The zoo's first life began in 1968, when Ellis Daw opened Dartmoor Wildlife Park on the Goodamoor Estate his family had bought in 1948. The 17th-century Goodamoor House at the heart of the property had been built by Paul Ourry Treby; his family had lived on the estate until the late 19th century. Daw acquired lions and tigers, jaguars and pumas, and designed and built many of the enclosures himself. He ran the park for nearly four decades. In 2001, the Captive Animals Protection Society published a report criticising conditions at the park, and most of the charges were eventually dropped. But one stuck: Daw was found guilty of breeding Siberian tigers outside an organised breeding programme, and of keeping them in poor conditions. The zoo's licence was revoked. It closed to the public on 23 April 2006.

Mee bought the park in August 2006 for 1.1 million pounds. He had no zoo-keeping experience. His wife Katherine had been diagnosed with a brain tumour shortly before the purchase; she died several months later, aged 40. The film loosely based on the book moves her death before the zoo purchase, partly for narrative compression and partly because the truth was too sharp to bear on screen. A four-part BBC documentary called *Ben's Zoo* followed Mee and his staff through the rebuild in 2006. The park needed 500,000 pounds for refurbishment to reopen. Mee got it. The zoo opened to the public again in July 2007. In September 2014 it became a charity, the Dartmoor Zoological Society, focused on conservation, education and research.

The 2011 film *We Bought a Zoo*, directed by Cameron Crowe with a script rewritten from Aline Brosh McKenna's original adaptation, transported the story to the United States and renamed the zoo Rosemoor Wildlife Park. Matt Damon played Mee; Scarlett Johansson, Colin Ford, and Maggie Elizabeth Jones rounded out the family. Mee and his real children have cameo roles in the film, a small acknowledgement that the place they live is the place the cameras invented. Real life kept providing its own scenes. In July 2016, a Carpathian lynx escaped from the zoo and roamed the Devon countryside for more than three weeks before being recaptured.

The zoo today holds more than seventy-three species. The breeding programmes include Amur leopards, Asian short-clawed otters, and Carpathian lynx, all classed somewhere on the endangered spectrum. Visitors encounter African lions, Amur tigers, geladas, Iberian wolves, Brazilian tapirs, and capybaras alongside more compact stars: Kirk's dik-diks, white-faced saki monkeys, and Patagonian maras. The bird collection includes laughing kookaburras, scarlet macaws, and grey crowned cranes. In April 2025 the zoo launched annual passes free with every general admission ticket, valid for twelve months, an experiment in turning visitors into members. The granite-walled Goodamoor House still presides over the grounds, with a block of inscribed granite beside it that has become part of the family's daily walk.