The zoos were making me mad. I wanted animal disposal records from all of the accredited zoos so I could track their surplus tigers, monkeys and nyalas after they left the zoo grounds.
Most of the zoos weren't cooperating, and I wasn't about to settle for a dik-dik studbook and records from a couple dozen of the smaller zoos.
Even so, for a while I became known as "Ms. Scanner" in the office as I faithfully scanned every animal transaction record I'd been able to get my hands on into Excel thinking all the while I'd plead, pry, pout and use my Southern accent to get the rest.
Records from my FOIA requests to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture already filled enough boxes to turn my desk, my car and my living room into forts. But I was still missing huge parts of the puzzle: Where did all of the animals go?
Seeking zoo records
One zoo director told me no reporter had asked for studbooks before, yet I was demanding them with a vengeance after learning all of them were public records, thanks to agreements signed with other zoological groups around the world. The studbooks recorded the genetic histories of animals in a species but they also contained such goodies as showing which animals left an accredited zoo and went to such dealers as Earl Tatum and Buddy Jordan.
I became very fond of a three-letter initial recorded after many of those animals were listed as going to dealers in the studbook - LTF, or "lost to follow-up." Lost to me, the public and the zoo itself. Lost in the regulatory black hole that governs zoo and exotic animals.
Enough already!
I had notebook after notebook of handwritten lists of where certain animals went after leaving the zoos, but the whole picture was far from complete.
So I decided, hell, I'll try to buy the same database the zoos use themselves to record their animal transaction records.
The first time I called the International Species Information System (ISIS) in Apple Valley, Minnesota, I simply said I wanted to buy a set of the CD-ROMs that hold all of the goodies.
The guy I spoke with said I didn't qualify - I needed to have a collection of animals. Ah, never fear, I said, I have a dog and a cat. The ISIS man laughed half-heartedly and said, um, no.
Fine. About that time, a pair of wild ducks had taken up residence in the moat surrounding two sides of the Mercury News and hatched more than a dozen ducklings to make their way in the chlorinated waters of the moat.
So I called the ISIS man back: "Hey, now I have a dog, a cat, a mama duck, a papa duck and 14 babies," I said. "Surely that qualifies as an animal collection."
Um, no, that won't do, the ISIS man said, and there was no half-hearted laugh this time. But as soon as I checked the list of ISIS members on the Internet and saw a few of the same dealers listed that I was trying to track, I had one of those moments investigative reporters know well. It's the moment when you say, OK, by god, I don't know how, but I WILL get the information.
Sources offer data
It took a little while longer, but I obtained two copies of the database from separate sources. It enabled us to verify the integrity of the data on each set.
Now all of you trained observers will have noticed that I slipped the first "us" into my narrative. I spent most of my career getting to the core of things by myself - well, me and all those boxes that accumulate. This time, I needed something I'd heard about but figured I'd never need to use - the expertise to make sense of those CD-ROMs. And luckily, I didn't have to go far.
Jennifer LaFleur, database editor at the Mercury News, and a former NICAR training director, took one look at my bewildered expression and said, OK, I'll help you, dummy. She actually said, "Oh, OK," but you learn to joke early and often on these things.
Sgt. LaFleur drove me nuts for the first two weeks we were working with the data because I kept wanting to make printed copies of the 52 million animal transactions, which had to be made one copy, one transaction at a time. I wanted to hold them in my hands, add them to the forts of documents that now surrounded my desk, the inside of my car and my living room.
But Jennifer kept saying no.
No, no, no, you don't need to print them out, she said over and over, her voice rising each time.
Well, dammit, I did need to, I still want to now and probably will print out copies of many of the animal transactions - one at a time - before it's all over. But I agreed to be a good kid and set about trying to identify who the recipients of zoo animals were in the computerized records. There was no manual that said so and so is a dealer or that NBJ was dealer Buddy Jordan's NBJ Ranch in Texas.
Explaining the data
I also located a terrific source from the zoo world who could help us understand the ISIS data. That made it possible for Jennifer and me both to make sense of this complex and quite literally awesome database. The source agreed that since we had the data, it would help no one if we misinterpreted them. And that's when Jennifer put this collection of millions of records into a database that we could search by individual zoo or pull out numbers for all of the accredited zoos. The data analysis derived from it was the crowning touch to the culmination of all that work: A four-day series called "Zoo Animals To Go" by yours truly in the San Jose Mercury News, published February 7-10, 1999.
For the record, this ol' warrior will add one thing: A database is a remarkable tool - one that I came to admire and deeply appreciate. I might even do it again.
Linda Goldston can be reached by e-mail at lgoldston@sjmercury.com