Caught Again: Roadside Zoo Racks Up New Set of Animal-Welfare Violations

Inspectors Find Animals Languishing Without Veterinary Care, Visitors Allowed Unsafe Direct Contact With Animals at Walnut Creek Zoo

For Immediate Release:
May 18, 2015

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Following an April 20 inspection of The Farm at Walnut Creek in Sugarcreek—a notorious roadside zoo that PETA has tracked for years—the facility has been slapped with yet another set of citations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act. The violations—which are far from the roadside zoo’s first—include castrating lambs and docking their tails and allowing five animals to languish without veterinary care, including a ram suffering from an oozing mass on his chest and four lambs with crusty eyes. A large mound of exposed animal waste and filthy bedding—for which The Farm at Walnut Creek has been cited since 2012—exposes animals to disease and contaminates grazing space.

“These new reports of unchecked filth and disease show that The Farm at Walnut Creek’s chronic disregard for the well-being of the animals on its property remains the status quo,” says PETA Foundation Deputy General Counsel Delcianna Winders. “PETA is calling on caring people and their families to give this cruel facility, and all roadside zoos, a wide berth.”

Inspectors also found a lamb who was chewing one of several dangerously loose metal wires dangling from a fence and noted that unsupervised contact between animals and visitors was permitted—putting the animals and human attendees at risk. Pigs and a camel were also left to languish in excessively filthy stalls. As documented by PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—The Farm at Walnut Creek’s many previous citations include failure to provide a baboon who was suffering from a swollen and often oozing eye with adequate veterinary care.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.