Borth Animalarium Private Zoo For Sale

The elderly owners are desperate to retire at the end of the day, they have dropped the price by £200,000 from two years ago , but still I think they will struggle to sell it unfortunately. The trouble is their zoo licence also runs out in 2013. Being honest in the end I can only see one realistic outcome to this situation- that is to send the stock to other collections, and sell the land off to developers ?

 

Knowing the area well, I strongly doubt developers would buy it, apart from being flooded pretty often, it also has serious restrictions, the collection has to stay invisible from the sea apparently, which is maybe 100 metres away, I strongly doubt any housing project could do that.
Personally I'm still hoping for a lottery win, I could make a lovely little collection there, and it'd be a shame if it closed only because of the location, there's not even a little farm park for miles!

 

Good point. But I still think the collection may have to be dispersed in the end, I don`t think the owners can carry on with it as is it for much longer.
(There is some talk about it becoming a charity).

 

Now in the Grauniad!

The Guradian Weekend magazine for the 22nd of September has the usual page of 5.5 by 4 cm colour adverts for property, furniture etc. One of them says

Zoo for sale!​

Price: £650,000
Located in Mid Wales. Includes bungalow and 12 acres. Full zoo licence, over 100 species.​

Then it gives the telephone number for more information.
There is a picture of a TV set, showing an image that might be a still from a movie I haven't seen (but I can guess which one it could be ).

Alan

 

You should buy it Alan. Then do a book, T.V series and film based on your experiences. aw shucks- its already been done...

 

If I could get Scarlett Johansson to help me, I'd rob a bank and do it!

Alan

 

Dream on!

 

From comments made on here I can only hope most of you are never in a position to own an exotic pet let alone own a professional collection. The modern zoo is a conservation organisation with husbandry based upon robust scientific evidence. The days of wooden chicken wire zoos I hope are going away. In order to maintain species you need millions. Most charismatic megafauna in top zoos are kept to a substandard level of welfare. Working with these species shouldn't be desirable because its cool, it should be driven by the conservation goal and not a cartoon dream version of it.

 

That's a tad rich, given that your previous postings have all been soliciting information that one might have thought - or hoped - might have been rather obvious to someone working with exotic animals!

I think you are perhaps under-estimating both the occasional sense of irony, and the widespread expertise, that exist amongst Zoochat contributors. Yes, not everyone is an expert - but many are, and those who aren't experts are nonetheless often very well informed.

I think you'll find that criticism of Borth style zoos is pretty strong and pretty consistent here....

 

Preaching to the choir?

 

Many people on here are private keepers of unusual or, if you will 'exotic' animal species. Many work in zoos or have done so. I think the joking about buying this collection is precisely because of the concerns raised regularly about the standards there (although it sounds as if there have been many improvements).

 

I have just listened to a rather nice radio documentary about the zoo and its owners: broadcast on Radio 4 at 11 am today in the 'Lives in a Landscape' series, which I confess I have never heard before. Podcast available
BBC - Podcasts and Downloads - Lives in a Landscape

Alan

 

I heard it too. You would need to spend the asking price again to put the Zoo to rights and enlarge the property. I lived in the area for 3 months some years ago. Just like living in a monsoon.

 

Reduced again to £600,000

 

Lets form a consortium and purchase it together

 

I'm up for it, got at least £20, hehe. Maybe we should kickstarter it?

 

Investigation underway after a near miss incident at Borth Investigation after leopard's cage left open at zoo | Wales - ITV News

 

Obviously not the sort of publicity the zoo really needs at this time.
Especially as this animal was at the centre of the last situation whereby he was suppossed to have been removed by the RSPCA due to the owners not having the correct paperwork in theory. However "Rajah" did not want to leave and the RSPCA did not have a clue how to move him correctly so he remains at the zoo.
Whilst it is worrying, there are countless near miss incidents like this that happen in zoos which never become public knowledge often because it is fortunate that the public are not around at the time.

 

That is shocking, what day did this happen? I was there only last week admiring Rajahs swanky new enclosure.