Tuesday, November 11, 2014NEW CASTLE, Pa. -- A sunny autumn morning finds Meaghin McGuire visiting the Living Treasures Wild Animal Park with her twin boys in preschool, William and Luke.
“Luke, they don’t eat sticks, honey,” she tells one son as he stands at the nearby petting area.
“They’re at a good age now where they can enjoy feeding the animals. It’s easy and fun for the kids,” McGuire, of Cranberry Township, Pa., says. Just a few yards away at the zoo in New Castle, Pa., are two giraffes – among its most popular attractions since their arrival two years ago – waiting for patrons to pay them a visit or give them a treat.
The McGuires’ visit that morning was the family’s second in two days – the kind of customer loyalty that encourages the owner and park director of Living Treasures, Adam Guiher, as he plans a $5 million expansion of its geographic footprint and programming. The zoo is on Fox Road, just off U.S. Route 422.
Guiher, whose background is in construction, bought the animal park from his father in 2005. “At that point, it was in need of an awful lot of work,” he recalls. His father, who opened Living Treasures in 1992, didn’t live here and wasn’t focused on the park. “That’s where I saw the opportunity, to come here and take what was old and ugly and make it nice again and see what we could do to make it grow,” he says.
Attendance has grown by about 600% in the years since Guiher took over the park.
“This year already we’ve had about 131,000 guests come through,” he relates, and he anticipates several thousand more over the next few weeks.
The zoo typically is open from April 1 through mid-November, “but we’ll stay open as late as weather will allow,” he says.
Another visitor this fall day is Sarah Huth of Butler, who brought her son, Andrew. They come about twice each year. “It’s clean and it’s close to home,” she says, “and you get to see almost all the animals you get to see at a bigger zoo, but up close.”
The animal park features 80 species, including 15 varieties of water fowl, more than 50 deer of three types, camels, lemurs, an Asian water buffalo, tortoises, leopards, kangaroos, Grevy’s zebras and primates such as gibbons, which are among the endangered species being raised there. Animals bred there are often sent to other zoos. The two African leopards have bred several cubs, Guiher says.
The two giraffes came to Living Treasures in 2012, each eight weeks old, the female in August and the male in November. “Giraffe feeding has become one of the very most popular things that we offer,” Guiher says.
More opportunities for up-close interactions with the animals – more so than at traditional zoos – are among the features Living Treasures offers, he says.
“It’s something different than at most zoos,” he explains. “We have large, comfortable enclosures for the animals and the reason they come up and see people is because they want to.” Interactions include feeding the animals. Visitors are able to feed them behind their walled enclosures as well through tubes.
Some of the animals on display are extinct in the wild, such as Living Treasures’ two Bombay lions, June and Cash, which have bred 12 cubs, Guiher notes.
“Our lions, they exist in the world because of people like us,” says Julie Bastian, curator and senior zookeeper. “They continue to be on the earth.”
Bastian, with Living Treasures since 2008, is among the 11 full-time and 19 part-time seasonal employees there. She has few problems with the animals, who look at her as their “food mama,” she jokes.
“You always have to make sure that the animals get along,” she remarks. “You have to respect the fact that even the smallest animal can hurt you.”
In addition, because two members of the same species can act “very differently,” she continues, it’s important to be aware of animals’ individual personalities. “You have to pay attention to so many different things,” she remarks.
Since purchasing Living Treasures, Guiher says he spent $2 million to either remodel or demolish and replace all of the structures within the park. Each of the animal habitats features an enclosure for its residents, and most of the habitats are designed in-house, he says. In some cases, different species live in combined habitats.
Funding for the zoo is raised solely from admissions and income from other sales, he reports. “We get no government funding at all. We don’t apply for any grants to operate. We don’t seek large sponsorships, anything like that,” he says.
Guiher’s plans for Living Treasures include adding 140 acres to the park’s existing 20 acres, and this offseason the park will take its animal encounter outreach program to offsite venues.
The outreach initiative starting this season will expand the animal encounter program the park has done for several years, Guiher says.
“We’re going to be traveling with the animals. That’s exciting,” he remarks. “We’ll be able to go to schools, churches, birthday parties – anywhere that has climate control where it’s comfortable for the animals.”
The additional acreage also would allow Living Treasures “the opportunity to do a safari park attraction,” he says, to place animals in large, open areas and have them in small herds “rather than in just the pairs and the smaller quantities we have here.”
The project also would lend itself to increasing the number of field trips and group visits, which now represent just 7% of Living Treasures’ traffic.
And enlarging the park increases the possibility of more exhibits and adding more animals, Bastian adds. When new animals arrive, both visitors and staff get excited, she says. “You hate to see an animal go but you love to see one come,” she says.
Pictured: Adam Guiher feeds one of the giraffes at the New Castle, Pa., zoo he owns and operates, and plans to soon expand.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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