Attribution: René Cortin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper’s recall of the starvation zoo story that never became a news story because the culprit was an acquaintance of the publisher of The Wisconsin State Journal where the keeper was employed.
The zoo owner’s plan had been to create an exotic animal tourist attraction up in the middle of the state’s sand country and it got as far as the cages and all of the live animals before a disagreement between the zoo owner and a local feeder and tender broke down and everything was abandoned.
When the keeper found the location it was as eerie as anything he had ever seen—long rows of wire cages, each with the remains or partial remains of the former occupant. The only survivors were five pigs that had managed to escape their cage and roam to feed on their fellow zoo residents’ remains. There was also a surviving family of elk that were later rounded up by DNR wardens on snowmobiles.
Maybe the keeper’s memory of the unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity involved in the dead zoo issue is jogged by the current circumstance of a political “zookeeper” with seemingly similar attributes.
Sadly, there was never any accountability or even any truth told about what actually happened as the last scavengers finished their work and the dead zoo disappeared back into the jack-pine sand country.
Had the keeper insisted that it be otherwise he would have likely been out of a job and he had a sizable family to support at the time.
No such alibi exists now as the prospects for a human dead zoo loom ever larger and the keeper and Phyllis’s crowd join in the resistance to prevent it.
