Most people at one time or another pay a visit to the zoological gardens. While there, they are so interested in the animals to be seen that they do not stop to wonder how a great many of them got to the zoo in the first place.
Now I am an animal collector and my job is to travel to the faraway places where these beasts live, and bring them back alive for the zoos. In this book I have described three animal-collecting trips that I have taken to various parts of the world, and have tried to show how the difficult but interesting job of collecting is done.
Most people have no idea of the hard work and worry that goes into a collecting trip to produce the fascinating birds and animals that they pay to see in the zoo. One of the questions that I am always asked is how I became an animal collector in the first place. The answer is that I have always been interested in animals and in zoos.
According to my parents, the first word I was able to say with any clarity was not the conventional ‘Mamma’ or ‘Dadda’, but the word ‘Zoo’, which I would repeat over and over again in a shrill voice until someone, in order to shut me up, would take me to the zoo. When I grew a little older, we lived in Greece and I had a great number of pets, ranging from owls to sea-horses, and I spent all my spare time exploring the countryside in search of fresh specimens to add to my collection of pets. Later on I went for a year to Whipsnade Zoo, as a student keeper, to get experience of the larger animals, such as lions, bears, bison, and ostrich, which were not so easy to keep at home. When I left, I luckily had enough money of my own to be able to finance my first trip and I have been going out regularly ever since then.
Though a collector’s job is not an easy one and full of many disappointments, it is certainly a job which will appeal to all those who love animals and travel. In this book I have tried to show that the hard work and disappointments are nearly always more than offset by the thrill of your successes and the excitement and pleasure not only of capturing your animals but of seeing them alive in their natural haunts.