Before Dardenelle Long ran a $5 million zoo with more than 500 animals, she was a 9-year-old with a pony and a plan – she was going to become a veterinarian.
It sounds like a story lifted from the pages of “A Horse of Her Own,” but it wasn’t fiction; it was the story of a real life Chattanooga girl who’s loved animals for as long as she can remember – and she can remember as far back as a dog named Midnight, who inhabits her earliest flashes of memory.
By the time Long’s pony came along, a deep and abiding love of animals had already taken root in her, and she could imagine no better life than one spent ensuring they lived full and healthy lives.
Long never became a veterinarian – life had other plans. But nearly 40 years into leading the Chattanooga Zoo, she can see it clearly: she spent her life doing exactly what she was meant to do.
Getting started
Long’s start came at Byles and Martin Animal Hospital, which was located not far from the zoo. She landed the job after returning home from Auburn University, where her plans for vet school were derailed when her father fell ill. She took the clinic job thinking it might be temporary, but quickly found purpose in the hands-on work.
“I was in heaven,” she says. “It was one of the top clinics in town. The vet I worked with is still a dear friend. He taught me so much.”
Though Long wasn’t a certified technician, she did just about everything.
“I wasn’t great at drawing blood,” she admits, “but I assisted in major surgeries. I learned a lot just by doing.”
That experience caught the attention of the zoo’s veterinarian, who often brought animals to the clinic. One day, he casually dropped a suggestion that would change Long’s life.
“He said, ‘You should apply to be the zookeeper.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know anything about lions, tigers or bears.’ He laughed and said, ‘The people there don’t know much about anything either. Whatever knowledge you bring would help.’”
Long applied, convinced she wouldn’t get the job. But she did. And in 1985, at 28 years old, she left the clinic for what she assumed would be a brief stint at a small and little known zoo on the edge of Warner Park.
Building a zoo from scratch
When Long first walked through the gates of the Chattanooga Zoo in 1985, the place looked less like a zoological park and more like a forgotten outpost.
“It was rough,” she says. “Kind of like walking through a penitentiary – just concrete and mesh.”
There wasn’t much to speak of: 1.5 acres; a horseshoe-shaped path with a handful of animals in stark cages; a jaguar here, a chimpanzee there, a few small monkeys and a lone hyena. There were no themed exhibits, no lush habitats and certainly no crowds. The animals were fed and clean – but the environment was sterile and bare.
Still, something about the animals touched her.
“They seemed OK,” she recalls. “And they kind of captured my heart.”
Long’s official title was “zookeeper” – but she was one of only two employees. They split the work between them, covering each others days off and doing every job – feeding, cleaning, basic medical care, enrichment (what little of it there was) and even maintenance.
“We took care of everything,” she remembers. “The zoo was small enough that we could do it. But it wasn’t what the animals deserved. We were doing the bare minimum.”
In time, the Friends of the Zoo – a local nonprofit that supports the Chattanooga Zoo – began sending volunteers. Some of them stuck around, doing jobs no one would allow a volunteer to do today.
“We needed more hands to do right by the animals,” Long explains. “So we made it work.”
There was no title change, but bit by bit, Long was becoming the one everyone looked to – the de facto leader of a place that was still figuring out what it could be.
Transformation
Progress didn’t arrive in sweeping changes but in small steps – and sometimes, leaps – forward.
One of the first major breakthroughs came in 1992 when Long helped secure an outdoor habitat for the chimpanzee, named Hank. He’d lived for years on a slab of concrete in what was essentially a jail cell – and this didn’t sit right with her.
“He was intelligent,” she says. “Primates are very aware. And he didn’t have anything.”
With some crafty negotiating, Long managed to carve out just enough land to build something better. The local ironworkers union then volunteered to construct the new enclosure, and Long and her team were able to give Hank something he’d never had before: space, grass and open sky.
When the doors opened for the first time, Hank hesitated. Then he saw his former owner – there to witness the release – and lit up.
“He ran straight through the door,” Long remembers. “He was so excited. That was a great day.”
Small wins like that laid the groundwork for bigger ones. The zoo got its first proper exhibit in 1996: a jaguar enclosure with rock structures, platforms and space to move. It wasn’t extravagant, but it was a leap forward from the cramped cages that defined the place when Long started.
After the jaguar exhibit opened, the zoo started charging admission, which meant it needed a proper place to collect money – so it built a log cabin-style entrance to serve as a gateway.
This new assembly housed a gift shop where Long’s mother volunteered, running the register to save on staffing costs. Later, she ran birthday parties – another new source of income the zoo was just starting to explore.
That same year, the zoo hit a milestone that put it on the map: accreditation from what is now the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). Long had heard about it from a colleague at the Knoxville Zoo. She didn’t know what it involved, only that it would help the Chattanooga Zoo shed its roadside attraction feel and become a serious institution.
Getting accredited required an overhaul – not just in how the zoo looked but also in how it operated. Animal welfare, staff training, financial transparency, guest experience – it all had to improve.
And it did.
“We became a real zoo,” Long says. “We had to meet real standards – and that pushed us to be better across the board.”
During those years, Long also became the unofficial face of the zoo – literally. After her hiring, the city’s public relations team sent out a press release that caught local media’s attention. Channel 3 invited her to appear every Friday during the summer to showcase animals on-air.
“We didn’t have many animals you could actually take anywhere,” she says. “You can’t take a chimpanzee or a jaguar out and about.”
So, she improvised. One of her first hires had a car that was just big enough to carry a few safe-to-travel animals.
“We took a peacock in the backseat once. A goat another time,” she says. “After one TV appearance, we stopped at Krystal on the way back – and no one even noticed the goat in the car.”
The biggest leap came in 2010, when Friends of the Zoo took over management. Before that, Long had slowly accumulated part-time staff and volunteers, cobbling together an informal team. Once Friends took control, they formalized the operation. Full-time employees received benefits. And Long became CEO and president.
Becoming a leader
Long didn’t climb a career ladder in the traditional sense. She wasn’t promoted through a chain of titles or brought in as a director with a master plan. She simply became the person who did the work – and kept doing it until no one could imagine the zoo without her.
“There was never a big promotion,” she says. “I just got staff. And then more staff. And then it was like, ‘Well, I guess I’m in charge.’”
Behind the scenes, she was learning how to run a business.
“A big part of what changed the zoo was understanding budgets,” Long says. “I was raised by some pretty smart businessmen who looked critically at what we were doing and gave me that fiduciary understanding.”
Long kept one foot in the barn and the other in the boardroom, mixing giraffe diets one minute and balancing spreadsheets the next. She understood that a zoo was both a sanctuary and a system – that she couldn’t improve the first without mastering the second.
And through it all, she never lost sight of the mission.
“I’m really hard to live with,” she admits with a smile. “My animals come first. I am who I am.”
That dedication isn’t performative. Long is known for dropping everything when an animal needs her. She tried going back to school in the ’90s to finish her path to veterinary medicine, only to realize the zoo needed her more.
“I was in organic chemistry – a nightmare – and my beeper went off. A deer we’d done surgery on was hypothermic. I left class and went straight to the zoo. That was the moment I knew – I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
Working at a zoo, Long continues, isn’t for the faint of heart.
“It’s fun when the weather’s perfect, but it’s not always perfect. Sometimes it’s freezing. Sometimes it’s a hundred degrees. You have to love it to do it.”
Emotional investment and loss
Running a zoo means making hard choices and living with hard losses. In nearly 40 years, Long has seen hundreds of animals come and go, some briefly. Others left a mark that never faded.
One in particular: Hank the chimp.
He was already there when Long started in 1985, pacing alone in a concrete cage. He’d once been a clown’s sidekick, living with a performer before being dropped off at the zoo. He didn’t have enrichment, stimulation or company. But what he did have was personality.
“He was very affectionate,” Long says. “He was my buddy.”
Hank got his outdoor enclosure in 1992 and lived out his days with more dignity and freedom. But when he died in 2011 at age 41, it hit Long hard.
Another loss: Spider-Man – a spider monkey. He was the last living animal from her first day on the job – and one of the first animals to have a friend join him when the zoo built the Spider Monkey Tunnel.
“Spider-Man died in his late forties, which is a good age for a monkey. But that was tough. He was part of my history here.”
Now there’s Scott – a current favorite, known for recognizing Long even if weeks go by between visits. Sometimes he runs to her. Sometimes he plays a game, jogging along the edge of his enclosure, waiting for her to follow on the other side.
“I don’t want to be anthropomorphic and say, ‘Scott loves me,’” Long says of the 38-year-old chimpanzee. “But he definitely enjoys seeing me.”
These connections to the animals keep her grounded.
“Some of the best memories I have aren’t about people. They’re about what it feels like to watch an animal walk into a new exhibit for the first time,” she says. “You know their life is better.”
The zoo today
Today, the Chattanooga Zoo spans 16 acres, houses 500-plus animals from 150 species and draws more than 300,000 guests each year. The budget has grown from $85,000 when Long started to more than $5 million annually. The full-time staff now numbers around 60, swelling to more than 100 during peak season.
But for Long, size isn’t the measure of success. What matters is how the animals live – and how the public connects to them.
The zoo now features a range of ecosystem-based exhibits, including deserts, forests, savannahs, snow-capped mountains, rainforests and other habitats from around the globe. There’s a giraffe barn with heated stalls designed to keep the animals healthy and visible even in cold weather. There’s a spider monkey tunnel, a jaguar habitat and a North American wildlife area. Long knows the details of each one – and often the personalities of the animals inside.
It’s a long way from bare concrete pens and two staff members doing everything by hand. But Long isn’t looking back. She’s already thinking ahead.
“We’re working on a new master plan,” she says. “The last one we did was in 2013. It’s time.”
There’s still more to build, more habitats to improve and more guests to educate. But even now, with everything the zoo has become, Long isn’t above giving a tour herself. She still schedules them. Still tells the stories. Still points out her favorites.
And if you ask her what the zoo means to her, she won’t hesitate.
“It’s my heart and soul,” she says. “It’s what I live for. It’s what I am.”