No pics and don't remember the name, but several times I have seen a traveling zoo at various Michigan fairs that was rather abhorrent. 3 full size alligators in a tiny concrete cell that wouldn't even hold one, a reticulated python that is unable to ever stretch out, maybe 5 ring tailed lemurs in a cramped cage with nothing but a single branch, overworked pony ride ponies with severely overgrown hooves, the list goes on. Can't decide what the worst part is: a bad childhood memory of their aviary where because I didn't buy food all the budgies, sun conures, and an Amazon attacked me until I fainted of stress and heat exhaustion, (they wouldn't give my mom a refund) the fact that I remember them having elephant rides, (its been a while since I've seen them though so I hope those elephants were siezed and are somewhere with actual mental stimulation) the fact that people always flock to these parts of the fair, (more so than the livestock shows, which are the only reason I ever come in contact with this "enterprise" in the first place) or the fact that they always post big signs claiming that they are legal within the USDA, making it even more sad cause now you know nothing you say will work.
As for permanent zoos, can't decide whether Indian Creek Zoo or Timber Creek Petting Farm were worse. The latter made me outright have a talk with my mom about looking for accreditation and not trusting a website that says it's a "sanctuary" (as opposed to some ladies backyard you have to pay 15 bucks to enter where there is no signage hence many other peoples confusion over what animals like the maras were, wet paint in the exhibits that turned a pig blue, a 10x10 foot kangaroo exhibit, and a lone nilgai getting gangraped by a swarm of intact pygmy goat bucks which the lady didn't give a darn about).
With this thread getting resurrected, I want to update this by stating that the past few times I've encountered the traveling zoo at fairs, it has been MUCH better. They still do the pony rides, which I don't know how to feel about, but the ponies have much better hooves. Every "exotic" animal, even the pet ones like the budgies and smaller reptiles, now appear to be gone. Instead, it's firmly farm animal focused now, and to my knowledge everyone - goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, alpacas, a mini pig, a Dexter steer, and a miniature zebu - looks healthy, a contrast to how that same pasture setup would look before. Indeed, the past few times I actually have been actively checking it out to say hi to the cute and friendly animals. I wonder if it got new owners that went through the effort to greatly clean things up compared to before.
Indeed, the realization of just plain how much better the traveling zoo is now that it is purely domestic has got me thinking. So many roadside zoos would be so much better if they were just farm animal petting zoos instead. Care of farm animals is so much more readily available than care of wild exotics like tigers and alligators. These roadside zoos seem to be cases of petting farms that, perhaps feeling threatened by the AZA zoos having the "cooler" animals, end up feeling like they have to bite off far more than they can chew. In reality, with only farm animals, they'll do just fine! I have not seen a drop in the big crowds around the traveling zoo at fairs at all, permanent publicly-visitable farms I've visited like Wolcott Mill Metropark and The Critter Barn generally have a good amount of people around them when I'm there, and heck, even at large AZA zoos with major ABC species, people STILL go to the farm sections to see the animals - if I remember correctly from being there, the Barnyard at the Toledo Zoo was so popular in its opening week that it was an outright chaotic area. Seriously, people. Think straight before you become an animal abuser. I'm sure many of you are farmers already.
Indeed, the way I've always thought of doing things if I ever started a facility is to start with just small to medium domestics (chickens, ducks, geese, goats, sheep, maybe mini pigs, maybe rabbits, maybe some herding or livestock guardian dogs or some barn cats - absolutely no cattle, horses, or full size farm hogs, at least to start with) and reasonable exotics (wild ducks, especially great lakes native ones for nature education like wood ducks, canvasbacks, and mergansers, pheasants, quail, chukar, maybe some small herptiles and inverts both native and exotic like ball pythons, corn snakes, milk snakes, Kenyan sand boas, painted turtles, red footed tortoises, leopard geckos, bearded dragons, uromastyx, White's tree frogs, poison dart frogs, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, blue death feigning beetles, and whip scorpions, and maybe a community freshwater tank). I would let that settle for a good long while before I made sure that I had absolutely ALL I needed to go more exotic, ideas popping in my brain just now are rescue foxes and birds of prey and muntjacs, maras, kangaroos, wallabies, and nilgai (out of Timber Creek vengeance for the last one, man I loved that poor sweetheart, check my old reply on Neil Chace's old Animal Adventures post for more info) that I'd rescue from other roadsides if possible. There'd be lines I'd never cross, like primates and large carnivores. Heck, I don't even know if I would do raccoons. There would be plenty of space for restored habitat that people could hike on their visit in addition to seeing the animals.
"Hey Prawn, why did you go off on a tangent about your dream job?"
Because I want to make it undeniably clear that you can, in fact, make an interesting, fun, educational, humane non-AZA facility without shoving a tiger in a tiny cage.
Long Island seems to have an abundant amount of lousy animal-related places, with nothing truly decent coming along.
