Craziest story I ever read LOL
Inside America’s Most Dysfunctional Zoo
By
Rachel Wolfe
June 2, 2026 5:30 am ET
ETHEL, La.—There is a Nile crocodile loose somewhere in central Louisiana.
It’s in good company.
A private zoo here has also misplaced a Marabou stork, a lynx, two Indian crested porcupines, a family of capybaras, a mob of kangaroos, a flock of flightless Rheas, a herd of water buffalo and an entire safari exhibit of bison, zebras and antelope.
Now even the founder wants out.
Last week, Gabriel Ligon donated the zoo’s roughly 125 remaining animals to a group of employees who are turning the facility into a nonprofit. Ligon says he wants to return to his true passion: jungle conservation.
“I can promise that I will never work and/or participate in the zoo industry again,” the 34-year-old said.
A chorus of former staffers wish the zoo would go away too. They say it has a long history of dysfunction and substandard conditions that won’t improve under employees with little prior zookeeping experience or clear plan to pay for the animals’ care.
“It’s not as messy as ‘Tiger King’ was,” said Josh Webb, a zookeeper there from April to November of 2025. “But it’s close.”
The people behind the new nonprofit say they have veterinarians on staff, are working with financial consultants and zoological experts and are “moving into the future, not looking into the past.”
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Ligon grew up in Ethel and spent summers during college rehabilitating wildlife in Costa Rica and Louisiana. The experience left him hooked on working with animals, even after a monkey ripped his ear nearly in half.
He bought an acre of his grandfather’s farmland with a $10,000 student loan, built a barn with an apartment and rescued a macaw named Cisco and umbrella cockatoo named Andrew to bring to children’s parties. He scaled up aggressively at what was then called Barn Hill Preserve, adding a safari park and animal encounters like swimming with otters.
But maintaining a zoo, Ligon learned, is expensive. Payroll started arriving late. Food deliveries sometimes ran out by the weekend. A red river hog gored an employee’s leg. A window fell out of the hyena enclosure. One of the hyenas bit a teen. (He was fine.)
“It was one of those places where something is always going wrong,” said Haley Berger, a former tour guide.
Ligon puts it differently. “I lived a wild life and wild things happened,” he said. “If you work in a high rise office your printer might break, while if you work at a zoo, an animal may escape.”
Employees routinely took newborn kangaroos, wildcats and goats home overnight to provide round-the-clock feeding. “I have videos playing with this kitten on my bed that could rip out my jugular,” former animal care specialist Avery Stewart said.
The pool where visitors could swim with otters and penguins was frequently bright green with algae. The otters were known to bite guests who paid $215 to swim with them. The otter swim instructors say they were told to downplay the bites as “just animal things” and to offer Neosporin and a bandaid.
A baby Nile crocodile lived for weeks in a horse trough. After the crocodile ate a bird that had flown in, staff moved the reptile outside and used cinder blocks to weigh down the grate keeping it closed. The next day, the grate and the cinder blocks were still there. The crocodile, which grows to around 16 feet and 1,000 pounds, was not.
Ligon thinks an employee stole the reptile. Employees think it escaped.
Private zoos are routinely inspected by the Department of Agriculture, which issues animal exhibitor licenses and can cite facilities for violating the Animal Welfare Act. But the highest standards are set by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, and the vast majority don’t make the cut.
At the Ethel zoo between 2021 and this past February, USDA inspectors documented 43 infractions, including the parasite-induced deaths of two alpacas, a flea infestation leading to the death of a Sand Cat, and an insufficient barrier between the lynxes and the public.
Ligon sued the USDA over its confiscation of a giraffe that he says caused the zoo to lose a million dollars a year because of all the bad press.
In 2024, Ligon rebranded the zoo as Magnolia Wilds. The night before the inspection to get the new name, Ligon told staff to move two Indian crested porcupines to a bigger enclosure despite warnings that the animals were tunnelers and the enclosure had no dig guards.
The next morning, both porcupines were gone. One, Owen, was found disoriented in the woods. The other, Rebel, was spotted dead on Highway 955, employees say.
Ligon’s troubles came to a head in January when he was arrested on a felony theft charge stemming from a business dispute with another zoo owner. Some former employees had hoped the arrest would force the animals to be sent to better-resourced facilities.
On a recent Wednesday, Ligon walked the property in ostrich boots and a duck-patterned shirt. Godzilla the rescue Sulcata tortoise lounged in a tidy shaded yard. Parrots and macaws that had outlived their owners squawked in a giant aviary. The enclosures were clean. The grass was mowed. The animals seemed content.
Sure, they’d had problems, Ligon said. But when you ran a zoo, “zoo things” were going to happen. “We had a bee escape once,” he said. “I have to tell you, PR nightmare.”
Vet tech Lauren Cotton will take over as animal care director at the newly named nonprofit Sanctuary Hill. The 29-year-old, who signed a nondisclosure agreement with Ligon, said keeping the animals in their homes is the most ethical choice. They plan to end encounters with humans—perhaps with the exception of feeding the sloths—and pursue accreditation from the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.
GFAS executive director Valerie Taylor says she can’t remember any facility successfully transitioning from for-profit to sanctuary, and hand-feeding sloths would be a nonstarter. But Taylor said they’d be glad to help.
Around the same time Sanctuary Hill announced its inception, a large, bedraggled bird was spotted in Wisconsin. Zookeepers in an online group began asking whether any facility was missing a Marabou stork. Former keeper Allison Balsamo, who moved home to Janesville, Wis., after leaving Barn Hill, saw the post and recognized the description immediately.
“You can’t get away,” she said. “Even if you want to.”
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/zoo-e...8G&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
