Veterinarians turn Moapa home into zoo for exotic animals

People move to the country for all kinds of reasons.

Jay and Valerie Holt did it because Jay wanted a camel.

"We didn't have enough room where we were living to have one in the backyard with the pool," Valerie said.

Their 3-acre spread 55 miles northeast of Las Vegas gave them the space they needed to expand their menagerie of exotic animals.

When the husband-and-wife veterinary team made the move from Las Vegas to Moapa three years ago, they already had 16 kangaroos and several dozen parrots, snakes and lizards, along with an array of more conventional pets.

In almost no time at all, they found themselves sharing their lives with about 170 creatures, both exotic and domestic.

"We woke up one day and Jay said, 'Honey, I think you've got a zoo,'" Valerie recalled. "I said, 'God, you're right.'"

So began Roos-N-More, an unusual, hands-on animal attraction that doubles as home for the Holts and their two children.

Late last year, they started opening the zoo to the public one day a month. They also began offering private tours, field trips and mobile "zoo-to-you" programs.

"It never started out to be a business. It was a passion," Valerie said. "But people would stop by and want to take a look. They'd just ring the doorbell and say, 'Can we see the animals?'"

Money also played a large part in the decision to turn their zoolike home into an actual zoo.

Though they save thousands of dollars a year by providing all their own veterinary care, the Holts' growing menagerie now costs them about $10,000 a month.

"Basically, that's our feed bill," Jay said.

Only a handful of the animals are kept in cages. Most of them live in open enclosures that allow them to interact with each other, even species from opposite sides of the globe.

In one pasture, horses, cows, sheep and goats graze peacefully alongside llamas, camels and a friendly zebra named Razbe.

In another field, several varieties of kangaroo mingle with turkeys and chickens.

The zoo is a family affair, and Zach, 14, and Hailey, 12, are called on to do a little bit of everything, from feedings to field work to fetching medicines. They know enough about the animals to lead tours on zoo days.

The Holts share the inside of their 2,600-square-foot home with dogs, ferrets, geckos, sloths and, at last count, 11 house cats. Monkey toys dangle from a rope attached to the living room ceiling, and the coffee table doubles as an enclosure for a pair of marbled polecats.

"It's absolute total chaos," Valerie said.

At times, they've had a beaver in their bathtub and a playpen full of joeys in their living room.

Before he got his own swimming pool and den outside, Snork the otter lived inside the house, where he would splash in the water at the bottom of the dishwasher and sleep under the covers next to Zach and a basset hound named McLovin.

The undisputed star of the show is Caico (pronounced kay'ko), an 18-month-old Capuchin monkey.

Caico is everywhere and into everything. With a hail of birdlike chirps, she leaps onto visitors' shoulders and, if they're not careful, rifles through their pockets.

When she is in the house, where she sleeps nestled between Jay and Valerie, the monkey wears a diaper with a hole cut in it for her tail.

"She gets a bottle before bed to wind down, but she gets to do monkey things as well," Valerie said. "She's a pet, but she's also part of the household."

And like a human toddler, Caico can't be left unattended. Two weeks ago, Jay caught her running through the house with a kitchen knife.

"She opened up the dishwasher to get it. Scared me to death," he said.

"She got a monkey timeout for that," Valerie added.

Bringing Caico home was the realization of a childhood dream for Valerie. As a girl, she carried around a stuffed monkey instead of a blanket or a teddy bear.

Her family's house in Metairie, La., was a short walk from a veterinary office. At 13, Valerie started volunteering there as much as she could. The only time she didn't go was when she was grounded.

"That was my punishment. I wasn't allowed to go work at the clinic," she said.

Jay grew up on a 75-acre cattle farm in Louisiana, near the Arkansas border.

He doesn't remember the first time he was called on to help out with the animals, but he knows he was young. "I probably had a diaper on," he said. "Just like my kids, I didn't know any different."

Jay and Valerie met in the pre-vet club at Louisiana Tech and dated all through veterinary school at Louisiana State University.

They graduated, got married and moved to Las Vegas in 1990. Seven years later, they had their own veterinary practice called Animal Kindness.

Valerie got her first kangaroo, a Bennett's wallaby named Pogo, as a birthday present from Jay in 2002.

"In almost the blink of an eye we had twelve joeys in the house. Our walk-in closet turned into a nursery," Valerie said.

The Holts' startup zoo got a financial boost last month, when some of the animals were "hired" to appear in the CBS update of "Let's Make a Deal," filming in Las Vegas.

"I was really hesitant to do it," Valerie said of the show. "This is not what I got the animals for. I don't want to exploit them."

In the end, the animals didn't seem to mind, and the money was too good to pass up.

"It will enable us to keep the zoo going," she said.

Roos-N-More is now accredited with the Zoological Association of America and licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the exhibition and captive breeding of exotic animals.

Valerie said they continue to butt heads with state wildlife officials, but most of their county permitting issues have been resolved, thanks to some guidance from Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins.

Collins was happy to help after he toured the place.

"They've got a lot of unique animals," he said. "I'd seen a camel before, but they got some funny porcupines and a one-legged kangaroo."

That would be Boomerang, a red kangaroo who broke his leg shortly after he emerged from the pouch. The standard response to an injury like that is euthanasia, but the Holts decided to amputate the leg and see what happened.

Boomerang hardly missed a hop.

Since then, Roos-N-More has become a nonprofit and hired its first employee. LynnLee Schmidt is a graduate of the teaching zoo at Moorpark College in California and once worked full time for the lion exhibit at the MGM Grand. Now she puts in four 10-hour days a week at the Holts' house, where she does everything from bottle-feeding the baby animals to pouring concrete to keep the porcupines from tunneling out.

She also is called on to be "the enforcer," someone to talk Valerie down when she discovers a new animal she just has to have.

But in Schmidt's first six months on the job, the zoo has added about 30 new critters.

"So I've failed at that," Schmidt acknowledged.

At the moment, Valerie has her eye on a bearcat and some squirrel monkeys. She also wants aardvarks and maybe a giraffe someday.

"I'd have to get another job or discover a rich relative I don't know about," she said. "My weakness is I love feeding baby things."

There are limits. Roos-N-More harbors no large carnivores, unless you count their enormous but affable Great Dane Sully. They never bring home an animal they can't care for, and they won't take in anything mean or "that's going to eat you," Jay said.

The rare critter that simply can't get along with the others is allowed to stay only until a new home can be found for it.

This is not like the San Diego Zoo, where enclosures separate people from animals that will either "kill you or run away from you," Jay said.

"Here you can walk up to them and pick them up. That's the persona we want to keep."

A few of their animals were donated, but they bought most of them from licensed breeders around the country.

Jay has a pilot's license and an airplane that seats six, so some of the zoo's animals have arrived by air.

Goats, lemurs and coatimundi have all seen the inside of Jay's Cessna. He once flew from South Dakota to Nevada with two adult porcupines on board.

But his largest passenger to date was the camel that prompted their move to Moapa. Jay flew back from southern Washington with Jafar sitting in the stripped-out cabin behind him.

"I was thinking about it, and it was either a 21-hour horse-trailer ride or a three-hour flight," he said.

Roos-N-More will probably never resemble other zoos. The Holts have no plans to open their gates on a daily basis. So long as they can still pay the bills, they are content to host private tours and scheduled events while limiting general admission to no more than two or three zoo days a month.

Beyond that, Valerie admits she hasn't really settled on a long-range plan for Roos-N-More. She just wants to share her unusual pets with the world and maybe help convince some people that such creatures and their habitats are worth preserving.

She also hopes to deliver another important public service message: Owning exotic pets is expensive and all-consuming.

"You're going to get kicked, bitten and scratched. You're going to get knocked down and pooped on," she said. "If I don't have three flavors of poop on me by noon, I obviously haven't been doing my job."

Right now, Valerie has a row of black stitches on the inside of her right arm, just below the elbow, where one of the kangaroos raked her with its claws.

Her worst injury came last year, when she was in the pasture running around with the zebra and the camel. She fell and the camel accidentally stepped on her.

Her crushed collarbone had to be pieced back together with metal plates and screws, but with so much work to do Valerie couldn't afford to let it slow her down.

"I figured out how to get a 50-pound feed bag on the other shoulder," she said.

But as hectic and occasionally painful as life at the zoo can be, it's a dream come true for Valerie.

"Caico and the zoo. This is my happily ever after."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.