Qualla: Dartmoor Zoological Park

Dartmoor Zoological Park: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D&LDartmoorZoo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four days after Benjamin Mee and his family moved into the closed-down Dartmoor Wildlife Park in August 2006, the jaguar escaped. He was eventually anaesthetised after leaping into the nearby tiger enclosure, which is one way of getting two big cats into the same frame. The escape became, in time, just one episode in a story that Mee would publish two years later as *We Bought a Zoo*, the book that became the Cameron Crowe film starring Matt Damon. The real zoo is a 33-acre property on the south-west edge of Dartmoor, just north of the village of Sparkwell, and it is open to visitors today.

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Image: D&LDartmoorZoo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dartmoor Zoological Park: Ellis Daw's Wildlife Park

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D&LDartmoorZoo, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 l...

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Image: D&LDartmoorZoo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dartmoor Zoological Park: The Family that Bought a Zoo

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit allen watkin from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 th...

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Image: allen watkin from London, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Dartmoor Zoological Park: Hollywood and a Lynx on the Loose

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KiraDartmoorZoo, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 Mag...

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Image: KiraDartmoorZoo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dartmoor Zoological Park: Seventy-Three Species on the Edge of Dartmoor

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KiraDartmoorZoo, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

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Image: KiraDartmoorZoo | CC BY-SA 4.0