Riverdale Farm

This guide to Riverdale Farm in Toronto starts with a nineteen eighteen dispute over a sea lion that would not stop barking, and the zoo superintendent who seriously proposed cutting its vocal cords until the Humane Society stepped in. It traces Riverdale Zoo back to eighteen eighty-eight, when an alderman named Lamb donated a few deer and talked wealthy friends into funding more animals, growing the collection into ocelots, a hippopotamus, and a Siberian bear within fifteen years. A wolf once bit fifteen inches off a pelican's beak, and a vet grafted on a duck's bill with horsehair stitches.