WILD AT THE SAFARI PARK

29-08-2008

West Midlands Safari Park is one of the great days out, but as Pete Millington reports, the attraction doesn’t seem to be keeping track with respect for the environment.

We took the kids to West Midlands Safari Park yesterday thinking that it might be quiet following two busy bank holidays. It's a great day out generally but what a nightmare trying to drive around the park to see the animals.

It was bumper to bumper all the way round. People were driving across the grass to cut each other up, the rangers were moving people on every time you stopped to look at or feed the animals (so at the end of the trail you still have your expensive box of grass pellets intact because the opportunties to feed the animals are so limited) and there was a continual smell of burning hand breaks and gear boxes.

As for the poor animals, they must be continually breathing in car fumes.

There are even signs at the front entrance entrance saying "no alcohol or fireworks to be brought into the park". Now doesn't that indicate to you that they have clearly had issues with people carrying all manner of inappropriate stuff around the park in their cars? It must be a very difficult situation to monitor for staff.

Is this why they have so many gap-year students driving up and down in four-by-fours with zebra livery, burning up yet more fuel to protect the inhabitants from the real wild animals?

Of course the great advantage of safari parks over zoos is that the animals get relatively more space to roam around than they do caged up. The disadvantage is that anything closely resembling a natural habitat is completely ruined by a two lane traffic jam for the whole four miles of the trail.

Who can blame the animals for hiding behind the longest clump of grass they can find, therefore providing less opportunity to observe them close-up than you'd get in a zoo.

Why is it in this day and age of being more mindful of the environment, safari park directors haven't thought of a way to cut out all of this awful traffic pollution in their parks?

As far as I am concerned it is colluding with our innate idleness and reliance on the motorcar in order to bring in as many visitors and generate as much revenue as possible in the most convenient way for both visitor and park owner, but flies in the face of any commitment by either party to the nature of our planet.

Why not get the visitors to leave the cars at the front entrance and enable people to walk around the park safely by providing raised walkways between picnic areas, viewing platforms, learning and information areas, hides and habitat viewing areas, perhaps a little train or tram to link main enclosures?

Keep the fences to protect both the animals and public from each other, perhaps provide a mobility option for disabled people, parents of babies and older people but in general kick the public out of their cars into the open air.

It works with the hippo enclosure and the adjacent viewing platform, so why not extend the same concept to the whole park?

We get closer contact with the animals, fresh air and physical exercise. The animals keep their spacious enclosures, but lose all the car fumes and unnatural spectacle of thousands of motor cars, coaches, minibuses etc, trundling past them all day long. Both animals and people get to have their mental health improved big time.

Come on West Midlands Safari Park, you are telling us it is all about conservation and the environment and the evidence is that this is a genuine concern at the park, so let's see some innovation in terms of ditching the cars!

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