Tiger World

Tiger World is not aptly named. It should be named something more like awesome carnivore rescue/place. I suppose that doesn't have as nice a ring to it as Tiger World, but I digress.

They offer a carnivore tour during the summer on Thursday evenings where they take you from cage to cage and talk about their animals as they chuck the animals' dinner over the fence. It. Was. Awesome.

As we walked through the gift shop the first thing we saw was this guy on the left laying in the window (the other side of the very thick glass but still pretty cool).

There are a lot of tigers here, but there are also wolves, wild dogs, lions, bears, baboons, bobcats, and a few other animals.

Oh, right, and there was a liger. He was the biggest cat at the conservation. Ligers apparently don't live very long, and it's not preferable to have lions and tigers mate. (I think they just didn't want us breeding them for their skills in magic.) They also suffer from a disease where they grow larger than they're organs can support. Really, ligers are tragic. Not magical.

They assured us that the fences were up to code, and that we were safe on the other side of these fences. It was still a little disconcerting as you heard a whole chicken's bones crunch as the animals devoured their meals.

You could judge this place and assume that cages meant they didn't take care of their animals because they don't have million dollar exhibits, but it couldn't be further from the truth. These keepers love their animals, have been trying to raise money and funding for years, and have slowly but surely been building better habitats for each of the animals. Most of the animals are rescues from zoos that have closed or people who thought they could really manage having a tiger as a pet and then really couldn't do it. One thing is for certain--there is no doubt in my mind that Tiger World is doing good by these animals.

This place makes a short, fun trip, but the best way to see this facility is to take this Carnivore Tour on Thursday nights and learn the backstory about the animals and watch them go nuts on some raw meat.