Zoo Story Read online

  After a review of police reports, evidence, and witness statements, it has been determined that further prosecution is not warranted. While it is clear Mr. Salisbury’s actions presented a conflict of interest, there is a lack of evidence to support any criminal intent.

  So much for the mayor’s suggestion that Lex was a crook.

  As Elena and Lex relaxed in front of the fire, they were accompanied by the two dogs who had been locked in the Pathfinder on the day of the final board meeting. Grub, worn out from sniffing lemurs and barking at giraffes, napped nearby. Pippi had climbed into Elena’s lap. The little terrier was still ailing from a nasty encounter with a Bufo marine toad in the yard. The toads secrete a toxic milky substance—a classic revenge of an ectotherm—and when Pippi got too close, she’d swallowed enough of the poison to nearly choke her.

  “She’s deaf as a post now,” said Lex.

  “She’s gotten otherworldly,” said Elena.

  The little terrier was fascinating in her ability to survive anything—toxic toads, hot cars, hordes of journalists. But even more improbable was Lex’s claim that he had never been a politician. Before everything went sour, hadn’t he seduced half of City Hall?

  Lex shrugged. What he meant, he said, was that he had never learned to wear the mask of a politician.

  “I was myself. I wasn’t trying to be anything. I was able to get people enthusiastic about what I did.” That passion, he said, was always genuine. “I guess I’m a good politician if I believe in something. But I don’t consider myself a salesman. . . . I never had to be fake.”

  With the dropping of the criminal investigation, Lex insisted that he had been exonerated. He pointed out, again, that Lowry Park’s relationship with Safari Wild had been blessed by the zoo’s executive committee—a fact that neither the mayor nor the zoo’s board had cared about when they went after him.

  “I never tried to hide anything, and everything I did, I got approval for.”

  To him, the whole thing was a witch hunt. He believed that the mayor wanted him fired because she was angry that he made more money than she did and because she needed to flex some muscle. The case against him sounded bad, no question. Ultimately, Lex said, that perception had trumped reality. He was still stunned that so many had turned on him so quickly. But he had no desire to seek retribution.

  “People have to live with what they did, and if they have consciences they’re going to be harder on themselves than anything I can say or do.”

  Leaving the zoo was hard. But he still worked with animals, both at his ranch and at Safari Wild. He was fighting bureaucrats and licensing issues, but hoped to open the game park within a year. Also, he and Elena were set to begin tours showcasing the animals on the ranch.

  By now the sun had begun its descent toward the treetops. Sandhill cranes, their great gray wings whooshing, sailed overhead and landed in the shallows of an ephemeral wetland behind the house. On many evenings, two hundred of the cranes roosted along the shore. The air filled with their warbling calls.

  Pippi, who could no longer hear the cranes, had fallen asleep on Elena’s lap. The terrier clearly held no grudges about the day she was left behind in the heat of the parking lot.

  “We weren’t thinking straight,” said Lex.

  “We were really stupid,” said Elena.

  And yet, Lex said, Elena was now “a nationally recognized pet abuser.”

  Elena explained that she hadn’t wanted to leave Pippi and Grub at home all day and that she hadn’t expected to stay inside the hotel as long as she did. Lex was in crisis mode. She wanted to be supportive. She lost track of the time. As for the dogs not having tags, she thought they’d been licensed through the zoo. What bothered her most, she said, was the idea that she might have somehow hurt her husband’s chances to stay at Lowry Park. Lex acknowledged that the incident hadn’t helped. But he was more upset for Elena, knowing how awful it must have been to be charged with mistreating the dogs—especially on TV.

  “It was a day from hell,” he said.

  The campfire was dying. The chill was deepening.

  What had Lex learned from all of this?

  He did not hesitate to answer. He had given the city a priceless gift, he said—a zoo with a national reputation and a world-class animal collection and revenues that had increased a hundredfold. In return, the ruling class had sought to ruin him and throw him in jail.

  “Tampa,” he said, “eats its young.”

  No one could accuse Lex of modesty. His perpetual defiance was precisely what made some people love him and so many others loathe him. But just because he was unrepentant did not mean he was completely wrong.

  Looking back on his downfall, it was hard to deny that the whole thing was driven, at least in part, by an orchestrated hysteria. Over the years, Lex had supplied his enemies with plenty of ammunition. Considering the dismal morale of the zoo’s staff after Herman’s and Enshalla’s deaths, the board might have had grounds to force him out long before the patas monkeys escaped from his island. But the outrage over Safari Wild had nothing to do with the well-being of the animals at the zoo or the game park. Despite the thunder of the audit, the scandal wasn’t about misappropriated funds, either. Otherwise, the city and the zoo would have pressed harder to recoup their alleged losses.

  In the end, it was about the balance of power—who would guide the zoo into the future, who got to decide what was acceptable and what was out of bounds—among a select handful of primates. Watching the official blustering and posturing was similar to standing in front of the chimp exhibit and seeing Herman and the other drama queens shriek and pound their chests and chase one another, round and round.

  All of it was a sideshow that distracted attention from the deeper questions of what kind of zoo Lowry Park should be and how it should evolve and what role it might play, along with other institutions, in the future of life on Earth. How much in legal fees did the city of Tampa devote to its crusade against Lex? Imagine what those sums could have meant for any one of the species disappearing into oblivion every year.

  Whatever offenses Lex committed, they pale in comparison to the damage the human species is currently inflicting on the wildlife of this planet. In his book The Future of Life, the famed biologist E. O. Wilson surveys the waves of extinction wiping out species around the planet and calls Homo sapiens “the serial killer of the biosphere.”

  Global warming. The melting of the polar ice caps. The poisoning of the seas and skies. The fires burning through the Amazon. Millions of us, driving our children to school, driving to the grocery, driving to work. For these and a hundred other reasons, many of the species at Lowry Park are on the brink of extinction in the wild. Some have already been pushed over the edge of that cliff.

  In the forests of Panama, the golden frogs have all but vanished. None has been sighted in any of the breeding grounds that used to teem with their numbers, even inside the gorge the researchers called the Thousand-Frog Stream.

  “I would say they are relics,” says Kevin Zippel, the biologist who is leading efforts to save the golden frog and other amphibian species around the world. “They’re on their way out.”

  That morning in January 2005, when Kevin and Dustin and the other researchers climbed down into the gorge, was one of the last sightings of golden frogs in the wild.

  Even in Africa, time is running out.

  Mick Reilly and his family are still watching over the elephants and the black rhinos and the lions and all the other species that have been given sanctuary inside the game parks of Swaziland. Mick’s father, Ted, has been preserving the country’s wildlife for four decades. Mick has been at his father’s side, wading among the animals since he could walk. There’s a picture of him standing in the bush as a toddler, staring down a rhino.

  Mick is thirty-nine now. All his life, he and his father have worked with the Swazi king to protect the animals. They have fought the politicians, the poachers, the killers who came into the parks in the early
1990s and mowed down the rhinos with machine guns, then cut out their horns and left their carcasses bleeding in the dirt.

  At Mkhaya, the park reserved for Swaziland’s most endangered species, there are rows of great bleached skulls from those slaughtered rhinos. Bullet holes are still visible. Spend an afternoon with Mick and Ted, riding in a Land Rover through the twisting trails, and they will show you all that they have fought for, all that the rest of us are losing. Weaver nests, hanging from trees like paper sacks. Eagles turning in the blue dome of the sky.

  Mick does not romanticize the savanna. He often hears tourists, wide-eyed, waxing on about the balance of nature.

  “There’s no such thing,” says Mick, sitting at the wheel of the Land Rover. “There never has been. There’s no balance, because it’s always in a state of change.”

  He talks about the swath that nature cuts through animal populations, wiping them out with a drought or a flood or disease. Not to mention the destruction wreaked by humans. As he says these things, a herd of zebras gallops along the horizon behind him, followed by a herd of wildebeests.

  “Nature,” says Mick, quoting his father, “plays no favorites.”

  Today, seven years after the eleven elephants were sent to San Diego and Tampa, the herds they left behind still threaten to overrun the game parks of Swaziland. More calves have been born. Poachers have been kept away. There are now thirty-seven elephants in the parks—almost the same number as in 2003, when the eleven were sent to the United States. As before, the herds are tearing down almost every tree in sight. Some of these trees are three centuries old. When they die, they are not easily replaced.

  “In the span of a man’s lifetime,” says Ted, “that vegetation will never come back.”

  The Reillys are back to the same quandary. They know they can’t let the elephants continue to destroy so many trees. But they don’t want to be forced to kill off any of the herds. They are experimenting with contraception; there have been recent advances in elephant vasectomies. Just last year, a specialist from Disney’s Animal Kingdom worked with a team of other veterinarians to surgically sterilize seven bulls from Mkhaya and Hlane. The Reillys are cautiously optimistic about this development. They are also open to the idea of sending more elephants to an American zoo where they will be well-treated.

  Mick and his father don’t want to be dragged into another controversy. They just want to find an answer that makes some kind of sense.

  Late one afternoon, the two of them are together as a ranger drives them along another dirt road inside Mkhaya. The elephants are nowhere in sight. The question of what should be done with them seems far away. Mick and Ted are content to enjoy the last golden hours of the day. They pass warthogs hurrying through the bush. They find a female rhino who has just given birth in the grass.

  At dusk, they stop at a watering hole where the hippos float and bellow in the purple water. In the gathering darkness, father and son listen, enveloped in silence. Then it’s time to go.

  “Chubeka,” Mick tells the driver. Carry on.

  “Let us chase the sun,” says Ted.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Yann Martel, whose beautiful novel Life of Pi made me want to chronicle daily life inside a zoo. I read Life of Pi in the summer of 2003, just as Lowry Park was preparing to transport the elephants from Swaziland, and when I saw news accounts of the court battle and the marathon flight, I knew the zoo was ripe for exploration.

  I am indebted to Lowry Park’s administration and staff, past and present, for allowing me to wander inside their world for so long—especially Lex Salisbury, Craig Pugh, Heather Mackin, Rachel Nelson, Trish Rothman, Larry Killmar, Andrea Schuch, Kevin McKay, David Murphy, Jeff Ewelt, Melinda Mendolusky, Brian French, Steve Lefave, Dustin Smith, Virginia Edmonds, Bob Scheible, Brian Morrow, Dan Costell, Kelly Ryder, Pam Noel, Brian Czarnik, and Carie Peterson. I am also indebted to many others outside the zoo, including Ed and Roger Schultz, Maggie Messitt, Monica Ross, Elena Sheppa, Don Woodman, Ian Kruger, Kevin Zippel, David Gardner, and Jeff and Coleen Kremer, and to the family of Char-Lee Torre. I thank Peter Wrege and Katy Payne at Cornell’s Elephant Listening Project for lending me their expertise as they read over my sections on elephant communication and behavior. I am especially grateful to Mick and Ted Reilly for helping me understand how they got elephants to fly and for showing me Mkaya and Hlane. My heartfelt thanks to Lee Ann Rottman for her unwavering patience with a reporter who, in the beginning at least, was afraid of animals. By the time we were done, she had me cradling a baby chimp.

  This book is based on a series originally published in the St. Petersburg Times, and I would like to thank everyone in that remarkable newsroom whose support made that work and this book possible, including Paul Tash, Neil Brown, Stephen Buckley, Patty Cox, Patty Yablonski, Nikki Life, Dawn Cate, Lane DeGregory, Kevin McGeever, Tim Nickens, Desiree Perry, Boyzell Hosey, Gretchen Letterman, and Jill Wilson, gone but not forgotten. I am deeply grateful to Alex Zayas, Ben Montgomery, Don Morris, and Kelley Benham, whose reporting on the escape of the patas monkeys and on Lex Salisbury’s downfall informs so much of the book’s final chapters. Special thanks to Kelley for her patience, advice, and ferocious line revisions. She remains the Enshalla of editors. Also to Stefanie Boyar, who snapped hundreds of startling images during all those years I was taking notes, including the cover photo of Rango, and to my editors Neville Green and Mike Wilson, whose insights and sensibilities shaped my reporting from start to finish.

  Special thanks to my agent, Jane Dystel, and my editor at Hyperion, Gretchen Young, as well as her assistant, Elizabeth Sabo, all of whom helped me reimagine this work and coax it into a book. Also to Bridget Nickens at the University of South Florida, who graciously assisted me with research; to Patsy Sims and the rest of my colleagues at Goucher College’s creative nonfiction MFA program, who indulged me with their enthusiasm through six summers of my working on this project; and to Brad Hamm, the dean of Indiana University’s journalism school, whose support and vision kept me going during the home stretch. Also to Stephanie Hayes and Mallary Tenore for their eagle eyes as they read over the manuscript. And to Anne Hull and David Finkel for decades of listening and prodding.

  I am grateful to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which gave me a quiet home where I could write and pace, and thoughtful colleagues who offered friendship and guidance. My humble gratitude to Karen Dunlap, Butch Ward, Keith Woods, Chip Scanlan, Jeff Saffan, and finally David Shedden, who tracked down hundreds of articles for me. I am indebted, as always, to my mentor and brother Roy Peter Clark, who was writing his own book down the hall at Poynter and who urged me on every step of the way, often materializing at my office door with a few words of encouragement just as the sun was rising over Tampa Bay.

  Deepest thanks and love to my sons, Nat and Sam, and my wife, Kelley, for their inspiration and neverending support. I owe them everything.

  Notes

  For further details on the sources listed in these notes, see the Bibliography on page 281.

  1 THE NEW WORLD

  1 Eleven elephants. One plane: The scene from the 747 was reconstructed from the author’s interviews with Mick Reilly and Chris Kingsley, the only two humans in the cargo hold with the elephants as they traveled from Johannesburg to Tampa.

  4 elephants loom like great gray ghosts: The author was in the Land Rover, reporting in Mkhaya in April 2007, when this incident occurred with the elephants and the bushwillow.

  6 The conflict unfolds in miniature inside Swaziland: The history of the Reilly family and of the reintroduction of wildlife to Mlilwane, Hlane, and Mkhaya are based largely on author interviews with Ted and Mick Reilly.

  6 an old jeep named Jezebel: Cristina Kessler, All the King’s Animals: The Return of Endangered Wildlife to Swaziland, page 21.

  7 Their armored captive was groggy: Cristina Kessler, All the King’s Animals, page 21.

  8 miles of dead trees: From the author’s firsthand repo
rting in Swaziland in 2007.

  9 “Kahle mfana”: Mick Reilly recounted this dialogue to the author, writing out both the original lines in siSwati and the English translations.

  10 so corrosive it can eat through metal: Holly T. Dublin and Leo S. Niskanen, editors of “IUCN/SSC AfESG Guidelines for the in situ Translocation of the African Elephant for Conservation Purposes,” page 38.

  12 elephant culls had long been a reality: This chapter’s lengthy description of the history and methodology of culls in different African countries is gathered from numerous sources, including “Lethal Management of Elephants,” a chapter written by Rob Slotow and others for Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa, by R. J. Scholes and Kathleen Mennell; Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Conscience, edited by Christen Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen; Dale Peterson’s Elephant Reflections; Raman Sukumar’s The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior and Conservation; Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton’s Battle for the Elephants; Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder; and Cynthia Moss’s Elephant Memories.

  12 The brutal choreography evolved: To describe the history of elephant culls inside Kruger National Park, the author also relied on the chapter on elephant management, authored by Ian J. Whyte, Rudi J. van Aarde, and Stuart L. Pimm, in The Kruger Experience: Ecology and Management of Savanna Heterogeneity edited by Johan T. Du Toit and Kevin H. Rogers, pp. 332–348; numerous sections of Salomon Joubert’s massive The Kruger National Park: A History, especially volumes one and two; and “Assessment of Elephant Management in South Africa,” a powerpoint presentation authored by dozens of elephant researchers, delivered on February 25, 2008.

  13 the use of Scoline was prohibited: “Elephant Culling’s Cruel and Gory Past,” an article posted on the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Web site.

  13 “Don’t ask me if I enjoyed it”: This quote and the description of vultures and hyenas waiting for the disposal teams to finish are taken from Fred Bridgland’s article, “5,000 Elephants Must Die. Here’s Why,” Sunday Herald, October 24, 2004.