The founding-mechanism split, run as a test: all three mechanisms empty

ITEMS 2–4 AND 6 · THE SPLIT PRINTED, NO YEAR MERGED

The leg forbids merging a zoo's birth into one founding year, and prints three mechanisms apart — a menagerie or park-origin date, a first-animal date, and a zoo-as-zoo opening date; for Walkerton each of the three was tested separately, and each is empty. (i) Menagerie/park origin: no menagerie, kept-animal display, or animal-keeping park origin stands for any Walkerton ground in the county histories, the town paper's record, or the parks record — Chapman's full text carries no menagerie for the whole county's townships, and Lincoln Township's own chapters carry none. (ii) First animal: no first-animal date exists to print; no deer, bear, buffalo, or other first kept animal is recorded as given, bought, or penned on the town's ground in any source reached — the deer that begin the region's zoo story are South Bend's (below), and they are not imported here. (iii) Zoo-as-zoo opening: no opening date stands because no institution opened. The pre-zoo sanctuary years the checklist asks after — a sanctuary phase, a first inventory, a relief-era animal house — are tested with the same result: no sanctuary years, no inventory, and no WPA or relief-era animal house stands on this ground; the town's relief-era building record is of parks, streets and utilities, and carries no animal house among its works. The three mechanisms print empty because the record is empty, and the split is preserved in print so the emptiness is legible as three tested absences rather than one assumed one.