Never Park Your Car on a Lion's Tail

Trader Hadidi joined me for lunch. He said he had to write off a bad loan in Tanzania. A lion had eaten the borrower.

In the 1970s I had my own unpleasant experience with a lion when I was operations manager of California's Lion Country Safari, a drive-through African wildlife preserve with 1,500 free-roaming animals. Although long gone today, the park was a popular spot, drawing 1.8 million human visitors annually.

"The animals have a way of communicating with each other," my boss told me during my first week on the job. "If you want to have an easy time, you have to do your best to make them like you."

I did the exact opposite the next day when I accidentally parked my car on a lion’s tail. The cat was quite unhappy about my mistake. Roaring his discontent, he pounded on my windshield with his paws; then he ran his claws along one fender, removing the paint. Undoubtedly he would have liked to fire me on the spot, but he and the other animals in the preserve had no direct control over my future. Like most humans in corporate zoos, the menagerie at the park had to put up with the new guy or force him to quit.

Fortunately the lion suffered no permanent injury because of my carelessness, but he stood with his tail behind a tree the next time he saw my vehicle. He had the facial expression of a creature with a plan.

The plan seemed to unfold almost immediately. The following morning I unlocked the entrance to the park and set down my keys to open the gates. An eland ate my keys. For an hour I ran around the preserve, chasing a 2,000-pound antelope, waiting for him to spit out my keys so I could open the ticket booths for customers.

Birds took up the harassment next. As I approached my car after work, I noticed a daring attempt by eight sneaky penguins to escape from the park. I rounded them up.

A few days later, a flamingo flew out of the preserve and into the path of a car. None of the varsity drinkers at the bar down the road believed the drunk who claimed he had almost hit a huge pink bird on the freeway. But I had to spend several hours on an expedition to recover the bird.

Next a tiger walked out the back gate. When an inattentive gatekeeper noticed the fangs beside him, he jumped inside the preserve and locked the cat outside the fence. I had to crawl through the grass on my hands and knees before I found the errant tiger asleep in the bushes.

Not long afterward, I saw a deer walking near me outside the preserve. Enough was enough. I grabbed the deer, a six-point buck, by the horns to return him to the zoological staff.

The staff members shook their heads. "That’s not ours," one of them said.

"What do you mean?" I asked incredulously.

"You just caught a wild deer with your bare hands."

I released the deer in time to see fleeing gardeners near the administration building. I headed in their direction. "What’s going on?"

"There’s a gopher as big as a large dog," one of the gardeners answered breathlessly.

I tugged at the gardener’s shirtsleeve until I convinced him to show me the animal. Finally we found the 120-pound "gopher" with the help of the zoological staff. "That’s a capybara," one zoologist said. "It’s part of our South American exhibit."

"Please put it where it belongs," I said.

When I arrived at my office, I found a fat, unexpected visitor with pencils in his mouth. I phoned the zoological department from the next room. "There’s a bear in my office."

"His name is Bruno," the girl volunteered.

"He doesn’t have an appointment."

"We’ll send someone to get him.

"The following week I took a baby elephant with me to appear on composer Henry Mancini’s syndicated television show. Outside the TV studio, the elephant ran off, pulled up a palm tree, and set it on the hood of Mancini’s Mercedes-Benz. I returned the elephant and the tree to their proper places.

Back in my office, I telephoned my friend Chief Agoma. He was from Nigeria, a double chief, a headman in two tribes. He listened to my story about the animal escapes. "I don’t know what to tell you," he said. "I grew up in cities, mostly in France. Maybe you should call the National Geographic Society."

"I don’t want publicity," I said. "I just want things to quiet down. All of these events go beyond a series of coincidences. The escapes represent some kind of animal conspiracy."

"Maybe you should talk to the animals—like Dr. Dolittle."

"Are you serious?"

"You could start by apologizing to the lion for parking on his tail," he said. "Then you could discuss the whole matter with one of the smarter animals—a chimpanzee, maybe—and arrive at some kind of truce."

"Is that your best idea?" I asked.

"It couldn’t hurt."

Although I felt like a fool, I reluctantly followed his advice. I went to the preserve and found the lion. I gave him a sirloin steak and a sincere apology. Next I got a basket of fruit and sat alone at a picnic table with Bruce, a tame, four-year-old chimpanzee. I handed him two bananas. When he saw me struggling to peel an orange, he took it, removed the skin, and handed the fruit back to me. He listened to my story without comment.

After the meeting, I had no problems with the menagerie for several months. But sometime later, I had to contend with an incident involving a missing animal. Bruce, the chimp, disappeared one night. The zoological department said he was stolen. But I think he escaped because he had no desire to work with a guy who was unable to peel an orange.