Quebec-made, electric bush cars will now take visitors through the park in an effort to cut down on emissions.
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Decades ago, the Parc Safari experience involved frantically rolling up the windows as monkeys went to town messing up visitors’ cars.
“They would rip off the windshield wiper, or they would take off the antenna, or they would tear the vinyl roof off,” said park owner Jean-Pierre Ranger.
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The monkeys were relegated to the non-driving portion of the park years ago. However, 2024 marks the first year that visitors can no longer drive their own cars through the safari experience. The zoo opened its doors for its 52nd season on Friday, in bright sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s, marking the first time visitors will instead tour the grounds in electric bush cars made by St-Jérôme’s Lion Electric.
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“The idea of going all electric was to lower the impact on the environment,” Ranger said.
Clad in a khaki button-down T-shirt and a blue Tilley vest, the white-haired Ranger was seen proudly visiting the sites of the park all day on his electric bicycle.
Ranger was one of the park’s first employees when it opened in 1972, eventually becoming president and owner of the place. He sold it, but was offered to buy it back in 2002. He and his wife re-mortgaged their home and the community raised roughly $500,000 from local benefactors.
“It’s a good feeling,” Ranger said. “Opening is always a day when you rejoice, even if you’re tired from all the work you did in the months to get to this point.”
The Lion 6 trucks were ordered specially for the park, and it cost roughly $4 million to make the conversion, with about half those funds coming from government sources. The park also has several new buildings, including washrooms under construction in the area where the bush cars depart.
“The idea is the same: You can still get up close and feed the animals, but you now can do it from the bush trucks,” Ranger said.
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On Friday, guests got to see water buffaloes, elephants, and gnus from a safe distance, while two-hump camels, dromedaries, zebras and even giraffes went right up to visitors who brought cucumbers, celery, lettuce and other greens recommended on the Parc Safari website.
The sixth place in the world to build such a zoo experience, Parc Safari is known as both an educational experience for its visitors and a place of species conservation.
That second mission is close to Ranger’s heart, and he’s proud of the birth of giraffe Stella in 2019, who on Friday was seen strutting along with her mother, Kigalie. The park also boasts an impressive birth rate of cheetahs, two of which were sent back to live in a nature reserve in Zimbabwe in 2021.
“The mission of an organization such as ours is to have large herds of animals,” Ranger said. “Zoos will keep one male and one female of each species, and sometimes they will have offspring, but they don’t have the space in a metropolitan environment to have large herds.”
The park’s remaining cheetahs were not on display Friday, as the feline habitat, which also includes lions, is undergoing renovations.
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