Lion tamer turned zoo owner after film shoot left her with unwanted animals
Sharon Matola lion tamer/zoo founder b June 3, 1954 d March 21, 2021
When Sharon Matola found herself in Belize with a jaguar, a boa constrictor and 18 other animals all in need of a home, she was faced with a dilemma. Matola, who has died aged 66, was previously a lion tamer, and had arrived in Belize in 1981 to film a nature documentary with British film-maker Richard Foster, who thought her former job would dispose her well to interact with wild animals. Now Foster had moved on to a new project in Borneo, leaving her with the animals they had been filming.
Some were injured, others were habituated to human company. They would stand little chance in the wild. As she had no money to send them to conservationists,
Foster’s production company suggested she shoot them. Instead she painted a sign with ‘‘Belize Zoo’’, placed it next to the road, and constructed some rudimentary enclosures. She walked to the nearest bar, three miles away, and told them that if their customers got bored, they could visit the country’s first zoo.
Matola turned up at schools to give impromptu talks about the animals, and found her way into cocktail parties in Belize City, where she convinced diplomats and dignitaries to support her unlikely project. In a display of absent-mindedness that was not the best advert for her planning ability, she once forgot to pack her cocktail dress, and attended a diplomatic soiree wearing her friend’s restitched curtain.
The government of Belize had no funding to offer, but did give its blessing to the project. Matola was startled when visitors started to arrive. As she was about to close the zoo one day, an old man appeared, asking if this was the place to see the animals.
She agreed to show him round. Upon reaching the jaguar enclosure he began to sob, saying: ‘‘I’ve lived in Belize my whole life and this is the first time I have seen the animals of my country. They are so beautiful.’’ Matola realised then that the zoo would be her life’s work.
She began to take in more animals, including a tapir which she found at the side of a river, near to death. She named her April and installed her as her room-mate, sharing a bed with her and making her banana smoothies. April would go on to become the zoo’s mascot: every year schoolchildren would come to celebrate her birthday with presents of carrots and bananas.
Trappers arrived at the zoo offering to sell Matola animals they had caught, but she only took in those that could not survive in the wild. Several of her wards were jaguars who had taken to eating sheep and cattle. Farmers would have shot them had she not given them a new home.
Over four decades, Belize Zoo grew into a national institution, with 200 animals and 58 staff. Before the pandemic, it was attracting 75,000 visitors annually. Matola told a journalist in 2006: ‘‘I would like anyone reading this to know that they are reading an interview given by one of the happiest people on the planet. Me, I am so proud of the Belize Zoo and what it has given to so many people.’’
Sharon Matola was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Edward, a sales manager for National Brewing, and Janice, a university administrative assistant. The kind of child who kept worms as pets, she was 9 when she discovered her favourite book, My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell’s account of his childhood among the fauna of Corfu.
After high school she joined the air force, but the only thing she enjoyed about it was a jungle survival school in Panama, and she left to study Russian at Iowa State University. She then transferred to New College in Sarasota, Florida, to study biology, after which her life took a series of picaresque turns.
She worked for two months as an apprentice to a Romanian lion tamer then, after beginning a master’s at the University of South Florida in the study of fungi, answered the advertisement of a Mexican circus seeking an exotic dancer.
‘‘I thought, I could be going to market during the day to see mushrooms, working towards my master’s,’’ she said. ‘‘I could travel free and I loved to dance. I thought, I can use the circus the way Darwin used the Beagle.’’
Soon she was in charge of six tigers and four lions, encouraging them to jump through burning hoops. She told herself that it was better that she did it than someone who cared nothing for animals. However, she left the circus after witnessing the beating of some chimpanzees.
She took her pet monkey, Rocky, with her. Knowing the guards at the US border would not let him through, she crossed illegally, fording the Rio Grande with Rocky on her shoulder. She returned to Florida and had not been there long when an envelope arrived from Foster.
Matola was known also in Belize for a radio programme she presented about conservation, and for the children’s books she wrote after realising that Belizean children were learning from books depicting only British animals. In the early 2000s she campaigned unsuccessfully against the construction of a dam across the Macal river in the west of the country, warning that it would destroy the habitat of the scarlet macaw.
Matola, who never married or had children, lived a mile away from the zoo, in a thatch-roofed hut next to a pool in which she would swim. The crocodiles in the water didn’t bother her. ‘‘They are just babies,’’ she said.