Top 5 in Top 10 10 Eerie Abandoned Animal Parks.
How the Stanley Park Zoo in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was founded is quite an interesting story: The superintendent for Stanley Park, Henry Avison, discovered an orphaned black bear cub on the grounds, so he chained the bear, like a dog, to a stump to keep him contained and safe.[4] Over the coming years, he captured more animals on the grounds that needed help and treatment. By the time the zoo officially opened in the early 1900s, there were over 50 animals, both native and exotic, that Avison had taken in or discovered abandoned, and people kept donating animals to the zoo’s collection, even after Avison’s death.In 1956, the zoo’s aquarium opened with penguins and otters, and in 1962, polar bears were donated to the zoo and quickly became the main attraction.In the 1990s, animal activists picketed against the zoo, stating that many of the cages were too small and that Vancouver’s weather was too harsh for many of the animals. To resolve this, the City of Vancouver decided to expand the zoo, but citizens voted against the expansion and called for the zoo to be shut down, so it did in 1996.Most of the animals were sent to the Greater Vancouver Zoo or relocated to the Stanley Park Children’s Farmyard (which was closed in 2011), but one animal was allowed to stay in the park—Tuk, the 36-year-old polar bear whose health was too poor to be moved. He died in 1997, and the zoo was officially closed.To this day, the polar bear pit still stands on the grounds and is currently repurposed as a salmon hatchery. Guests can still walk through the overgrown vegetation of where the zoo once was.