The Monroe County Sheriff's Office Animal Farm began with ducks and deputies. The ducks were being hit by cars on College Road and one of the deputies had the idea of rounding them up. They'd be safer inside a fence, his thinking went, and the deputies could have a picnic table out there for their breaks. This was a few years before Jeanne Selander arrived in the Keys with her new marine biology degree to be the assistant curator at the Key West Aquarium. It happened that the vet for the sea turtles there was also the vet for the animals out at the Sheriff's Office, which had expanded some from just ducks. They were looking for a new farmer. That's the job title, and Dr. Mader recommended Selander. "You'd be perfect," he told her. She wasn't so sure. She hadn't planned on being a farmer, and besides, she told him, "It's a jail!"
Mader was going out there to shear a llama. "Come with me," he said.
Selander thought the place was dirty and run down. Much of the space is underneath the county jail, which stands on cement pilings for storms, and the animal collection was eclectic. Some of the critters are confiscated in the course of law enforcement. If a druggie has a ferret, you know what to do with the guy and his stash, but what happens to the ferret?
There were only 20 animals, going by species, but counting noses would get you 120 because of the bunnies. The former farmer had let them breed. Ever since Selander's had the job, her first order of business for new arrivals is to get them fixed.
She wears a sheriff's tan uniform but she is a civilian, not a sworn officer. "It was odd to be at a jail," Selander remembers. She had some ideas about what the place could be, but without a predecessor to show her the ropes, she was on her own to figure things out. It wouldn't be the first time.
A female lieutenant trained her for the jail side of things: working with inmates, and how to deal with contraband. "Sometimes they're going to get mad with each other. There's a protocol to being a lone female down here with four or five inmates, but a lot of it is instinct. You either have it or you don't." The inmates are her labor pool. They are generally low-level offenders in detention while their cases are being sorted out.
The first thing Farmer Jeanne tells you is that she doesn't have perfect animals. Every one of them has been injured, abused, abandoned, donated, or confiscated. "A lot of facilities won't display animals that have anything wrong with them. They get flack from the public." The misfits wind up here.
The capybara is here because he got his lips ripped off by another capybara in a fight. His name is Simon and he's a kid favorite. Capybaras are the world’s largest rodents and even bigger on TikTok. Simon has sloe eyes, luxe fur, and webbed feet.
Jack the ostrich is blind in one eye. Selander uses a special squeaky voice to tell him how handsome he is, and he dances for her. His wings are fluffy and expressive. It's sultry to watch until she tells me they can kill a lion with their feet, and points out the middle toe, which looks like a Bowie knife. This is why no one goes into the enclosure except her, and she stays on Jack's blind side.
The white-crowned pigeon, native to the Keys and endangered, can't fly. It's a long story. Tyson is an exotic to locals; he's the only squirrel in Key West. His head was smooshed by a car in Key Largo and he has balance issues. Kelsie, one of the lemurs, was surrendered by a busker on Duval Street who was trying to use her as photo bait. Lucille, the ball python, turned up in Old Town in somebody's outside clothes dryer. Talk about surprise.
Selander is at her limit for African spurred tortoises. She has seven. "They are the most surrendered animals in the Keys," she says. "People have no idea that their quarter-size pet will grow to 200 pounds and live 100 years."
The mandarin ducks were exiled from the Key West Butterfly Conservatory for eating the butterflies, along with Ruby the violet turaco for fighting with the green turaco. It's not hard to see why some of the inmates relate to the animals here.
Kids sympathize with Beth the binturong who's lost a leg and most of her tail, but they are fascinated by who she is. "She has paws like a bear, and whiskers like a sea lion, but she's a cat! And she smells exactly like buttered popcorn." You can look it up.
"I had a blind horse who was abandoned. You couldn't just walk into his stall, you had to let him know you were there working around him. The inmates talked to him. They hand-walked him, because he couldn't see. They had to bond with him. He was a transformational animal."
The toy tells you who lives in the A-Frame. The log cabin is for the tortoises, except Albert. Albert lives alone.
When Hurricane Irma bulked up to Cat Five and took aim at the Keys, the Sheriff evacuated the jail. This had never happened before. "I got a call at five o'clock on Friday afternoon that the jail was being evacuated, and if I needed some inmates I'd better come in," Selander remembers.
The hurricane plan for the animals was relocating them to the cells after the inmates cleared out. The smaller ones got crated up, and the larger ones were coaxed into temporary stalls that the inmates assembled like Ikea furniture. They all went up the freight elevator to the cells, along with bags of feed, hay, bedding, trash bins and water to last for a while. Selander's inmates were on the last bus out just before dawn.
Alone in their ark, Selander and her charges had 36 hours to think about things before Irma came ashore. "I didn't really have a choice but to stay here by myself," she says. From inside, the storm seemed remote. The walls are thick and there are no windows. The only clues to what was happening were silent video feeds before the power went out.
After Irma moved on, Farmer Jeanne wrangled the crates down two flights of stairs to the animals' usual enclosures. The ones in the stalls balked at the stairs. Now, with no power, she had upstairs and downstairs populations to feed, water, and clean up after. They were on their own for two weeks. "The main thing is to feed," she says. "Have hay for the horses, give them something to do."
From when she first took the job, Jeanne Selander's dream improvement was pavers. The ground was all raw dirt and nubby limestone rock: uneasy footing, and worse for wheelchairs and strollers. It's taken most of 18 years to realize the paver dream.
Between the parking lot and the jail, donkeys, miniature horses, and a zebu nibble at the grass inside a pretty white fence. Like Disney, Selander has created a pastoral grazing yard from a sun-blasted sandlot. "I tried to make it a sanctuary," she recalls. "We want shade. We want it to be not like a jail." Farmer Jeanne planted every tree, and people stop by just to watch the horses.
Most of us who see someone in an orange uniform stop seeing them right there. Whatever they did to land here, Selander's inmates bring a lot of skills and she puts them to work. She wants habitats, not cages. She wants a grazing yard. She wants charm. There is cheerful art on the benches and bright signage suggesting where to wander next on her pavers.
Inmates also muck stalls and do endless feeding and landscaping, but what they create is important. They're not doing hard time, and many bring their families back to show off what they've done here.
Todays crew is sitting around a picnic table waiting for lunch. "Alright, guys," she announces, "this is Chris Moore and he'd like to talk to you if you want to talk to him for an article he's writing." The inmates have to sign a paper saying that it's okay. Two of them do.
Erich is Cuban, although it's not clear how recently. "My English is not very good-looking," he warns me right away. This is a running joke with Farmer Jeanne. His English is fine and I ask him how he got here. Not to the jail, but the farm. "It's up to the sergeant," he explains. "In my case, I was sentenced to this work." He helped build some of the habitats, but claims no special skills. "I'm just support," he smiles. "I'm emotional support."
Felix asked for the job. "I'd rather be here than inside with all the noise. We get a little more freedom and it's a little more calm." The farm gig is six to eight hours, six days a week, and you get lunch at a picnic table in the shade. Being with the horses is more fun than landscaping. Erich knows horses and showed Felix what to do, Felix being a city boy out of New York.
They have good things to say about their boss. Farmer Jeanne, not the sergeant. "She has a big heart," Erich tells me. "Sometimes she wears the snake." I ask him if there are any animals that he stays away from. "The snake," he says.
Selander is matter-of-fact about their praise. "I try. I always tell them that I treat them like an employee. If they treat me as an inmate would, I treat them like an inmate. Everybody you meet down here is somebody that's good and worth being down here." She opens the big chain-link gate. I walk out past the grazing yard, with its white fence and green grass, and say hello to the miniature zebu bull. His name is Thunder
The tour
Farmer Jeanne's office, where she stays during storms. The tiny building is strapped down so she doesn't blow out to the Dry Tortugas.
"Albert has been here since I took over and he'll be here when I'm gone. He's very territorial. If any other tortoises are in his area, he tries to kill them."
