I know this is very long, but PLEASE read EVERY WORD OF THIS REVIEW.......
If I could give this 0 stars I would. I HATED it. I am a kindergarten teacher and thought it would be a great experience for our students to go to a petting farm. We have about 115 students just from our school alone. When we got to the farm, there were about 3 or 4 other schools,give or take about 500 children. We ate our picnic lunch (honey bees were flying everywhere! all over the lunches, etc.) caused a lot of chaos and kids running away from bees.
After lunch, we waited for our tour guide to take us to see the animals. Our school got split up into 2 groups to make the tours smaller (about 50 students per group)
Tour guide was obnoxious and unpleasant. When she led us to the animals, my heart sank. They were in tiny pens and the children had a free-for-all where they all went in at the same time and pet the same animal(s).
I could easily speak about the horrible experiences with each animal, but I will leave you with the worst ones and you'll get the idea.. I especially hated when we came to the baby ducklings, piglets, cow and puppies.
The baby ducklings were thrown into tiny boxes in the ground where the kids were reaching from the outside of the box and grabbing at them from all angels. There were about 5 ducklings in each box all huddled together in the center not wanting to be touched. Without any malice intentions, one of my students picked one up, and threw it to the ground because she got startled.. she felt really bad. This is just what little children do. They don't know any better and they need to be taught/explained how to hold/touch animals before getting thrown into a situation like that. The poor baby ducklings were terrified!! It was so obvious they were not taken care of properly. No one was supervising the animals as the children were touching them either.
Then we went into a chicken pen and the kids were chasing the chickens all around. The tour guide was in there grabbing at the chickens, scooping them and throwing them into the kids arms like they weren't even live animals. The tour guide looked as if she was having more fun grabbing at the chickens than the children. The feathers were damaged, they looked exhausted and sick..
With each new animal we moved to, the tour guide just called over to the kids "come on, lets go!" and the kids were running all around out of control behind her. I tried lining my class of 26 up to calmly make our way over to the next pen, but NO, this woman spoke over me and my students went running behind her because well, they are 5 and don't know any better. (THIS IS HOW ACCIDENTS HAPPEN AND HOW CHILDREN GET LOST).
Then we saw the pigs, the piglets (about 9 of them) were all on the mother, feeding. I was surprised the children were allowed to go in during that time.(there were at least 20-30 kids at a time in there all reaching and grabbing at them.) The only rule was "No picking up the piglets" but there wasn't a staff member inside monitoring it, so the children did what they wanted.
Daisy, the cow, was chained up under a wooden bar where the (50+) kids line up and, one at a time, got to milk it (one squirt each). This poor cow's utters were stretched out. I felt so bad for the cow.
At the end of our visit, we got to hold 3 very tiny and adorable (but dirty, and untaken care of) Yorkie puppies. They weren't very playful at all. They were so tired of being handled that they weren't much fun. They looked sad, and the saddest thing of all was they they didn't even have names. :*
To top it off, there were no hand washing stations, only hand sanitizers that were gross. The students were putting their hands in their mouth, picking their nose, wiping their eyes, all with these nasty animal germs on their hands. Who knows what diseases are on these animals.
In closing, If you calculate how many children were there just that one day alone, and multiply that every day the farm is open.. that's a lot of people and a lot of animal handling...
These animals are slowly dying and being replaced just for the ILLUSION of this fun petting zoo. The animals don't even live on the farm, they are shipped there from their real farms for 4 months a year. I bet most of the baby animals don't even survive the entire season.
How can this be a child-friendly farm when these animals are not being treated well. We are not showing good examples to our children if they see how animals there are being treated. I even had a few students that didn't want to touch the animals because they didn't like the way they were treated. THEY ARE 5 AND THEY KNOW BETTER. Most of the kids don't realize it, but I certainly did. There are much better ways to handle this, SHAME ON THEM.
I hope this was insightful and educational. Please don't go there in large groups and if you do plan on taking your child there, or students there, just be warned. It is not what you think it is. read more