Cat Tales Zoological Park Cat Tales Zoological Park

[Ituri]

Cat Tales Zoological Park is located north of Spokane, Washington.

Cat Tales Home Page

The History

Cat Tales Zoological Park was founded in early 1991 by, cofounders, Mike & Debbie Wyche. We were registered with the Secretary of the State of Washington as a non profit charity and Incorporated on July 27, 1991. We have been licensed by the USDA as a "Class C - Exhibitor", the classification given to all major zoos, since August 2, 1991. We were classified as a 501(c)3 with the IRS on December 10, 1991, and granted permanent status in 1996.
The first summer there were four cats and the tours started and ended in the house. Our gift shop was half of the living room with photos on the walls. Our visitors parked in what was the front yard and came through the front door to sign in. The tours started out the front door, included the four cats, and came in the back door where the guest surveys were on the kitchen counter.
We started incorporating a volunteer staff, some of whom are still very much involved. With the help of our previous Senior Staff and Felidae experience, we began training in the basic day to day care of big cats and how to give good informative tours to our visitors.
As word of our facility traveled throughout the U.S., we began to rescue more and more cats (and other non feline animals) from the private sector. Some of them came to be part of the Park's family, some were placed in other centers.
We ended the summer of 1992 with two tigers, five pumas, a serval, two bobcats and two lynx. By Spring 1993 we had three leopards, a clouded leopard, three tigers, four pumas, a serval, two lions, two bobcats, two lynx, two kinkajous, an agouti, and three prairie dogs. (We soon placed the non felines in other homes.)
Our attendance slowly increased and so did our staff. During the 1998-99 school year the Park's Outreach Programs and On site Tours hosted thousands of students K-Adult. The staff averages 20+ members who are either students, instructors, or volunteers.
Currently, as of Spring 2005, we feed an average of 14,000 pounds of food per month to 42 Big Cats, 2 Bears, 3 Parrots, 2 Snakes, 2 Lizards, 1 Raptor, 2 Hamsters, 3 Goats, 1 Rabbit, 2 Ferrets, 4 Dogs, 2 Geese, 5 Ducks, 10 Chickens, and 6 Domestic Cats, plus miscellaneous creatures which occasionally call the Zoo their home. .
Some of these animals are not on exhibit to the general public but provide additional experience for the students enrolled in the zoo school. Most of the non-felid animals arrived as "orphans" and were taken in as part of the zoo's rescue program.
Cat Tales also is the home of the Zoological Training Center which is the only school of this type in North America. Students from all over the world come here to the Park to learn the profession of Zookeeping.
We currently have Zoos waiting to hire future graduates from our program.

 

[Ituri]

I visited Cat Tales today. It is a very small, privately owned facility. The collection consists almost entirely of big cats, with a couple of American black bears. The enclosures were up to USDA standards and the animals appeared well cared for. The facility was very clean, and the animals appear to have a lot of interaction with their human caretakers (through the fence of course). The collection was made up mostly of tigers with animals of Amur and Bengal descent and a couple of white tigers. There were also a few lions, a handful of leopards including a melanistic individual and one that was alleged to be a North Chinese leopard. Other cats present were pumas, bobcats and servals.

 

[Arizona Docent]

Finally someone from ZooChat has visited Cat Tales. I have known of them for several years, but never made it up there.

 

[aquaticpencil]

Cat Tales held their first fundraising gala in 20 years this weekend with the hopes of being able to fund facility improvements towards ZAA accreditation. The event concluded with a presentation of a conceptual relocation master plan done by a landscape architecture student:

Full project

Will be interesting to see if they can get enough local support to actually make the move happen.

 

[snowleopard]

Cat Tales held their first fundraising gala in 20 years this weekend with the hopes of being able to fund facility improvements towards ZAA accreditation. The event concluded with a presentation of a conceptual relocation master plan done by a landscape architecture student:

Full project

Will be interesting to see if they can get enough local support to actually make the move happen.

Thanks for posting the link. The 49-page project to relocate the entire zoo looks ambitious but attainable as long as a significant amount of funding can be raised. I visited Cat Tales in 2014 and the exhibit quality is incredibly poor, with tiny chain-link cages everywhere. I'm skeptical whether this ambitious plan will ever see the light of day, but it would be amazing for the dedicated staff at the facility if a miracle occurred and the plan came to fruition. As things stand, Cat Tales has enclosures that are smaller and worse than many American roadside zoos and extra funding is basically nonexistent.

 

[pachyderm pro]

Cat Tales held their first fundraising gala in 20 years this weekend with the hopes of being able to fund facility improvements towards ZAA accreditation. The event concluded with a presentation of a conceptual relocation master plan done by a landscape architecture student:

Full project

Will be interesting to see if they can get enough local support to actually make the move happen.

That is a really nice plan and well put-together document. This new facility looks like it could be AZA quality and there are some very inspired species choices as well, although jaguar feels a bit out of place considering the others are cold tolerant North American/Asian species. Fingers crossed they're able to make this happen.