The Dallas World Aquarium has suffered such accidents, as well. When one of Richardson’s first jaguars grew fatally ill, he returned it to its owner in California, who says he discovered blocking its intestine the enormous bill of a toucan the cat had apparently devoured. Richardson told me he always believed the cat had died of an infection. A few years later, a second jaguar died under anesthesia; some employees attributed the cat’s weak heart to the stressful conditions of her small and grassless exhibit. Richardson said his veterinarian chose to sedate the cat: “That was her decision.” In 2011, yet another jaguar mauled an ocelot, costing the smaller cat his leg. “Keepers will make errors,” Richardson said.

Additionally, some former Dallas World Aquarium employees were distressed by Richardson’s fondness for large animal shipments. “Daryl would import massive amounts of birds and set them loose in the open aviaries,” said a former employee. “They would slowly disappear, and then he’d get them all again.” Since 2001, for instance, the Dallas World Aquarium has imported at least 175 euphonias, but it currently lists only 60 of the birds in the main database zoos use to track their animals. The same goes for tanagers, a family of small, fluorescent birds: Richardson has brought in more than 430 since 2001, but the database lists fewer than a third that many. These birds were small and inexpensive, but such gaps exist with larger and pricier birds, as well. Richardson imported eight shoebill storks from Tanzania since 2007 at a total cost of $90,000. Only two are listed there today.

Richardson said three storks died in government quarantine, before they ever arrived at the Dallas World Aquarium; another two, he admits, died from infection in Dallas after a water pump failed in their enclosure. “Our [remaining] pair is here and doing well,” he said. And Richardson said he needed so many small birds to create an immersive experience in his open aviaries. “If we brought in 1,000 tanagers, you would probably only see 50 or 60 at a given time,” he explained. “You cannot go to another facility in the United States and see an aviary with as many tanagers as I have.”

At times, Richardson’s attitude was callous, say former Dallas World Aquarium employees (most of whom requested anonymity out of fear of harming their professional futures). “Everything is replaceable,” is how one former zookeeper summarized Richardson’s collecting ethos. Another former employee was harsher: “Everything Daryl has learned he’s taught himself, but at the expense of the dead animals that haunt that place.”

Because Richardson prized species not kept in other zoos, he would sometimes bring in animals whose husbandry had not been studied. When he first imported three-toed sloths in 1998, he and his staff had almost no idea how to care for them. “The only information we knew was from old textbooks and some observations in the wild,” Raines said. “We were just making it up as we went along.” By the end of 2003, Richardson had attempted to incorporate at least twelve three-toed sloths into his collection, and eleven had died. In the wild these animals can live up to 40 years.

Richardson, never one to give up easily, did not acquire any new sloths until 2005, when he met Judy Arroyo, the founder of the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica, where Animal Planet filmed the series “Meet the Sloths.” Richardson agreed to help fund the Sloth Sanctuary’s operations—“Anything that I need, anything that the Sanctuary needs for the sloths, Daryl is right there,” Arroyo told me—and in return received a trio of brown-throated sloths. At the same time, he found a domestic source of cecropia leaves, the sloths’ favorite food, at a nursery in Hawaii, and ordered twice-weekly shipments. These sloths have fared better, relatively speaking: Richardson has brought in six, and three continue to live at his zoo today. (He declined to comment on the status of the other three.)

In 2009, the AZA advised its members to “phase out” three-toed sloths, like the brown-throated sloth, from their collections—a recommendation that would have only applied to the Dallas World Aquarium, since it was the only zoo to keep them. But Richardson was already thinking about his next marquee acquisition—the rarest three-toed sloths of all. “From the day I started work there, he talked about pygmy sloths,” said a former Dallas World Aquarium insider. “He was always going to get pygmy sloths.”

Richardson first discussed a captive population of pygmy sloths with the Panamanian government as early as 2007. On September 9, 2013, he watched his team arrive at the Bocas del Toro airport with his new sloths in crates. But as they were preparing to load the animals onto the jet, his years of preparation hit a snag: The strange cargo caught the eye of a local policeman. The officer alerted his supervisor, who, in turn, called Bocas del Toro’s mayor and several other authorities. A local conservationist named Angel Gonzalez was among the first people on the scene. He confronted Richardson and his team.

Richardson had planned for hiccups. He dug out a sheaf of paper: six permits for the export of pygmy sloths from Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente (ANAM), Panama’s main environmental agency. Richardson’s partners told Gonzalez that they intended to save the pygmy sloth from extinction by establishing a contingency population at his zoo in Dallas. Richardson was already funding pygmy-sloth conservation by supporting the local projects of Julia and Jason Heckathorn, American missionaries who had also written a children’s book about Escudo’s animals.

Concentrated captive breeding has rescued a few endangered species, but there are protocols to follow. Zoo professionals recommend that such programs begin before a wild population falls below 1,000 animals, and that zoos capture at least 25 animals to maximize the captive gene pool. These rules can be bent in extreme circumstances; the crucial imperative is to loop in the rest of the conservation community so that all expertise and resources are marshalled for the rescue mission.

Apparently no one in Bocas had heard anything about the Dallas World Aquarium’s plan. Nor was Gonzalez impressed by the export documents: Many Panamanian conservationists distrust ANAM, suspecting it of corruption. The longer they argued, the more nervous Richardson grew. A crowd was gathering outside the airport fence.

While mob action had created the first zoo in Paris during the French Revolution, the group in Bocas, two centuries later, saw zoos as symbols not of enfranchisement, but exploitation. “The capturing of the animals,” wrote the art critic John Berger, “was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands.” When the industry began to refashion itself in the ’70s, it was responding not just to environmental pressure, but political pressure too, as empires vanished and former colonies demanded control over their natural resources.

Gonzalez and the residents of Bocas del Toro saw a group of foreigners—clearly wealthy, based on their charter jet—drop into Panama and attempt to extract one of the region’s most unique animals. The crowd overran the airport fence and stormed the runway, blocking Richardson’s workers from loading the sloths onto the jet.

He and his team piled into a van and sped toward their hotel, hoping to wait out the uproar before trying to take off again. The crowd gave chase, chanting in Spanish about rich gringos. Protesters threw rocks, swung chains, and tried to flip the van. Throughout the riot, Richardson was on his phone, trying to come up with a solution. He never found one. A local conservation group volunteered to return the animals to Escudo, and Richardson reluctantly agreed. He flew home on an empty plane.

On September 20, 2013 Mongabay, an environmental news site, published an article about the Bocas confrontation. None of the zoos or conservation groups active in the area believed a contingency population was appropriate. The Dallas World Aquarium claimed to have circulated a pygmy-sloth rescue plan, but only the Zoological Society of London recalled receiving a copy. It had replied promptly, according to Mongabay: “The current draft raises a number of questions and concerns.”

The Dallas World Aquarium’s import permit listed the pygmy sloths for “educational display.” But Richardson told me he never intended to exhibit the animals. “I wasn’t planning on the pygmy sloth driving my gate. I don’t need more people through,” he said. Richardson originally told the Morning News that his primary intention was to study the animals’ reproductive and dietary habits. In our conversation, he stressed a different motivation. He said he had wanted to carry out DNA tests to help the Pana-manian government figure out whether the pygmy sloths might just be slightly smaller brown-throated sloths, rather than a unique species. But such tests require only hair or saliva samples, which can be taken in the wild. At the University of Porto in Portugal, Nadia de Moraes-Barros has been analyzing the DNA of 20 or so pygmy sloths, none of which was ever removed from Escudo. “There is no need to keep the animals in captivity,” she said.

In stressing his scientific intentions, Richardson was appealing to another common belief about “good” zoos—that they add to the body of scientific knowledge. The AZA’s accreditation guidelines hold that member zoos “should maximize the generation of scientific knowledge gained from the animals.” Not only did science underpin zoos’ collective breeding, but many zoo-goers would be more comfortable knowing that captive animals were more than just spectacles, that they served a higher scientific purpose.

Zoo biology is built on recordkeeping. “Without keeping records you really don’t learn anything about the animals you’re taking care of,” Judith Block, the first registrar at the National Zoo, told Irus Braverman in Zooland: The Institution of Captivity. Block called the registrar, who maintains a zoo’s records, “the conscience of the zoo,” and the Dallas World Aquarium did not hire one until 2012. That person left the job within a year. (The former registrar declined to comment; Richardson said he could not comment due to a non-disparagement agreement.)

Richardson required his keepers to submit daily reports recording their activities, but former employees say they didn’t serve any clear scientific purpose. “It felt like it was more about justifying your time,” said a former keeper. Lacking good records, the Dallas World Aquarium turned out little significant research. “My title was scientific adviser,” said Juan Cornejo, who worked at the Dallas World Aquarium as he finished his Ph.D. in veterinary microbiology at the University of Texas. “And that is the thing: There was not much science involved in what they were doing.”

After the Panama fiasco, environmentalists successfully petitioned the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, the main treaty regulating the world wildlife trade, to belatedly add the pygmy sloth to its list. The newly protected population is smaller than it might have been. Conservationists around Escudo say two of the pygmy sloths removed by the Dallas World Aquarium died shortly after their release.

In 1998, the Morning News asked Richardson to pick one thing he’d like to change about himself. His answer was, “to be able to enjoy relaxing.” When we met at his zoo in August, he sounded ready to give it a try. He said he is looking forward to spending more time on David Copperfield’s island. He said the Panamanian government had asked him to come back for more pygmy sloths, but the species would need to find a new savior: He had already torn down the special space where he had been cultivating red mangroves for the animals. He suggested it was no great loss. Pygmy sloths, he said, “are bigger than my sloths! So this ‘pygmy,’ pygmasius, is all a misnomer. My animals are as cute or cuter than the ones there. Actually, they’re probably cuter as far as the public is concerned.”

Some zoo officials I spoke with were embarrassed by Richardson’s misadventure, but it does not seem to have caused much damage to his professional standing. In an image-sensitive industry, a rogue who collects and breeds exotic species—animals that can then be traded with more cautious zoos, at scant risk to their own budgets and reputations—plays a useful role. Last year, the AZA said it was looking into the pygmy-sloth controversy, but it never released any findings. It also renewed the Dallas World Aquarium’s accreditation last March, finding that Richardson’s zoo upheld the “practices and philosophies that are commonly accepted as the norm by the profession.”

“My story is really not that different than any other zoos that have their failures and their successes,” Richardson told me. “It’s just I happen to be the independent owner of this facility and I’ve been here for the duration, from day one to day now.”

As Richardson walked me out of the Dallas World Aquarium, he indicated the adjacent site where a new museum of South Asian art will soon crop up. A few blocks away stands the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, which Richardson can see from his office. “When I was going to live here, there was nothing downtown,” he said. It would have been just him and his animals. He doesn’t get to spend as much time alone with them as he used to, but the occasion does arise. “I was up here last night at 11 o’clock because I was worried about an animal,” he said. “You wake back up, and you drive to work.”

A few months ago, Richardson bought a nightclub next door to the Dallas World Aquarium. He told me he’s going to turn the space into a parking lot; his zoo, his masterpiece, is basically complete. Others, though, have heard that Richardson is already planning the next expansion. “New Guinea is what he plans to do,” a former employee said. “He’s already got some birds of paradise.”

