Things To Do – Octagon Wildlife Sanctuary

My wife and I went here with friends back in January and I forgot all about doing a post, so here it is! Lions, tigers and bears. Oh my! Plus, hyenas, monkeys, turtles, birds, cougars, canines and more. Everybody is behind chain link fences (which is a good thing), but it kind of makes it hard to get a good picture as you will see in my pics that follow. They have nice fence free pictures on their website which you can go to by clicking here.

I guess, if I remember correctly from the tour guide, this all started when the TV show Gentle Ben shut down and they left behind some bears with no plans to take care of them. So the sanctuary was started. Most of the animals at the sanctuary have similar stories where they were used in entertainment venues like circuses and then weren’t wanted anymore. So they ended up here, which is a lot better than the alternative.

I’ve never seen a white tiger before, so that was interesting. There were other tigers too. Lions that were roaring. Hyenas scare the bejesus out of me. At feeding time they were giving them whole chickens and the crunch of the bones was heard all over! The peacock and parrots were beautiful. The three different bears were interesting. The guide got them up and about by giving them marshmallows! That reminded me of back in the 60s when we went to the zoo, people would throw marshmallows at the bears who sat up begging for them. Kind of a sad memory. Those kind of zoos are mostly in the past with more open space and natural habitats for the animals to use. They don’t have much space here, but everybody seems dedicated to the animals and their mission to help them.