Fort Bragg civil affairs unit goes vertical for local zoo

By Leslie Ozawa
95th CA Bde. PAO

April 7, 2011

	Photo by Leslie Ozawa/95th CA Bde. PAO Aloha Safari Zoo staffer Tiffany Tremont has a cuddly moment with one of the goats in the zoo’s petting menagerie. Fort Bragg Soldiers often visit the zoo, which is home to about 400 wild and domesticated animals, including lions, camels and zebras.

“It was a great training opportunity for my company to come up and volunteer some hours, since I had some personnel just graduate from an engineering construction course,” said 1st Sgt. Jeremiah Grow of Company F, 91st Civil Affairs Battalion.

A zoo may seem an unlikely place to do military training, but word about the Aloha Safari Zoo is spreading well beyond the reach of its country road location in Hoke County that is home to almost 400 wild and domesticated animals. Their Facebook page gains dozens of new fans every week.

Zoo volunteer and tour director Tiffany Tremont described what people see at the lower and upper halves of the 60-acre zoo, where she takes visitors on two and a half mile tours on weekends.

“We take folks on our safari tour to see camels, zebras, ostriches, emus, rheas, mouflons (sheep), black buck antelopes, watusi cattle, buffalo, élans, neagaz, pot-bellied pigs and four-horned Jacob sheep,” said Tremont. “Up here, we have a lion, tigers, a bear, a beautiful wolf, an arctic fox, and a complete petting zoo for kids to feed goats and sheep.”

Tremont said that the Aloha Safari Zoo is a sanctuary for rescued animals. “We take in exotic type animals that have no place to go. We allow them to come here and live with us.”

“People don’t realize exotics are easy to purchase on the black market. They get them young. They grow up, and they become their own wrecking crew.”

By word of mouth, exotic pet owners hear about the rescue sanctuary in the small farm town of Cameron about an hour northeast of Fort Bragg.

The zoo is certified to care for up to 600 animals and is regularly inspected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure it meets federal wild animal care guidelines.

The sanctuary had its beginnings when the owner, Lee Crutchfield, received a capuchin monkey as a prize after one of his show horses won a top prize twenty years ago.

“I didn’t know much about them and then got educated on monkeys and why they don’t belong in the pet sector. And that started a whole process,” Crutchfield said.

Crutchfield had loved animals as a child and went to veterinary school to become a vet. He started raising miniature horses, competing in national horse shows, and eventually became a judge himself on the miniature horse show national circuit.

Crutchfield was successful raising horses and started his exotic animal sanctuary about the same time he got his farm. Today, the horse farm and animal sanctuary is operated daily by a staff of five, including three women. It also relies on a small group of volunteers who labor on weekends, when the zoo is also open to the public for a small admission fee. The zoo has five local veterinarians on call to help with the animals.

The rescue sanctuary got its first animal, a monkey, when the son of an elderly woman inherited her monkey when she passed away in Florida.

“The monkey was living in a dog kennel, stuck her arm out and got attacked by a dog,” Tremont recalled. “She had lost her finger; her arm was broken, and without proper vet care, lost all her hair.”

“Then the word got out,” Tremont said. “It’s amazing what people have in their backyards. We took in a kinkachu a month ago, from a lady in Tennessee. It’s like a honey bear. She got it at an exotic pet store but it wasn’t healthy. She caught a disease, and her whole Family caught the disease from the kinkachu.”

The Aloha Safari Zoo is not unfamiliar to people at Fort Bragg. Tremont said that the zoo has gotten some reptiles and even tarantulas from deploying Soldiers. Fort Bragg medics and vets also come to the zoo for hands-on training on animals like camels and African cattle, found in countries to which they are deployed.

After stopping by the zoo to check on training being done by their medics, Co. F commander, Maj. Dante Antonelli, and Grow, his first sergeant, found that they could both assist the zoo and conduct training at the same time. They saw that the zoo needed some serious repair work and signed up the company’s Soldiers for a full day of building projects at the zoo.

Antonelli said his team sergeants were the first civil affairs Soldiers to graduate from an engineering course at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, to learn techniques in building “anything going up,” including framing, wall and roof construction.

“This was a good situation for both parties,” Antonelli said. “It gives us an opportunity to exercise our training in a realistic setting — things that actually need fixing — just like you would see when you are deployed. Generally, you’re not going to go to places that are just bare ground. There’s usually something going on that needs repair and fixing. And this also helps the zoo, with their very minimal staff,” he said.

“This is the kind of relationship we need to foster, and it goes right along with civil affairs missions, which is working with the populations. I think this is a great opportunity for both sides, the kind of things we need to continue to do,” Antonelli said.

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