Key West Zoo

It is an irony that my wife teaches in the one room classroom at the Monroe County Juvenile Detention Center, which is a massive structure on stilts parked right above the Monroe County Sheriff's Office's Petting Zoo. Its ironic because her students are not allowed to pet the animals they can almost see from their cells. They might leap the barbed wire, like POWs and run...The downstairs inmates find their time at the jail to be restorative, there is no feeling that to them running might be a good idea. Trustys from the adult jail get the privilege of working at the farm under the supervision of the civilian "farmer" who is charged with looking after the animals. I'm told it is a much prized job and confers status on the orange suited prisoners who get to lift and carry for the farm's inmates. The inmates vary: I've seen horses, a donkey, pigs of all sizes, lots of ducks, friendly inquisitive goats and other more or less barnyard animals. Vets volunteer their time and skill to help restore the battered arrivals.

To the outside world, principally guide book authors, the existence of the farm is something of a surprise. They are shocked the Sheriff of all people runs a petting farm at the jail. However there is a great deal of poverty on the keys in our diverse world down here and it should come as no surprise that humans living on the brink of a very deep financial abyss mistreat their animals. Also Cuban and Haitian migrants, arrivals from some of the poorest places on the planet have very different animal husbandry standards than those of middle class parvenus like yours truly, so it happens from time to time that animals get abused, and even sometimes get saved from that abuse by interfering Sheriff's deputies. Cock fights get broken up, abandoned farm animals are found. Those are the lucky ones and their spirits and bodies are mended in the serene little petting zoo under the juvenile jail.

They in turn introduce fresh young Conchs to the concept of Farm Animals. Children growing up in Key West should know how to fish, but a farm is an alien concept because there is no agriculture anywhere in the Keys. Central Florida is littered with post-and-rail ranchettes raising show horses, and south central Florida is a vast open tract of cow ranching to rival that of the Far West of popular imagination. In Key West the only tractor you will see is the blue machine that cleans the dead seaweed off the public beaches. So children get to learn life lessons at the farm, and very cool it is too. Eccentric perhaps to an outsider, but like so many things in the keys it makes perfect sense that the Sheriff treats abused animals as just another part of the law enforcement equation.

For many reasons Sheriff Rick Roth was the first Republican candidate I ever voted for. Keys politics being the topsy turvey jumble they are, he wasn't the last.