Hello!
Recently our family visited the Shalom Wildlife Sanctuary for the first time. It’s located in West Bend, WI. It’s a pretty large zoo that’s on a several mile path, mostly through wooded areas. They’ve quite got a lot of animals! I’ll share a bit about our experience below.
What’s something you liked about it (and why)? I liked being able to interact with and feed apples to some of the animals! Including a cow, some Tarpan horses, donkeys and brown and black bears! That is something that not many zoos allow, and it was really fun to interact with them, feed them, and see them interact with the food.
What’s something you disliked about it (and why)? They offer golf cart rentals, and I didn’t really like how many there were. It caused a lot of noise, and was kind of annoying to be around them on the paths. I felt like it also took away some of the “wild” feeling that they go for, and it’s probably not very nice for the animals to hear and smell the golf carts so much. I do see some benefits of having them though, so I don’t think it’s all or nothing.
What was your biggest takeaway or lesson? While we were there, I think it had to do with seeing the wolves, we brought up the question of how did all dog breeds come from the wolf? Later my Dad asked AI and read off what it said. Some of the things I remember from that was how it started after they began domesticating wolves, and how it happened over a super, super long period of time, and how you could breed two wolves or dogs with a similar quality (such as being small, or having a long snout) and you’ll be more likely to end up with one that also has that quality. From what I understand, that if you kept doing that, they’d eventually get even smaller, or have an even longer snout, etc. There was a lot more he said, and a lot I still don’t understand about it though!
What is something you’re curious to learn more about as a result of this experience? I’ve seen some shows about zoos, I’m interested to get back into that, and through those, to see what it’s like to be a zookeeper and work at a zoo.
There were some other really neat animal sightings we got, including the tigers, a black panther, baby cougars, some huge bull elk, and wolves! There’s some pictures below!
Thank you for reading!
Lucy
