The Papanack Park Zoo is a small zoo in

Wendover Wendover is a market town and civil parish at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England. It is situated at the point where the main road across the Chilterns between London and Aylesbury intersects with the once important road a ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...

. It opened to the public in 1994 and is under new ownership as of 2014 with the intention of acting as a conservation park. It hosts 36 different species, including snow monkeys, cougars,

snow leopard The snow leopard (''Panthera uncia''), also known as the ounce, is a felid in the genus '' Panthera'' native to the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia. It is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List because the global population is es ...

and white lion cubs. These cubs are the offspring of the zoo's African lions although they did not stay white as they grew. They also have four

white Bengal tiger The white tiger or bleached tiger is a leucistic pigmentation variant of the Mainland tiger. It is reported in the wild from time to time in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, in the Sunderbans region and ...

s including a "snowball" tiger named

Venus Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never f ...

. The zoo is approximately a 25-minute drive from

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

's capital of Ottawa. A number of animals at the zoo have been shown in the children's documentary,

Zoboomafoo ''Zoboomafoo'' is a live-action/animated children's television series that originally aired on PBS from January 25, 1999, to June 7, 2001. It was formerly shown in public television (depending on the area) and was regularly shown on Sprout unt ...

, featuring Chris Kratt and Martin Kratt. In addition, an African lion named Simba was a model for production sketches of the main character used in

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

The Lion King ''The Lion King'' is a 1994 American animated musical drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 32nd Disney animated feature film and the fifth produced during the Disney Renaissance ...

. In 2016, a lion named Zeus escaped from Papanack Park Zoo due to human error. The lion was shot and killed over concerns for public safety. In 2016 shocking undercover footage was released by Animal Justice depicting acts of animal cruelty including a zoo manager describing how he trained a lion cub by repeatedly hitting the baby animal in the face. It also includes zoo management stating that several Père David deers (extinct in the wild) broke their necks after running into the fence of their enclosure. Again, in 2021 another animal escaped its enclosure. A kangaroo named Willow escaped her enclosure before being found by the side of the road injured. The injured kangaroo died.

References

Papanack Zoos established in 1994 {{zoo-stub