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A roadside zoo and traveling menagerie called Barn Hill Preserve boasts a grandiose name, but it’s no preserve for the wild animals it forces into stressful public encounters. In Ethel, Louisiana, and Frankford, Delaware, crowds attend Barn Hill Preserve’s gimmicky events based on animal exploitation, such as a yoga class inside a kangaroo pen and a wine-tasting event in which attendees can take selfies with sloths. Public interactions like these subject the animals to the stress of irregular sleep, loud noises, and mishandling by strangers.
This is pathetic. Don’t visit parks like Barn Hill Preserve that profit off of confining & exposing animals to dangerous and unnatural encounters!
Wild animals normally evade human contact, so the trauma of continual public interaction often leads to dangerous incidents. Despite knowing that it’s natural for otters to respond to perceived threats with aggression, Barn Hill Preserve hosts “swim with otters” encounters, and multiple guests have been bitten as a result. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has cited it for numerous violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act, including an incident in which a worker dropped a tub on an 8-month-old otter, causing fatal injuries to the animal.
USDA inspectors found otters at Barn Hill Preserve in Louisiana kept in ramshackle cages with broken wires and tarps, which the animals were seen chewing on, risking their health and well-being.
Barn Hill Preserve exploits animals in these lucrative public encounters and then purportedly sends some of its profits to wildlife rescue and rehabilitation organizations around the world. Don’t be fooled! No amount of support of legitimate efforts can justify forcing sensitive wild animals into stressful public interactions with strangers. This is exploitation, period—not conservation, education, or rehabilitation.
Treating wild animals as props for entertainment is an example of speciesism—the human-supremacist worldview that disregards other animals’ complex needs, desires, and feelings. Please ask Barn Hill Preserve to recognize that animals deserve better than to be used as selfie spectacles, end all animal encounters, and send the animals to reputable facilities where they could get the expert care they desperately need. You may edit the template letter below to share in your own words why you won’t support this cruelty.