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This Colorado sanctuary gives animals a second chance – and a callback to the wild
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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
ROAM SWEET ROAM: Mobo (back) and Noelle, a bonded tiger pair, interact at The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colorado, Oct. 10, 2024.
- By Melanie Stetson Freeman Staff photographer
- Sarah Matusek Staff writer
- https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/2025/0404/wild-animal-sanctuary-colorado
April 04, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET|Keenesburg, Colo.
At a distance, the snowy Rocky Mountains line the horizon like lace. Otherwise, it’s hard to tell this is Colorado, given the tigers, lions, leopards, and other foreign carnivores.
This isn’t a zoo, and don’t let the fencing fool you. This is The Wild Animal Sanctuary, where more than 450 animals brought to Colorado’s eastern plains get a second chance to roam. The sanctuary spans over 1,200 acres and rehabilitates captive exotic and endangered animals. For some, this might be the first time their paws have touched grass.
Below the elevated walkway where visitors watch, a jaguar patrols the edge of a fence. The nonprofit says Manchas was a neglected pet in Mexico, confused about his identity after he was raised by the family’s dogs. Other rescues have come from Bolivian circuses, an Iowa mall, and a shuttered Puerto Rican zoo. About 150 came from the cages of the Netflix show “Tiger King.”
Why We Wrote This
Some formerly captive exotic animals have never had their paws touch grass before. The Wild Animal Sanctuary gives them space to roam.
In the view of Austin Hill, public relations director at the sanctuary, the need to rescue animals can result from owners’ warped priorities. “People were trying to mistake human want for animal need,” he says.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
BEAR ESSENTIALS: Chumlee, a Syrian brown bear, walks in his enclosure. Visitors can watch the bears below from an elevated viewing platform.
Perhaps some exceptions are the lions that hail from a zoo in Ukraine. Rescued from Odesa, they were spared Russia’s war.
Rehabilitation takes time. And progress, when it comes, appears in behavior. For the big cats, for example, roaming is a welcome sign. Roaring is also good. So is falling asleep on one’s back, with legs limp and stomach exposed. The cats would do that only, the humans here assume, if they felt safe.
One lioness, spotted on a recent tour, is in just this pose with her jaw gone slack. During the Monitor’s second visit in December, most of the sanctuary’s bears were missing from the scene. They were busy hibernating, dreaming bear dreams.
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The sanctuary expands beyond just this site, and includes a wild mustang refuge in Colorado’s northwest. Overall, the nonprofit has about 100 staff members and some 160 volunteers. From a safe distance, workers here build rapport with the animals.
Mr. Hill can name the rescues at first glance, as if ticking off the roster of a favorite football team. Foxes with tails that float behind them, light as scarves, frolic in a ditch. That’s Benedict, Suzette, Pickles, and Pancake.
The sanctuary provides over 100,000 pounds of food a week at its peak. Meals are offered at random times to replicate an authentic habitat. Another callback to the wild comes in sound.
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The lions start a call-and-response – thunder from their throats. The conversation builds, with groans and grunts and heaving sighs, rattling the valley and its birds. Several seconds pass till I remember how to breathe.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
THE LYIN’ KINGS: Lions Leo II (center) and Nala lie in the sun while a liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger, named HeDaBomb stands in their enclosure.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
FOX TROT: A red fox rescued from a farm that bred foxes for fur and fashion spends the day in its enclosure. Red foxes come in many colors.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
WALK ON THE WILD SIDE: A tiger strolls through an enclosure, with mountains in the distance. The sanctuary is home to more than 450 wild animals.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
THE CROWD GOES WILD: Sanctuary visitors use binoculars to check out animals from the raised viewing platform.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
MEAT AND GREET: Mobo enjoys a block of frozen meat fortified with vitamins. He is fed on a random schedule to replicate what his diet might be in the wild.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
WOLF PACK: Two wolves rest in the snow. The sanctuary houses nearly 40 wolves that were rescued from illegal or abusive situations.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
HOME FREE: Diesel, a Syrian brown bear, roams in his enclosure. He and three others of his kind were rescued from a roadside zoo.
For more visual storytelling that captures communities, traditions, and cultures around the globe, visit The World in Pictures.
Brazilian rescue center returns trafficked animals to the wild
2 Apr 2025Atlantic Forest
A wildlife rescue center in Rio de Janeiro is giving animals a second chance after they’ve been torn from the Atlantic Forest by poachers, a Mongabay short documentary showed.
At the Vida Livre (Free Life) Institute, the team of volunteer veterinarians and biologists rehabilitate thousands of wild animals — from parrots with broken beaks to newborn armadillos and drugged monkeys — helping them recover so they can be returned to their natural habitat.
In September 2024, two capuchin monkeys were brought in after staff at the Rio Botanical Garden noticed unusual behavior in the primates. Blood tests confirmed they’d been given sedatives, which poachers often sneak into treats like bananas to subdue their victims. In March 2025, another two arrived in the same condition.
“When they arrived, they were very uncoordinated,” Roshed Seba, the president of the Vida Livre Institute, told Mongabay in a video interview. “They were evaluated by the vet and had their blood taken.” They were also given food and water to help them recover.
The institute, which turns 10 this year, has treated more than 13,000 animals. Most are native to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, including sloths, owls, anteaters, boas, toucans and even pumas.
One toucan lost half of its upper beak during an attempted capture by traffickers. After its rescue, the team used a 3D printer to make a prosthetic beak, allowing it to eat and resume its normal functions.
In another case, a sloth was drugged the same way as the monkeys. “Imagine drugging a sloth,” Seba said. “It almost died.”
Wildlife traffickers often use social media to sell animals as pets. Birds, especially male songbirds, are the most trafficked for their songs. Without them in the wild to reproduce, the wild population is weakened and the species’ reproductive capacity diminishes.
“Wildlife trade has more impacts than people imagine,” Juliana Machado Ferreira, the executive director of Freeland Brasil, a nonprofit fighting wildlife trafficking, told Mongabay. “Apart from the individual animal who suffers greatly, we also lose pollinators, seed dispersers, animals that have an ecological role in nature.”
Illegal wildlife trade ranks as the world’s fourth most lucrative international organized criminal enterprise, behind drugs, weapons and human trafficking. “Wildlife trafficking can only exist in conjunction with other crimes such as fraud, forgery, smuggling, criminal association, among others,” Ferreira said.
The Vida Livre institute says it hopes to educate the public about the harm caused by buying birds or monkeys as pets. And for the wildlife rehabilitated at the center, the goal is always to release animals back into the wild to live in freedom in their natural habitat. “I would love for the institute to be empty,” Seba said, “and to be only dedicated to talking about the beauty of Brazil’s fauna to inspire people.”
Banner image: A young orange-spined hairy dwarf porcupine (Sphiggurus villosus) rescued by the Vida Livre institute. Image by Rafael Bacelar for Mongabay.
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Viewpoint: Wrong to give wealthy landowners special tag access
Viewpoint: Wrong to give wealthy landowners special tag access
Missoula CurrentPublished: April 7, 2025Wildlife in the Evaro area. (William Munoz/Missoula Current)
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- https://missoulacurrent.com/viewpoint-tag-access/
Steve Platt
We are lucky to live in Montana where wildlife is held in trust by the State, for the benefit of all. Unlike in Europe, Montanans do not need to be rich to hunt.
Last session, HB 635 awarded wealthy non-residents owning 2,500 acres of land with guaranteed deer and elk tags. HB 635 violated one of the tenets of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, guaranteeing wealthy non-residents special access to deer and elk tags, while ordinary non-resident hunters and resident hunters got nothing in return.
Proponents argued that HB 635 would solve hunter crowding, publicly stating that it would “reduce non-resident hunting by up to 30,000 hunter days annually” by moving vast numbers of public land hunters to private lands. That is proven to be utterly false, eliminating the sole benefit this bill might have offered to resident sportsmen.
According to FWP, HB 635 had no impact on hunting pressure whatsoever. Landowners with this much land are likely only hunting their own properties. HB 635 really isn’t moving any hunters from public to private.
Only 131 non-resident landowner tags were issued last year, hardly noticeable out of the 17,000 non-resident deer and elk combo tag holders, and nowhere near the 2,550 tags that proponents said would be used by this program. More than 130 hunters looks even smaller when compared to the 85,253 total number of non-residents who hunted Montana in 2024. We were duped.
So, since HB 635 didn’t fix or have any real impact on hunter crowding, what are we left with?
Just a giveaway to large landowners who don’t even live here.
Worse, giving non-residents tags for nothing in return actually disincentivizes Block Management. One of the existing perks for Block Management cooperators, both resident and non, is that they’re given a deer and elk license (in addition to cash from license sales) as a thank you for providing public access. But if non-residents who own chunks of Montana can get these tags (actually 5 tags if they own over 12,500 acres) for providing nothing, what does that do to the existing access incentives? It makes them worthless.
But now, with HB 907, we can right this wrong by repealing the non-resident landowner preference and instead motivate non-resident landowners to enroll in Block Management. Non-resident landowners who provide public access are already given a deer and elk tag. HB 907 would also allow those landowners in permitted districts to buy a 2nd bonus point, increasing their odds of drawing their permits each and every year. That’s fair to all landowners and all hunters.
Providing access would not be forced, just rewarded. It’s not mandatory. If a non-resident landowner doesn’t want to enroll in Block Management, that’s fine. They can enter the drawings just like everyone else, or they can look at the many other customizable public access options that FWP offers as ways to guarantee their tags or permits.
The longer we let this program go without correcting it, the more entitled these wealthy out-of-state landowners will become. And they’ll just keep extending their hands asking for more and more, while obligated to provide nothing in return.
Eliminating non-resident handouts and turning these instead into reasonable incentives for public access, as HB 907 would do, is something all Montanans can get on board with. And by the sounds of it, the only ones who disagree are the lobbyists paid by out-of-state interests. It’s time to repeal HB 635 and pass HB 907.
Steve Platt is a retired archaeologist, conservationist, hunter and fisherman. He lives in Helena.
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Montana’s bold gamble to stop the Yellowstone highway bloodbath
A mule deer struck and killed by a vehicle on Highway 89 in Paradise Valley, Mont., March 25, 2025.Blakeley Adkins/Greater Yellowstone Coalition
By Kylie Mohr,Big Sky Country Contributing Parks EditorApril 4, 2025
At first sight, Highway 89 in Montana doesn’t look dangerous. It’s bucolic: horses and cattle graze near the road, the Yellowstone River winds in and out of sight, and the Absaroka Mountains rise sharply to the east. But with alarming frequency, this two-lane highway en route to Yellowstone National Park becomes a bloody mess when wildlife cross the road.
Wildlife-vehicle collisions on this stretch of highway between Livingston and Yellowstone’s north entrance in Gardiner, one of the park’s five entrances and the only one that stays open year-round, have cost drivers $32 million in damages over the past 10 years, according to a coalition called Yellowstone Safe Passages. Yellowstone Safe Passages is made up of residents of the Upper Yellowstone watershed, as well as state and federal agencies, elected officials, conservation groups, landowners and more.
About half the accidents here are wildlife-related, which is 10 times higher than the national average. Every year, there are at least 160 wildlife-vehicle collisions, with several times more going unreported, experts say.
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That’s bad for the nearly 1,700 deer, elk, moose and more that have ended up splattered on the side of the road between 2012 and 2023. It’s also expensive for humans, including both locals and tourists. According to a highway assessment by Yellowstone Safe Passages, the average collision costs for deer, elk and moose are $14,014, $45,445, and $82,646, respectively.
“We want you to get to Yellowstone safely; we want you to get your kids home from school safely,” said Blakeley Adkins, a conservation associate with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an environmental nonprofit group in the region.
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Adkins and other Yellowstone Safe Passages staff do weekly roadkill surveys to assess the damage, driving up and down this stretch, often in the early evening hours when wildlife are the most active, and recording what they see near the road — dead and alive.
They’ve found carcasses of pretty much every animal that lives here: bison, mountain lions, bobcats, grizzly bears, beavers, moose, skunks, coyotes, birds of prey like eagles and owls, and more. The survey work can be hard on those who do it, especially when they find animals that can’t outrun cars.
“That beaver didn’t stand a chance,” Adkins said. Deer and elk are the most common victims.
The valley is the “perfect storm” for roadkill, said Daniel Anderson, a Montana resident who co-founded Yellowstone Safe Passages. Anderson knows the area well, growing up on a family ranch in the nearby Tom Miner Basin, which borders Yellowstone National Park.
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Wildlife here is sandwiched between two mountain ranges, drawn to irrigated agricultural land with plenty of grass and alfalfa to eat. Animals also come to drink at the Yellowstone River, which winds on both sides of the road. “The highway runs right through all of that,” Adkins said. Both Adkins and Anderson were passengers in vehicles that hit wildlife in this area when they were younger.
More and more people have come to Yellowstone in recent years. The park’s visitation increased by 20% between 2014 and 2017. Almost 400,000 vehicles entered the park through the Gardiner entrance (driving Highway 89 to get there) in 2023. More people mean more cars on the road, and more opportunities for a collision.
A highway assessment identified seven hot spots for vehicle-wildlife collisions, each 2 to 3 miles long, as targets of additional infrastructure improvements. The worst is a spot near Dome Mountain, where the highway narrows into the Yankee Jim Canyon. Irrigated land draws deer and elk close to the road, and to the east, a 3,770-acre wildlife management area is home to even more ungulates, such as bighorn sheep.
After four years of building community support and collecting data, Yellowstone Safe Passages won state funding in September 2024 to conduct an engineering feasibility study near Dome Mountain for the project’s crown jewels: two wildlife crossings.
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Wildlife crossings, which include overpasses and underpasses to help animals safely cross roads, have gained steam in recent years. The world’s biggest wildlife crossing is under construction in Agoura Hills, California, where a first layer of soil was placed over the crossing’s surface Monday. Wyoming has also been a leader in wildlife crossings, and additional projects are underway in Florida, Utah, Washington and many more states.
In Montana, engineers are now studying factors that will influence future wildlife crossing construction projects, including the soil, hydrology and topography of the sites under consideration.
In total, the crossings, plus fencing to funnel animals toward and away from them, are expected to cost $38 million. Wildlife crossing construction in other states in the past has depended on the federal government for about 80% of the cost, Anderson said, with private philanthropy and nongovernmental organizations chipping in for the rest.
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Any construction is likely still years away. In the meantime, signs warn drivers to slow down. Visitors leaving through the Gardiner entrance of Yellowstone are greeted by elk herds calmly sitting 10 feet off the road and a sign, in all caps, saying, “BISON ON THE ROAD NEXT 5 MILES.”
Anderson and Adkins hope the landscape bordering Yellowstone National Park will, in some ways, sell itself. “People come here to see wildlife,” Anderson said. “Not to hit it.”
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April 4, 2025
Big Sky Country Contributing Parks Editor
Exposing the Big Game 