In February 2023, a team from Keenesburg, Colorado’s Wild Animal Sanctuary landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico to begin what would become the largest rescue of its kind in history. The territory’s only zoo, long-shuttered to the public, was in a desperate state of disrepair along with its animal residents due to devastating hurricanes and corruption. The U.S. Department of Justice had negotiated a seizure of all the animals at the zoo, in addition to a derelict detention center for surrendered exotic pets, and nuisance and injured wild animals. In total, more than 700 animals were in dire need of medical attention and new homes. While this scale of operation might scare off most people, it was just another puzzle to solve for The Wild Animal Sanctuary’s founder, Pat Craig.
After all, this is the guy who helped rescue more than 140 tigers from Joe Exotic’s zoo and tiger breeding program in Oklahoma that you may have seen on Netflix’s hit docuseries, Tiger King. Craig has devoted his whole life to rescuing abused, abandoned or illegally kept wild animals. Today, he runs the largest and oldest animal sanctuary in the country, caring for 900 animals across facilities in Colorado and Texas. When you visit the original Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, the sense of healing you’ll feel is palpable. Across 789 acres of Colorado’s eastern plains, lions lounge in prides, grizzly bears splash in ponds and tigers stalk each other in a playful manner reminiscent of your house cat through lush reeds. From a 1.5-mile-long elevated walkway, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of the sprawling grounds. While one of the world’s longest footbridges offers visitors a better view, it also provides a better experience for the animals. Craig noticed early on that the wild animals he was caring for got nervous when strangers approached their enclosures, but didn’t seem to mind when he was working above them on a roof with loud power tools. The idea of the walkway was born and it’s obvious to anyone who visits and has also been to a traditional zoo how much more at peace these animals are.
View of the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colorado (Photo courtesy of The Wild Animal Sanctuary)
This is just one of many methods Craig pioneered when it comes to caring for wild animals. In 1979, then 19-year-old Craig visited a friend working as a zoo groundskeeper in North Carolina. There, he made a discovery that would change the trajectory of his life and thousands of wild animals’ lives across the world. His friend showed him the back of the zoo where surplus tigers and lions that wouldn’t fit in the exhibits were kept in small cages away from the public eye. Craig was horrified. When he returned home, the animals stayed in the back of his mind as he attended classes at the University of Colorado Boulder. He called the Denver Zoo to see if they could care for the big cats, but they told him that they too had a surplus of tigers. He called the state and federal government to see if what was happening was illegal–it wasn’t. Soon, he realized that his only option to help these animals was to take them in himself. After building cages and obtaining the right certifications, Craig was approved to legally house exotic animals on his family’s 15-acre farm east of Boulder.
He went to work contacting zoos across the country, writing letters on his grandparents’ typewriter to inquire if there were surplus animals he could give a better home to. Within a week, letters started pouring in from across the country. From surplus animals like the ones he’d seen in North Carolina, to elephants and chimpanzees on kill lists, he was overwhelmed with requests. His first rescue was a baby jaguar whose mother had rejected it. He flew back from South Carolina commercially with the abandoned cub, telling flight attendants it was a “Himalayan cat”.
Though Craig’s family farm was rapidly filling with rescued wild animals, they still weren’t living the life he hoped for them. Per state and federal regulations, the cats were required to live in concrete cages with metal bars. He began bringing them outside into a fenced-in enclosure during the day one at a time and realized that this was the life he wanted for them. At night, they always returned to their cages where they felt safe. He used this knowledge to help pioneer the amendment of laws which now allow captive wild animals to live in habitats more closely resembling the natural world, like you see at the Keenesburg sanctuary.
The sanctuary is open to visitors from 9 a.m. to sunset and you’ll want to plan to stay the better part of the day. In addition to the 1.5 miles of raised walkway, there’s a football-field sized visitor center with seating, food and drinks, and ice cream. Along the walkway you’ll find yourself stopping often to watch the animals whether it’s Arctic foxes, lions, bears, wolves, or so many more creatures.
It’s been more than 40 years since Craig’s first rescue, but his passion hasn’t faded. You’ll still find him working seven days a week to rescue, care for, and manage the animals and four sanctuaries under his purview. In addition to The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, there’s also a 9,789-acre facility in southeastern Colorado, a small facility in Texas and the brand new Wild Horse Refuge near Craig, Colorado, which is caring for more than 100 wild mustangs that were put up for auction by the Bureau of Land Management as a form of population control. These Colorado-born mustangs now roam in bands across 22,500 acres, 30 miles from where they were born.
“Hearing them run out there, it’s like thunder,” public relations director Austin Hill says.
It’s no easy task to run the sanctuaries. At the Keenesburg facility alone, the cats and canines eat 55,000 pounds of meat each week, and the bears eat 65,000 pounds of food weekly. The sanctuary’s feeding bill alone would be astronomical if it weren’t for the donations from grocery stores across Colorado’s Front Range of surplus food. It’s a win-win for supermarkets and big-box stores that can keep food waste out of landfills, and for the sanctuary that can put that money towards everything else required to keep their operation going. From medical care to habitat enclosures there’s a mind-boggling amount of logistics, and cost, that go into running the sanctuaries. For most rescues, like the Puerto Rico operation, The Wild Animal Sanctuary foots the bill. It isn’t cheap to fly 700 animals, including a 26,000-pound elephant and crate, to the United States. The sanctuary is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and relies on virtual adoptions, memberships and donations to keep doing their critical work. When you visit, make a donation, or even share the sanctuary’s work on social media, you’re helping these animals find healing.
The reward for all the hard work Craig and the sanctuary staff put in is seeing wild animals who grew up in captivity, often in abusive or non-ideal conditions, get to live out the rest of their lives in peace and comfort, as wild things should. Every animal rescued from the zoo in Puerto Rico, from a tarantula to an elephant, are now living out their lives at sanctuaries across the U.S., including The Wild Animal Sanctuary. Craig and his team took in bears, lions and even a camel who had been living in horrible conditions and now are roaming the beautiful Colorado plains.
“Every time she would pluck a small stem from one of the bushes or tug on some of the evergreen branches, we had to remind ourselves that this was the first time in her life that she was able to interact with such common natural things,” Craig says of one of Joe Exotic’s tigers, Nala, that now lives at the Wild Animal Sanctuary. And that? That’s what it’s all about.
Learn more at wildanimalsanctuary.org and visit at 2999 County Road 53 in Keenesburg.
For more information:
The Wild Animal Sanctuary
2999 County Road 53
Keenesburg, CO 80643
303-536-0118
wildanimalsanctuary.org
