand.

The site I chose for my zoo (when I had persuaded an ingenuous bank to lend me the capital) was a beautiful fifteenth-century manor house on the island of Jersey, the biggest of the Channel Islands. The islands, lying fairly far south, enjoy a considerably better climate than most of Great Britain, and, in consequence, are invaded by large quantities of holidaymakers during the summer months. After having gone through the usual preliminaries of persuading the Jersey people that we did not intend to release lions to devour their herds of pedigree cattle, flocks of pythons to devour their children, or noxious small rodents to decimate the tomato or potato crops, we set to work and the zoo came into being.

I very soon realized that living in the middle of a zoo is a vastly different proposition from visiting one occasionally. To begin with, of course, there is the charm of being able to visit your animals at any hour of the day or night in order to observe them. If a nocturnal animal performs some particularly interesting action at one o’clock in the morning, you simply slip on a dressing gown and potter down to watch it. But the thing that makes itself obvious very soon is that everything is of secondary importance to the happiness and wellbeing of the animals, even, sometimes, your own happiness and well-being. For better or for worse, you find your private life bound up inextricably with the private lives of your specimens, Take, for example, the sick animals. They, instead of staying in the sanitarium as they should, invariably start looking incredibly pathetic, and eventually end up by being nursed in your drawing room or bedroom.

Just recently some people arrived unexpectedly to visit us, and we were forced to entertain them in our drawing room, heated for our patients’ comfort to a temperature of eighty-five degrees, in which were our female chimpanzee Lulu, who had just had a nasty abscess lanced behind the ear, a parrot with a chill who wheezed and bubbled by the fire in a melancholy manner, and four baby squirrels lying in a box full of cotton wool, making loud and irritable trilling noises while waiting for their next bottle feed. I explained to our guests, who were not animal lovers, that our living quarters were not usually so cluttered with livestock, and they smiled bright smiles of disbelief. Quite soon they decided they would have to leave us, as they had another pressing engagement. I have a feeling that this was due to the fact that a member of the staff had just wandered in with ten feet of python draped nonchalantly over his arm, to have it anointed for mouth canker.

But this, as I had assured my guests, was an exceptional day. We rarely have more than one patient at a time in the flat.

MANY animals, when they come to us from dealers in different parts of the world, are sick on arrival, and if they are very timid species or newly caught or distrustful of human beings, their treatment poses problems. The case of Topsy is a good illustration of this. Topsy was a baby woolly monkey, and I found her, half dead, lying at the bottom of a cage in a dealer’s shop in England. To begin with, she was much too young to have been taken away from her mother, and how she had survived the journey from South America was in itself a miracle. Apart from acute malnutrition (for nobody had bothered to bottle-feed her) she had bad enteritis and a severe chill that was obviously bordering on pneumonia. She was huddled up in the sawdust, her arms over her head, breathing stertorously, and when I tapped on the wire she turned to me a small black face with such a lost and tragic expression on it that I knew I had to rescue her, whatever the price. The dealer at first refused to sell her to me, but at last, after some argument, we came to an agreement. I was to take the animal, and if she lived, I was to pay him. Hurriedly I bundled the monkey into a box and flew back to Jersey.

We soon discovered that dragging Topsy back from the edge of the grave was going to be more difficult than I had anticipated. The chief problem was, not surprisingly, that she had a horror of human beings and worked herself into a terrible panic if we approached her. Topsy was, of course, still at an age when she should be clinging to her mother for warmth, comfort, and protection. The first thing to do, obviously, before we could begin treatment, was to give her a sense of security, but how to achieve this when she was treating us all as though we were Frankenstein’s first cousins was a difficult thing. At last, Trudy Smith, who is in charge of all the mammals, had a brilliant idea.

Topsy wanted something to cling to, something furry as a Substitute mother; what about a Teddy bear? So a Teddy bear with a particularly benign and pleasant expression was procured and introduced into Topsy’s cage. At first Topsy was inclined to treat the bear with the same suspicion that she reserved for us, retreating to the very limit of her cage and staring at the smiling face of the toy with horror. We left her alone with the bear for an hour or so, and then went back to see how she was getting on. At our reappearance, Topsy took one look at us and decided that, of the two, she preferred the bear, and rushing to it, site clutched it frantically, wrapping her arms, legs, and tail tightly around its tubby body and imploring it in a shrill voice to protect her from all humans. So we had won the first round.

As soon as Topsy had transferred her affection to the bear, the whole problem became much simpler. As long as she was clinging to it, she did not mind what we did, and so by removing both her and the bear, we could give her the necessary injections, clean up her fur, and generally start her on the road to recovery. Within a week she was looking worlds better: her fur was starting to shine: she was eating well and had put on some weight. Her enteritis had been cured by the drugs she had taken, and her cold was now a mere sniffle. By this time, the unfortunate bear was in such condition that, from the point of view of hygiene, we were forced to remove him and give him a wash and brush-up. Topsy’s screams at this outrage were of such a piercing quality that in sheer self-defense we were forced to rush into town and purchase another Teddy bear to act as standin while the first one was drying. So for the next six weeks Topsy grew and flourished, changing Teddy bears every two days.

Eventually, Topsy grew to such a size that she did not even remotely resemble the shivering, snuffling scrap that I had brought back with me. We decided that she was quite old enough to graduate from Teddy bears, and thus save us a washing problem. So we introduced into her cage a large ginger-and-white guinea pig with a vacuous expression, given to uttering shrill piping cries that pass, in a guinea pig, for intelligent conversation. To our delight, Topsy look an immediate fancy to this imbecile creature and treated it with the slightly bullying air of affection she would have displayed toward her own offspring. At night she slept on top of the unfortunate animal, looking like an out-size jockey perched on a Shetland pony. Their marriage has been — and still is — a very happy one, but the guinea pig is not getting any younger, and so we are training a young ginger-and-white one to act as a substitute in case of accidents.

The breeding results in any zoo are of great importance, for they are an indication as to whether or not the zoo is being properly run. If your animals breed, it is sure that they are healthy, properly fed, and happy. We have so far, in our first year of existence, bred eleven species successfully, and the excitement attendant upon these births was considerable.

Take, for example, our pair of North American raccoons, christened Splash and Paddle. A lot of time and energy was spent in getting these two animals into breeding condition, for they were thin and uncared for when they arrived. Eventually they became fat and glossy, and we felt it was only a matter of time before they presented us with a litter. Then, suddenly and quite unaccountably, Paddle, the male, died. To say that we were irritated is putting it mildly. It meant that we had to procure another male, introduce him to Splash and hope that site would approve, and then wait until the male had attained decent condition, A month passed while we wrote to various zoos in an attempt to trace a young male raccoon of cheerful disposition, with a view to marriage. Before we had achieved success, however, we were one day surprised and delighted to discover that Splash must have been pregnant before Paddle died, for she had presented us with a litter of three fat, squawking babies, which she guarded with ferocious growls when we went to look at them.

A great many of the animals in the zoo I myself have collected from various parts of the world, and of course, when any of these give birth it is a considerable source of satisfaction to me. The romance of Juan and Juanita is a typical example. They are a pair of white-collared peccaries that I obtained on an expedition to northern Argentina. Peccaries are rather handsome pigs, with their dark, brindled fur, the neat, white, cravatlike marking around the neck, and delicate, slender legs. Juan was quite big when I purchased him from an Indian who had reared the animal to provide a Christmas dinner. Shortly afterward I got Juanita, but she was quite a baby, measuring some six inches high as opposed to Juan’s impressive two feet. The two had totally different characteristics. Juan was slow, placid, and inoffensive, whereas Juanita glittered with personality. She had immense charm and a loving disposition, but at the same time was tremendously willful, and was quite capable of giving you a swift bite if she did not get her own way.

Owing to the discrepancy in size, I did not cage them together, but decided to wait until we returned to the zoo before introducing them to each other, by which time I hoped Juanita would have grown a bit. But Juanita soon proved herself a problem child. In spite of her forceful personality she was extremely delicate, and on arrival in Buenos Aires she caught a slight chill, which developed with ferocious rapidity into pneumonia. In a matter of hours she was unconscious, and I felt sure that she was going to die. Nevertheless, I pumped her full of penicillin, kept her warm, and her indomitable personality did the rest. She recovered, but not before I had had to sleep for three nights on a sofa with her, wrapped up in blankets. If left by herself, she immediately kicked off all the coverings and wandered around the room on a tour of inspection.

Eventually, she was her old self, and with the other animals I had collected, we set off on the long voyage to England. A week before we reached our destination Juanita caught pneumonia again. Once more, in a matter of hours she became unconscious, and once more I treated her but was sure that she would die. But again, by sheer will power, she pulled through, and by the time we landed at the London docks she was her old self. On arrival at the zoo she and Juan were introduced to each other, and it was love at first sight, though it was obvious that Juan was going to be thoroughly henpecked. Juanita, having twice been so ill and being of such a delicate disposition, was watched intently for any signs of sickness, but in their new paddock she grew and flourished. After her illnesses I did not think she would breed, for severe illness sometimes can affect the breeding abilities of a wild animal. But Juanita, the indomitable, thought differently. She kept her secret carefully, as well as a svelte figure, and so no one suspected a thing until one day there beside her lay a tiny brown piglet, about six inches long. Having twice nursed Juanita back from what I thought was certain death, to be able to look out of the kitchen window and see her, her husband, and baby playing a new game they had invented — a sort of catch-as-catch-can — fills me with pride. This is one of the best things about owning your own zoo.

EVEN in the best-conducted zoos you have the occasional escape, and my zoo is no exception. I think the escape that caused the greatest stir on the island occurred when Delilah, our African porcupine, decided to go to see the world. She had lived for a number of months in her paddock without showing any symptoms of wanderlust, and so we were taken quite by surprise when one spring night she calmly gnawed a large hole in her fence and wandered off. The first we knew of it was at two o’clock in the morning, when an agitated farmer arrived in his car to say that Delilah was wandering around his yard, rattling her quills and uttering fearsome gurking noises. Clad only in our pajamas, and armed with brooms, we sped to the farm, to find Delilah making a light meal of the farmer’s cabbages. She was not, we decided, overjoyed to see us. She grunted peevishly and tried to back into us, her spines erected so that, in the moonlight, they looked as if she were wearing a Red Indian war bonnet.

We decided that with Delilah in her present mood, it was useless to try to catch her, unless we wanted a leg full of spines. Therefore, the only method of getting her back to the zoo was to drive her, with the aid of the brooms we had brought. So we set off along the road, herding Delilah, grunting and rattling, in front of us. She would trot along quite well for a bit, and then suddenly try to back into us, while we leapt and jumped to get out of the way of her armory of spikes. Twice we were overtaken by cars full of late night revelers, and when they came upon the sight of two men in pajamas vigorously brushing a large and obviously irritated porcupine along a country road, the cars slowed down, and the occupants stared at us with expressions of disbelief. We eventually got Delilah back to her cage without any harm being done. In fact, I am inclined to think that she may have done some good, for I am sure that several of the occupants of the cars that overtook us must have, first thing the next morning, hurriedly joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

Another escapee was Claudius, the South American tapir, who chose a particularly wicked night when the heavens were pouring down the sort of rain generally associated with the tropics. Luckily, Claudius did not go far, and as soon as we discovered his absence we easily tracked him down to a neighboring field by following the wide, trampled path he had made through the potato crop.

Now, Claudius is as tame as a donkey, but he is also as stubborn as one, and as soon as we had cornered him — after a short but exciting chase, during which he plowed through five cucumber frames — he decided that he did not want to go home. He stood quite placidly while we tied ropes around his neck, and then simply lay down and refused to move. Claudius weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. We called for reinforcements, for obviously three of us were not going to be able to shift him. Eventually, with two of us lugging at the ropes around his neck, one pushing his forequarters, and another clasping his fat hind legs and wheelbarrowing him, we managed to get him up and moving. We plowed our way slowly through the potatoes, and the rain poured down. We would progress perhaps thirty feet, and then Claudius would lie down again, and we would have to wait until he felt sufficiently rested to continue the journey. Comparing notes later, we all decided that lying in a field of potatoes in the pouring rain with a large and stubborn tapir was not our idea of an evening’s sport. The distance we had to chivy him back to his cage was not more than a couple of hundred yards, yet it took us an hour and a quarter. A double check is now kept on Claudius’ paddock gate.

In my view, a zoo should be something more than just an exhibition of various species of animals. There is still very little known about wild animals, their habits, their breeding, and their illnesses, and zoos can make a very real contribution. But the most important job of all for any zoo nowadays is to help in the preservation of wildlife, which is so rapidly being exterminated all over the world. Zoos should do their best to acquire as many of these threatened species as possible and build up breeding colonies so that, even if the animal does become extinct in the wild state, there will still exist breeding stocks. Though we have a very young zoo and are still suffering from that universal malady known as lack of funds, we have already started on this important work.

But the best part of owning a zoo and living in it is the very real friendship you build up with your animals. It is so pleasant to be greeted with delight by them wherever you go, from the birdlike twittering of Claudius, the Roman-nosed tapir, to the strange giggling grunt of N’Pongo, our baby gorilla. Walk under the fifteenth-century arches, even at midnight, and you are greeted by the soft, sweetly seductive Piccadilly voices of the cockatoos, saying “Hullo, darling”; and return after a few weeks’ absence and you are welcomed by the chimpanzees with such enthusiasm that they can be heard half a mile away. At such times as these I know that all the years of waiting to have my own zoo have been well worth while.