Safari park


A safari park, sometimes known as a wildlife park, is a zoo-like commercial drive-in tourist attraction where visitors can drive their own vehicles or ride in vehicles provided by the facility to observe freely roaming animals. The main attractions are frequently large animals from Sub-Saharan Africa such as giraffes, lions, rhinocerotes, elephants, hippopotamus, zebras, ostriches, and antelope.
A safari park is larger than a zoo and smaller than a game reserve. For example, African Lion Safari in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada is. For comparison, Lake Nakuru in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya, is, and a typical large game reserve is Tsavo East, also in Kenya, which encompasses.
Safari parks often have other associated tourist attractions: golf courses, carnival rides, cafes/restaurants, ridable miniature railways, and gift shops.

History

The predecessor of safari parks is Africa U.S.A. Park in Florida.
The first lion drive-through opened in 1963 in Tama Zoological Park in Tokyo. In double-glazed buses, visitors made a tour through a one-hectare enclosure with twelve African lions.
The first drive-through safari park outside of Africa opened in 1966 at Longleat in Wiltshire, England. Longleat, Windsor, Woburn and arguably the whole concept of safari parks were the brainchild of Jimmy Chipperfield, former co-director of Chipperfield's Circus, although a similar concept is explored as a plot device in Angus Wilson's "The Old Men at the Zoo" which was published five years before Chipperfield set up Longleat. Longleat's Marquess of Bath agreed to Chipperfield's proposition to fence off of his vast Wiltshire estate to house 50 lions.
Knowsley, the Earl of Derby's estate outside Liverpool, and the Duke of Bedford's Woburn estate in Bedfordshire both established their own safari parks with Chiperfield's partnership.
Another circus family, the Smart Brothers, joined the safari park business by opening a park at Windsor for visitors from London. The former Windsor Safari Park was in Berkshire, England, but closed in 1992 and has since been made into a Legoland.
There is also Chipperfield's "Scotland Safari Park" established on Baronet Sir John Muir's estate at Blair Drummond near Stirling, and the American-run "West Midland Safari and Leisure Park" near Birmingham.
One park along with Jimmy Chipperfield at Lambton Castle in the North East England has closed.
Between 1967 and 1974, Lion Country Safari, Inc. opened 6 animal parks, one near each of the following American cities: West Palm Beach, Florida; Los Angeles, California; Grand Prairie, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Richmond, Virginia. The first park, in South Florida, is the only Lion Country Safari still in operation.
Burgers' Zoo at Arnhem, Netherlands, opened a "safari park" in 1968 within a traditional zoo. In 1995, Burgers' Safari modified this to a walking safari with a board walk. Another safari park in the Netherlands is SafariparkBeekse Bergen.
Most safari parks were established in a short period of ten years, between 1966 and 1975.