Last night I read a book I’ve been meaning to read since I read a review earlier this spring: We Bought a Zoo, by Benjamin Mee. As the title suggests, it’s about a family who, finding themselves in possession of a spare 1.2 million pounds, decided to buy a declining zoo in Devon. Through a lot of hard work and a lot of worry, the Mee family managed to resurrect the Dartmoor Zoological Park and even become the subject of a reality TV series. It was a crazy idea, but they pulled it off.
The book starts with Mee reminiscing about his family’s time in Languedoc in the south of France. One day, his sister sent him a realtor’s ad for a zoo in Devon. Other offers came in, but most of them involved plans to sell off the animals and turn the land into something else. The Mees sold the family house and negotiated loans to get their hands on the property. (It’s not that easy. The negotiations and the sale take up almost half of the book. Their first bid was actually rejected.) On top of all the legal and financial wrangling, they have to figure out how to take care of the more than 200 (mostly) exotic animals and turn the place into a successful business. Besides all the real estate stuff, the family also has to bring the exhibits and the zoo restaurant up to code. If anything had gone seriously wrong, this exercise could have turned into the Money Pit with monkeys in a hurry.
Even though Mee is an experienced author—he used to be a columnist—this book doesn’t really read like a traditional, organized book. It’s more like having a conversation with Mee. He meanders from topic to topic. I wished, though, that there were more animal stories. It’s a zoo, for crying out loud. There are great stories about escaping jaguars and tranquilizer-proof tigers. The Day of the Dentist is an amazing little vignette in exotic veterinary medicine. And my favorite animal fact was when Mee shared that, unlike other raptors, caracaras like to run down their prey like “mini T-rexes” (86). But, like I said, most of the book is about getting the zoo back on its feet financially and legally. Weird, really. As far as I’m concerned, zoos are all about the animals.
One of the major themes of the book, and one of the most enjoyable, is about how zoos went from a place where animals were exhibited for the entertainment of humans to a place where reintroduction efforts and breeding programs are launched. Mee writes that even as recently as the 1970s, zoo keepers and biologists didn’t think that breeding programs were viable options. He writes about successful programs and important people, and I ended up spending an instructive half-hour learning about Przewalski’s horses and Mauritius kestrels. It’s bittersweet reading. On the one hand, I feel glad that an animal that might have disappeared forever gets to survive. But then, I feel unutterably sad that the species’ situation got to that point.
My verdict on this book is that it’s a very enjoyable read. It could have been better, but it was a lot of fun to picture all the Mees running around with their staff putting the zoo back in order.