Animals 24/7: A zookeeper who's wild about her calling

Cindy Hall ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY With a day off and the snake pit behind her — along with the public exhibitions and private ministrations she provides for the big cats (Bengal tigers, African lions, leopards, Western cougars) and the little cats (the old ocelot in particular, her favorite) — zookeeper Cindy Hall is chasing hay for her horses.

"It's 24/7 animals from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep," she explains. "It's a different lifestyle, something most people don't understand."

"Most people" probably includes the cool cats who flash smiles her way while she's working with the wild cats at The Naples Zoo. There's no way these guys are going to figure out this 34-year-old woman who spent seven weeks in the jungle in Guatemala four years ago and came within a couple of days and five people of winning $1 million on CBS' "Survivor."

Here's a person who actually went back to Guatemala, not once but twice, so she could "sleep in the same dirt," she says.

"I love the jungle. I'm 100 percent content, 100 percent at peace there. I don't feel like I'm going to die or starve. I'm not afraid of anything there."

About men and life and having a family, Ms. Hall is forthright: "I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't know if I haven't grown up enough or if it's something else. I don't want to say you have to stop chasing your dreams to pursue a family, but it's a challenge to be in a relationship with someone like me. My brain does not turn off."

So if you're going to spend any time with Ms. Hall, she says, "You cannot be needy. I'm off doing random things at any given moment. And I'm not needy, so I don't treat other people in such a way. It would take a unique person to put up with me, because I live in a oneroom cabin with a bunch of cats and lizards. If you're okay with that we can talk, but if you're not 100 percent with it, I don't have a lot of time to pursue a relationship."

Animals, many of them, are 100 percent with it.

On this particular day off, Ms. Hall will feed her horses twice and clean their stalls at the Everglades Ranch, just like she cleans the caged environments of so many animals during the course of her work week at the Zoo. She'll brush down her horses, too — a registered Arabian and an Arabian mix, taken in by Ms. Hall because they'd been beaten up and abused by life (that's true of all her animals).

At some point, she'll mount her 100 lean pounds atop those 1,000-pound beasts as effortlessly as most people saddle up an armchair, and ride out into the Picayune Strand State Forest, past deer, snakes, eagles and bears, or at least their tracks.

At home, Ms. Hall has four ancient cats, two corn snakes, a Solomon Islands monkey-tailed skink, an Indonesian blue- tongued skink, a bearded dragon and an African Sulcata tortoise, the third largest tortoise on the planet. Somebody gave her the tortoise when it was the size of a 50-cent piece. Now almost 9 years old, it weighs 25 pounds and it will keep growing and living for as long as a century.

It's a tortoise, not an albatross — but it's definitely a burden, since it digs its way out of the cages Ms. Hall builds for it, and it eats like neither a tortoise nor an albatross, but like a horse. "As much as you give it," she says. "That's how much it will eat." Veggies, of course.

Although Ms. Hall might be complaining, one suspects it's more likely that the small-town girl from north central Kentucky with a huge compassion for the planet's fauna is rejoicing at her lot in life.

When she was 19 years old and a student at Ohio State University (she holds a degree in anthropology), Ms. Hall's mother, Bonnie Carney, moved to Naples. Summer came, and when Ms. Hall needed a job she applied at the Zoo because she loved animals. Her mother, she says — like her twin sister, Mindy, perhaps — thought her animal-philia was a fluke, something she'd outgrow before getting a real job.

But six months later, when Ms. Hall was still at the Zoo, her mother laid down both the rules of the road and the reason for those rules.

"She said, 'Cindy, you've got to leave now and go back to college, or you're never going to leave," Ms. Hall recalls.

So she did. She returned to Ohio State, finished her degree and then almost immediately came back to the Zoo. She's been there fulltime since 1996, and has worked with almost every animal or species the Zoo maintains.

Now, her mother and her sister are ardent defenders of what she does. Even her older brother back in Kentucky sees her life as amusing and novel, she says.

Ms. Hall herself speaks of the Zoo with a reverence and felicity that's potent. "The Naples Zoo is my home," she says. "I've grown up there. I have a sense of patriotism toward it. I wouldn't have stayed if there wasn't something phenomenal about it."