SOME OF OUR BEST FRIENDS ARE ANIMALS: The Story of a Wildlife Park

What shall we do with the place?"" the Taylors reportedly asked each other (or should have) after they'd bought Cricket St. Thomas and found themselves lords of a thousand-acre estate with a whopping mortgage that farming alone wouldn't pay off. Salvation came in the form of a Sunday Times ad offering needy estate-owners a tie-up with Associated Pleasure Parks; and Cricket was on its way to becoming the West Country Wild Life Park, a 50-acre valley stocked with assorted animals in cages and at loose. This is the kind of venture that seems ready-made for a book (as in ""You should write a. . ."") but the unfocused mix of wildlife management, business management, and anecdotes about the leopard cub in the loo, et cetera, amounts to no more than a mild diversion.