Building Your Dream Zoo

"It's a pretty good zoo said young Gerald McDrew,

And the fellow who runs it seems proud of it too

But if I ran the zoo, said young Gerald McDrew,

I'd make a few changes, that's what I'd do."

-  If I Ran the Zoo, by Dr. Seuss 

From the moment I first learned about it, the game Zoo Tycoon had enormous appeal to me.  For all of my life, I wanted to work in a zoo.  Well, that's not entirely accurate - I expected to work in a zoo.  What I really, really wanted was to have my own zoo.  Preferably one that I designed myself.

When I was young, one of my favorite pastimes was to design my zoo - on long car rides I'd mentally lay out the paths and the exhibits, stocking them with a laundry-list of my favorite animals.  Whenever the combination of a pen, a piece of paper, and an idle moment came together, I'd doodle out maps.  These weren't simple sketches, either - I'd plan it down to the size of the enclosures and the individual numbers of each species.

Sometimes these schemes were inspired by the particulars of a specific zoo I had visited (not many of them, though - despite my lifelong passion for them, before I went away to college I had only ever visited a small number of zoos), or something I had read about (the internet not really being much of a resource back then).  Other times, I made them up whole out of cloth.  Those were probably my favorite ones.  I didn't have to try to shoehorn an idea or a vision I had into an existing landscape.  I was able to let my imagination go wild.  Instead, I got to plan everything out so it all fit together, smoothly and seamlessly.  I tried to create things that had never been done before.  When I walked through the zoos of my imagination, I wasn't just going for a walk among the animals.  I was telling myself a story, or going on an adventure.

This came to a head in high school, when a gullible if well-meaning teacher agreed to let me indulge my interest in zoo design for a final project.  I buried the poor man alive under fifty pages - double-sided, single-spaced - of text, drawings, and diagrams.

To this day, my favorite part of the job is the planning and designing of new exhibits - working on the layout, selecting the animals, and putting shovels in the ground to make them a reality.  This doesn't get to happen nearly as often as I would like it to.  Unlike my childhood ramblings - or even Zoo Tycoon - building a new zoo exhibit is very expensive in terms of labor and money, and not something done lightly on a whim.

Still, on those days when the projects are in motion and a new piece of the zoo is being built, and I know that I'm one of the minds that made it happen, I'm probably the happiest person I know.