The Gales: Wildlife Refuge - Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

In mid-September, we took a fun little trip to the GW Exotic Animal Memorial Park in Wynnewood, OK. It was a little far for a day-trip with a 2-month-old and a 2-year-old, but in the end we agreed that it was worth it. We went with Maria and her kids, and it was a lot of fun.

We were skeptical when we pulled up. It looked extremely small and just unimpressive. But we had purchased tickets, so in we went. They had a lot more animals to look at than we would have guessed judging from the outside. However, that meant that they had smaller cages or areas than we thought would be good for each animal. We saw so many animals and were able to get really close to them. Here's some of the animals that we saw.

Lions

I didn't realize how short the lioness' legs were. But they are very pretty animals.

This poor old guy looked like he had had a very rough life.

I absolutely loved the colors of this lion's mane. It was beautiful!

He was so big, too. We took this picture to get an idea of his size in relation to us.

Tigers

They had so many tigers.This one seemed to hear something interesting. She kept standing up and looking in the same general direction.

We were snapping pictures when she started to lower her back legs. We weren't sure what she was going to do. She ended up just taking a seat. It cracked us all up. She sat like this for a minute or two.

This is one of my favorites. He looks so content.

Bears

They had two bear cubs that were both so cute.

One kept wanting to suck its thumb.

Caught red-handed!

This guy needed a good scratch.

There were many other animals, too. We don't want to share too many pictures, but we'll share a couple more.

We saw raccoons, which of course we have seen before. But have you ever seen an albino raccoon? We hadn't. I wouldn't have guessed it was a raccoon if it wasn't named and wasn't with the other raccoons.

There were some kangaroos.

They had some baby alligators inside a stinky building. The guy pictured below was actually quite small, but thanks to our camera's nice zoom, we were able to get a pretty good shot of him. He was probably about 9-12" in length.