Life a the Zoo - The Real Thing

How It All Began:

When I moved to the backwoods of Alabama, it was not with the intention of starting a zoo. Although I love animals and had all sorts of creatures as pets, becoming a zookeeper was never one of my aspirations.  In fact, my training is in Library Science, not biology.

Here am I, a kid raised most of her life on Army posts. And my husband, a cop from Brooklyn, who had never stepped foot in the woods a day in his life.  But we were now settled on a three-acre piece of woods, one mile off the paved road, eleven miles from town.

Joe had taken a job at the Auburn University Police Department.  I was substitute teaching and doing dog obedience training on the weekends.  We had set up a little boarding kennel with eight runs and had quite a good little sideline going with college students who went home for the weekends or over quarter breaks.

We had just finished construction on a little grooming shop next to the kennel when our home burned to the ground in 1987. For several months, we lived in a 17-foot motor home while we rebuilt.

One weekend my friend’s daughter came by with four rabbits in a cage. Laurie said she knew we loved animals and hoped we could help. She told us she couldn’t keep the rabbits any longer and if we didn’t take them, they would go to the pound.

I looked at Joe and he shrugged.  We took the rabbits. But where to house them?   As luck would have it, this happened to be an especially cold winter forAlabama, so we housed them in a huge pile of hay in the grooming shop until we could build a compound.

By that spring, we had three dogs, four ferrets, and twelve rabbits.  Joe was pretty busy building cages… when he wasn’t working on finishing our house.

Then one of our dog training clients told us she was a vet student at the university. They had an orphaned pygmy goat that needed a home. She wondered if we would be willing to take it.

“Sure!” I said, thrilled at the prospect of a baby goat. The next day she called and asked if we would be willing to take two goats.  “Why not?” was the instant reply.

She brought us Heidie and Peter, the two cutest little babies you ever saw!  Peter still has his tiny umbilical cord.  Their little hooves were no bigger than my thumbnail. I couldn’t believe anything could be so tiny and so cute. They minced around taking tiny baby steps, tiny baby jumps and pirouetted in the air. Their tiny, talkative bleats were too adorable for words. Instantly, they wrapped my tough cop husband around their little hooves. In his eyes, they could do no wrong. (That was soon to change, but another story for another time.)

Later that summer a deputy stopped by our house and came in carrying something in his arms. He said he’s heard we loved animals and wondered if we could help him out.  He had an orphaned fawn whose mother had been hit by a car.

I was stunned. Little Faline was exquisite.  Whitetail fawns are all legs, with a tiny body about the size of a house cat. Her spotted fur glimmered with health and she looked like a jewel.  She walked with dainty delicate steps, looked around with huge brown eyes offset with the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen.  Our hearts melted.

In addition to the three dogs, eight chickens, four ferrets, fifteen rabbits, a baby raccoon, two pygmy goats, and one deer, we had added four turkeys, eight guineas, and six geese.

By the following spring, the neighbors had brought us an orphaned squirrel to bottle raise, and two baby pigs (half guinea and halfArkansasrazorback). Another vet student brought us a lamb, whom we promptly dubbed “Baa Baa Louie”.  The local humane society sent us a litter of orphaned baby opossums that needed bottle-feeding.

A veterinarian across the state inTuscaloosa,Alabamahad heard of us (!!!!!) and donated her petYorkshirebarrow, a huge neutered male pig. The people on the farm where she kept him were getting divorced and selling the farm. Her pig needed a new home. She even brought a work crew out to build him a quarter acre pig pen.

In the mean time, my dog grooming, boarding, and training business kept increasing.  Every time someone would come out, they asked for “The Tour” to see all our animals.  Often, someone would call and explain that Aunt Minnie was in town, and could they bring her out to see the animals?

We always obliged.  At some point along the line, someone suggested that our place was like a real zoo.  So many people seemed to enjoy coming, and it was fun to show them around, let them pet the animals and explain about each creature in our care. It got so we were doing an hour-long hands-on guided tour.

Finally, we agreed that it might be nice if we could use this activity to at least help reduce the cost of our burgeoning feed bill.  I contacted USDA to see about a permit to “make it legal”.

Who could have guessed that twenty years later this would lead to my writing a children’s novel about a goose in a petting zoo?

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