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December 20, 2004

Where the wild things are | Bob and Julie Miner host lions, tigers and bears — and many more exotic creatures — at D.E.W. Animal Kingdom and Sanctuary

By Michaela Cavallaro
It's a chilly day in early December and I am holding hands with a lar gibbon. The 20-year-old monkey, whose name is Freddy, has cool, leathery hands, which he's stuck through the chain link cage he occupies inside the monkey barn at D.E.W. Animal Kingdom and Sanctuary in Mount Vernon. Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecilia" plays on a small radio while Julie Miner bustles around the room, giving buckets of food to lemurs, marmosets, squirrel monkeys and a pair of binturong ˆ— tree-dwelling members of the civet family who are native to southeast Asia ˆ— named Felix and Felicia.

Her husband, Bob, croons "Mama's coming" to the lemurs, pressing his face up to their enclosure and nuzzling them through the chicken wire, then warns me to move away from Freddy's cage. "Gibbons are long-term monogamous animals, ma'am," he says. "Freddy's not going to like me standing next to you." Sure enough, the gibbon who a moment ago had been looking into my eyes turns surly when Bob approaches, slashing at Bob's sleeve with his long, thin fingers and turning his back on us.

The animals in the monkey barn ˆ— which is slated to be replaced next year by a much larger structure ˆ— are just a fraction of the species the Miners rescue, breed and raise. Outside in large pens are several cougars, a striking pair of black leopards, a couple of African lions, a pair of Bengal tigers, a zebra, a few camels and dozens of other animals. "We take everything but cats, dogs and people," Julie explains.

Bob Miner, a gruff, bearded Winthrop native with a dry sense of humor and a penchant for puns, says he began collecting animals in the late 1970s as he recovered from a series of strokes and a heart attack brought on, he says, by his military service in Vietnam. "I started with cows and sheep for therapy," he says. "I didn't want people around."

Gradually, though, the animals became more exotic ˆ— early inhabitants of Miner's farm were a kangaroo, a coatimundi and Freddy the gibbon ˆ— and Miner became more willing to interact with people. He attributes his turnaround to the unconditional love he says he gets from even the wildest of his charges. "Animals are not demanding," he says. "They love you for you. It's people that want things from you."

In the early 1980s, a local elementary school asked Miner, now 60, if some classes could come over to visit his burgeoning collection of creatures seldom seen in Maine. He put them off for a while but eventually relented; he says he's not exactly sure why he changed his mind. Though the group made just a three-dollar donation for Miner's time, the visit was a major turning point in the creation of D.E.W. Animal Kingdom, which now is open to the public year-round (this time of year by appointment only). "The kids learned so much," Miner says. "It was so rewarding. Then when my wife came in, everything just evolved."

Julie Miner, now 44, visited the farm more than 10 years ago as a chaperone for one of her daughters' school trips. Bob asked for volunteers to help with the chores, something Julie found intriguing because of her background raising cattle, chickens and other domestic animals. Soon she was coming by the farm a few days a week, picking up after the animals and doing other maintenance work ˆ— but not before giving Bob a strict warning: "I told him to stay away from me; he's a terrible flirt," she says with a laugh. "Six months later we were married."

Since then, the couple has patched together a living from entrance fees ˆ— $8 per person for the general public, $3 each for school groups ˆ— proceeds from the sale of animals they breed and Bob's disability pay from the military. During the summer, Bob says, they'll get 50 or 60 visitors a day. But entrance fees, they say, barely cover the cost of feeding their nearly 200 animals, some of whom, like the African lion, eat a whole calf carcass in one sitting. To raise funds for the recently completed bear enclosure, which is home to three North American black bears, they put out a donation box in front of the bear cage. It raised $1,600, just $256 shy of the project's cost.

The Miners also encourage donations of supplies including tools, cloth diapers (for baby animals, like the three cougar cubs currently residing in a plexiglass pen in the house, where Julie can bottle-feed them) and Clorox. Technically, D.E.W. ˆ— which stands for Domestic, Exotic and Wild ˆ— is a for-profit organization; Julie says that while federal nonprofit status would be beneficial in the long run, it's simply too expensive to do the necessary paperwork.

About three years ago, they moved their operation a mile down the road to a 42-acre lot on Route 41 in Mount Vernon. Bob and Julie did the vast majority of the work themselves, from building their house to setting 21,000 sq. ft. of chain-link fence around the property. They have no other employees, though Julie says she'd love to have the money to hire someone to help with the cleaning so she can focus on the increasing mounds of paperwork and on breeding animals for sale to small zoos that focus on education; two of the cougar cubs, for example, are slated for sale to a Minnesota operation for about $400 apiece.

It's an unusual existence, but Bob Miner looks at D.E.W. as simply a farm with what he calls "alternative" livestock. "There are three reasons to farm," he says. "For fur, for fiber or to enhance the breed, like people do with horses. [When it comes to exotic animals,] we are overtaking their habitats so quickly ˆ— somebody's got to do something to keep them going. Because once the animals are gone, the people are going right after them."

D.E.W. Animal Kingdom and Sanctuary

Mount Vernon

Owners: Bob and Julie Miner

Founded: 1980

Service: Wild animal rescue, rehabilitation and breeding, as well as educational tours for the general public

Employees: Two

Revenues, 2003: Approximately $20,000

Contact: 293-2837

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