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We bought a zoo by benjamin mee6/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Katherine Mee, Benjamin's wife, had a recurrence of a brain tumor, forcing Benjamin and his two young children to face the heartbreak of illness and the devastating loss of a wife and mother. Tigers broke loose, money was tight, the staff grew skeptical, and family tensions reached a boiling point. The grand reopening was scheduled for spring, but there was much work to be done and none of it easy for these novice zookeepers. Their extended family now included: Solomon, an African lion and scourge of the local golf course Zak, the rickety alpha wolf, a broadly benevolent dictator clinging to power Ronnie, a Brazilian tapir, easily capable of killing a man but hopelessly soppy and Sovereign, a jaguar and would-be ninja, who devised a long-term escape plan and implemented it. So in 2006, Mee, his wife and two children, his brother, and his seventy-six-year-old mother moved into the Dartmoor Wildlife Park. But Mee's dream was to refurbish the zoo and run it as a family business. When Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his family and move them to an unlikely new home-a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside where over two hundred exotic animals would be their new neighbors-his friends and colleagues thought he was crazy. This touching memoir is now a major motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon. Already a BBC documentary miniseries and excerpted in the Guardian, We Bought a Zoo is a profoundly moving portrait of an unforgettable family living in the most extraordinary circumstances. ![]()
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