208 pages

One puff adder; one antelope; one crocodile. These were the animals on the sick list with which Oliver Graham-Jones was presented on his first day as veterinary officer of London Zoo. It was 1950, and the care of wild animals in zoos was in its infancy. Previously sick animals had been placed in the care of their keepers, kept from public view, and if they didn't respond to traditional medications allowed to pass quietly away. But Oliver was to change all this. A pioneer of many of the techniques now used by vets around the world, he was instrumental in building the first animal hospital, and in moving London Zoo away from its Victorian past into the high-tech world of modern veterinary medicine. In Zoo Tails, he tells us about some of the animals he cared for: what it felt like when he was faced with an escaped bear or an injured elephant; and what he did when called upon to perform a colostomy on a python, or when he was asked to fit one of the ravens in the Tower of London with a wooden leg. If a dangerous animal escaped or required urgent medical attention, Oliver Graham-Jones was always on hand, ready for any eventuality. Frequently describing himself as quaking with fear, he comes across as humane, skilful and most of all incredibly brave. If you are a lover of animals in any shape or form, and My Family and Other Animals was an essential part of your childhood reading, then Zoo Tails is for you. Filled with wonderfully funny stories (with titles like Chased by a Gorilla or A Leopard in the Cabinet Room) which are told with appealingly self-deprecating humour, Zoo Tails deserves to become a classic in animal literature.

This is a very interesting memoir of the London Zoo which I had the joy of visiting last April.
The visit made the book even better than it would have been otherwise. And now I would like to visit the Zoo again. I have never heard that a snake can swallow another snake. A specimen of this is to be seen somewhere, the doctor says. He said having seen it. He operated small animals with equipment used usually for operating eyes. He even succeeded in making for a raven of Tower an artificial foot.

I found a new reader for this book.
Happy reading!

Thank you for thinking of me, Annelis! I have read "First Catch Your Tiger" by the same author, a much older memoir. Let's see if he has remembered more stories or is just 're-heating' the old ones.
I have visited London often, but never the Zoo. Perhaps one day...

I think some of these stories ring a bell, they might have been told in his previous book.
And poor Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley, one of British wonders), I think Gerry Durrell brought him back from Africa, where the chimp had been somebody's pet, and he got on with him okay. Probably because the highly intelligent chimp wasn't bored with him, like he was at the zoo.
Being a zookeeper or zoovet before proper anaesthetics were being invented was really dangerous, shear madness, if you think about it. I know an old keeper from the Helsinki Zoo who has told hair-raising histories of what was tried on the animals to calm them down (nicotine, for one) and accidents did happen. It was first when Ketamine was introduced when the odds turned and some sort of safety could be obtained. A Finnish drug, Medetomidi, was also revolutional in animal sedation as it had a proper antidote, so the animal could be woken up safely after the procedure, which is important especially for ruminants.

Finished yesterday, but was too tired to write anything here.
I did enjoy the book, although three of the chapters had appeared under the exact same name in the previous book and some under a different name but the story was still the same... Well, he had added something new and I'm an old lady, I can read same stories several times without remembering too much about them 😊.
I will keep this in my permanent collecting for the time being.