Back in the early 1990s—when Pat Craig began looking around northern Colorado for a piece of property that could accommodate his rapidly expanding menagerie of lions, tigers, and bears—space was the priority. Most of his charges had been rescued from private zoos, breeding mills, and squalid roadside attractions. Craig, the founder and executive director of the Wild Animal Sanctuary, was determined to provide them with room to roam and comfortable dens for the rest of their lives.
He found what he was looking for a mere 40 miles from Denver, outside the Weld County town of Keenesburg: cheap land, a rolling prairie surrounded by an ocean of wheat. “It was like The Wizard of Oz,” Craig recalls. “There were no power lines anywhere, no fences on the road.” And almost no people.
Over the past 30 years, Craig has built his nonprofit into the largest carnivore sanctuary in the world. By acquiring parcels of adjoining land as they became available, he’s transformed his original 160-acre spread into a 1,450-acre refuge sheltering more than 550 tigers, lions, bears, wolves, leopards, lynx, bobcats, coyotes, and other exotic animals (including the occasional camel and water buffalo) in species-specific habitats. But as the operation grew, so did the human population surrounding it. These days, the wheat fields flanking the sanctuary are only a few minutes’ drive from new housing developments sprouting like spurge on the outskirts of Keenesburg and Hudson…