Atlanta Safari Park news and notes

To my surprise there are now six "safari parks" in Georgia. The only one that is working toward AZA is Georgia Safari Conservation Park in Madison which is not yet open but they have 500 acres of beautiful land which I toured a while go and they are really trying to do a genuinely good job.
Then there is Atlanta Safari Park, Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain, North Georgia Safari Park, Wild Georgia Safari Park, Lake Hartwell Safari Park. I've never been to any of these but they all seem to rely on giraffe, zebra, bison, fallow deer, Ankole, llamas etc for their experiences and they seem pretty mediocre. Easy to say from the comfort of my desk of course and I may be unfair......
 
Well, any facility can say they are "working towards AZA", unless they are in one of the AZA programs to work towards that (such as the Pathway Towards Membership program) I feel it is just words that many places claim, including some supremely dodgy zoos. I am not saying the new Georgia Safari is dodgy, just that words are empty without some sort of action (which they may have, I am not familiar with them).

Atlanta Safari is nice, the location near the city is convenient and they offer a pretty standard drive through safari experience. You can read my review about it from this past July here. They don't have fallow deer, unless they have added them since that time. It is a bit strange that they don't have scads of fallow and axis deer about, they are generally really common in these parks.
 
SwampDonkey said:
Well, any facility can say they are "working towards AZA", unless they are in one of the AZA programs to work towards that (such as the Pathway Towards Membership program) I feel it is just words that many places claim, including some supremely dodgy zoos. I am not saying the new Georgia Safari is dodgy, just that words are empty without some sort of action (which they may have, I am not familiar with them).

Atlanta Safari is nice, the location near the city is convenient and they offer a pretty standard drive through safari experience. You can read my review about it from this past July here. They don't have fallow deer, unless they have added them since that time. It is a bit strange that they don't have scads of fallow and axis deer about, they are generally really common in these parks.
Click to expand...

I'll have to go check it out next time I'm down that way.
I can confirm that Georgia Safari Park is taking AZA seriously. This is not a mom-and-pop operation. The Pathway toward Membership is better suited to existing places that need to upgrade for first time accreditation or are trying to get accreditation back (Pittsburgh Zoo, Riverside Discovery center). Georgia Safari Park is still in construction phase and is leaning heavily on AZA expertise from other facilities. They are using known zoo designers. They have the veterinary side covered well, escape policies and procedures being written BEFORE they have most animals, they are going to have Ambassadors but managed in highly professional way. I'm impressed and I suspect they will be ahead of some other AZA institutions when they actually open. Of course there will be a learning curve but we all have those when we open something new. It's a good team inc on the animal side.
 
Torgos said:
I'll have to go check it out next time I'm down that way.
I can confirm that Georgia Safari Park is taking AZA seriously. This is not a mom-and-pop operation. The Pathway toward Membership is better suited to existing places that need to upgrade for first time accreditation or are trying to get accreditation back (Pittsburgh Zoo, Riverside Discovery center). Georgia Safari Park is still in construction phase and is leaning heavily on AZA expertise from other facilities. They are using known zoo designers. They have the veterinary side covered well, escape policies and procedures being written BEFORE they have most animals, they are going to have Ambassadors but managed in highly professional way. I'm impressed and I suspect they will be ahead of some other AZA institutions when they actually open. Of course there will be a learning curve but we all have those when we open something new. It's a good team inc on the animal side.
Click to expand...
That's really good to read, thanks for the information!
 
Just left this place a bit ago and honestly, I was a bit let down. There wasn’t any one fatal flaw, it just didn’t generate any real excitement for me, despite having relatively rare species in banteng and red deer (both of which I saw). I guess the biggest issue was how much of the safari was simultaneously hilly and densely wooded, all but guaranteeing you would never see any animals in those lengthy stretches. All of the animals congregated around a small handful of hub areas, and it felt like llamas accounted for about 50% of the lineup. And naturally having the animals bottleneck like that is going to be an issue with any safari park, but this place felt like it had no contingency plan to a degree I’d never seen before. For comparison, I found Lake Hartwell and Eudora, both somewhat nearby and similarly new safari parks, to be far more enjoyable.

I don’t suppose there’s any real need for me to post the species list I took down, but the tldr is that I saw everything that was advertised or previously mentioned aside from nilgai and silver pheasant.
 
At least the owners seem to care and are working towards accreditation so that'll likely open the door for more opportunities

Imagine if they and the Grant Park Zoo could become sisters
 
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