Exotic Resort Zoo

The Exotic Resort Zoo is a family run animal park of one hundred and thirty seven acres off US 281, a few miles north of Johnson City, where zebras, camels, kangaroos, kudu, oryx and bison share the Hill Country pastures. It opened in 1995. Most visitors see it from a trailer pulled by a tractor, on a guided tour of forty five minutes to an hour that works through seven fenced pastures, and riders can buy feed to hand to the animals that crowd the trailer. Visitors may also drive the loop in their own cars. The park keeps more than seven hundred animals of some fifty species, whose wild ancestors come from every continent but Antarctica.

Among them are dama gazelles, a North African species listed as critically endangered in the wild, and white elk. By the family's own account the zoo was never planned: Dennis and Marilyn Bacque, who describe themselves as Cajuns, bought the land as a place to retire, and it began to fill with animals after Marilyn brought home a baby elk named Dottie. The park has stayed in the family: the founders' son, Donavan Trahan, is a co-owner, and their granddaughter Kayli Cantwell helps run it.

Exotic game ranching is an old Texas business. The King Ranch began releasing nilgai in 1930, axis deer arrived from India in 1932 and blackbuck followed in the same decade, and by the Handbook of Texas's account the state holds more exotic big game than anywhere else in North America, more than half of it on the Edwards Plateau and most of it behind game proof fences.