Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!
Some of the most horrific stories are the non-fiction ones, and I’m not talking about True Crime or the coverage of the Long Island Serial Killer — although hair-tingling and mouth-dropping. Sometimes, fact is stranger than fiction and is too wild to be believed.
Several years ago, I visited my sister at her digs in Iowa. I knew little about the state other than “Field of Dreams” was partially filmed in Dubuque County — and yes, we visited. But no, for some reason, as I stood on the Homeplate on a baseball diamond cut into a cornfield, the familiar white farmhouse a foul hit away — I did not run the bases.
Still, the “Field of Dreams” place wasn’t the trip’s highlight. That title went to the makeshift zoo she took me to.
I didn’t believe the place existed when she told me. “Prove it,” I said. So, she did.
I can’t remember the name of the zoo or the town it was in, but we drove miles into the country, cornfields swaying in the wind like a never-ending green ocean.
We pulled into a neighborhood, a regular street with nice houses on each side, all with manicured lawns and mailboxes. The road dead-ended at a ranch-style home. This was the private zoo.
The signs directed us to park in the lot — a dusty piece of unfertile ground and to enter by the house’s two-car garage. We paid the fee in the garage and were directed to follow a path that led inside to the kitchen.
It was an innocent-looking 1950s-style kitchen — a sink, a stove and oven, a refrigerator, and a round dinette table with four chairs. But in the corner of the room, probably a walk-in pantry once upon a time, was a glass wall holding a plastic kiddie pool and a couple of small alligators.
Against another wall was a metal shelving unit turned Terrarium. Stacked glass boxes housed several kinds of giant snakes — the kind found in Disney Movies and in jungles. In one of the glass containers with a simple lid (no lock or any weight to hold it closed) was a Boa-Constrictor with a prominent bump in its belly that could have been a boot or a neighbor’s yappy Russell Terrier.
In the backyard, the path split. We went one direction to a collection of wooden Tuff-Sheds nailed together to form enclosures for different types of monkeys. Instead of a front wall, however, was floor-to-ceiling metal fencing.
A Mandrill spotted us. Its red-beady eyes were watching, its blue muzzle twitching as it hung by one arm, feet gripping the links. Its other arm, slamming against the wire repeatedly — a small gap ripping open between the roof and the chain-link wall…
The other path led to more danger. A conglomerate of above-ground grain silos, their metal sheeting sides replaced by thick metal links resembling chicken wire.
Each silo held some predatory animal — a couple of full-sized Lions in one, a Leopard in another, a sad Grizzly Bear wandering in circles in the third, and a short-limbed Bengal Tiger in the last.
The tiger got excited when we passed by — the path less than eight feet away from its pen and nothing but old wire and crabgrass between us. It crouched behind what looked like a giant rubber-wrecking ball. Its shoulders posed to leap, its eyes lit up in a fierce sparkle as my two-year-old niece toddled by.
I shouted at the creature, “No! Go Away!”
It slinked to its shabby lean-to and watched us from the shadows and a heap of hay.
When I had had my fill of taking my own life in my hands (having paid a ticket to do so), we headed out. We ran into the homeowner, and I started asking questions (I couldn’t help myself).
She explained she and her husband started collecting “exotics” after their son died. On the night of the tragedy, the son was in his early twenties, driving his truck with his baby — an adolescent Bengal Tiger. The son died at the scene, but miracles of miracles, the tiger survived!
She wiped away tears telling the story.
I could only picture the highway patrol rushing to the scene of a terrible accident, opening the truck cab door, and finding a full-grown tiger — banged up, confused, scared, and probably at the height of its most dangerous.
The woman wasn’t happy about the battery of questions I lobbed at her — How is this place allowed? Aren’t exotic animals illegal? What do the neighbors think? Did she know a Mandrill had engineered an escape? And what was really in the Boa-Constrictor’s belly — when was the last time she’d seen or had contact with her husband?
She thought I was a journalist or worked for PETA and asked us to leave.
For years afterward, I scanned newspaper articles for headlines– GRIZZLY DISCOVERY OF COUPLE FOUND FACELESS–MISSING MANDRILL SUSPECTED or SNEAKY SERPANT SURFACES — HUSBAND FOUND INSIDE–but it was all in vain.
Only recently did I find out what happened to the place. The permits to run a private zoo had been revoked, all appeals had run out, and the zoo was shut down.
I have no idea what happened to the animals.
