♪ >> We are an animal safari park.

We are in between Paoli and French Lick, which is part of Orange County.

Wilstem is proud to be located in southern Indiana.

It's just a unique option for our state and for our region, really, to be offering the conservation efforts that we are here, and just to be bringing guests in and educating them in our home state about how different we are versus other facilities that they may have been to in the past.

We bring north of 100,000 visitors annually here to our facility.

So we have a lot of people, a lot of foot traffic coming into town to come see us.

We have several experiences and tours that they can do here when they're visiting.

So our drive-thru safari is very popular.

There's two options for that.

There's a self-guided, where you drive through in our own vehicle, and then there's also a guided wagon safari tour option as well.

Each are great.

You know, both very, very popular.

The wagons are very popular with younger children.

It's a little bit more interactive, led by one of our guides.

They are explaining the animals that you are seeing as you are going through the safari.

So it's just a little bit more informative in that manner.

But the self-guided is also a great option.

So in the safari, we have a wide variety of animals there.

We've got birds.

We've got ostriches and emus.

And if you've been here, you know the emus because if you've done the safari, you've definitely met them.

They love the feed.

We also have camels that are also very, very popular.

They love to be fed as well.

We've got llamas.

We've got Nilgai, which is an antelope breed.

We've got eland, which is another antelope breed.

We've got fallow deer and sika deer.

We've got all kinds of different cattle breeds out there.

We've got bison, a growing herd of bison that's been very popular.

We've got elk.

Just all kinds of thing.

Aoudad, which are also -- they kind of look like goats.

They've got curved horns.

They're called Barbary sheep, and we are always looking to expand our options as far as our safari animals go, and just having fun out there and getting some different species that you may not see at other facilities.

In the animal safari, a lot of times our guests will come in mentioning the emus or the camels, and we know their names and we're able to tell them about their names.

And oftentimes, people will email us afterwards with pictures of animals from the safari and say, who was this one, and things like that.

So it's just a lot more personal.

A lot more intimate than -- versus like a zoo or something like that, where you are just going to see the animals from a distance.

So the Roos and Crew building has all kinds of our smaller animals in it.

You're going to see primates that consist of our cotton-top tamarins, our squirrel monkeys, our roughed lemur.

We've got a binturong in there, which is also called a bearcat.

We've got a couple sloths that are showstoppers.

They are very, very popular with our encounter guests.

We've got several different reptiles.

We've got our kangaroos that guests love, and they can actually meet in our mini kangaroo encounters.

We've got tortoises and turtles.

We actually just recently built a turtle enclosure that's been very popular with guests to be able to see those turtles.

We have armadillos that recently had a baby.

We did a contest on Facebook for our guests to be able to name him.

His name is Bowser, who is doing fantastic.

We've got a couple of giraffes in that location as well.

Burt's been here for years, and we have a new 16-month-old baby giraffe.

His name is Daktari, and he recently joined us.

So we're super excited to have him.

He's doing great with guests and is becoming best friends with Burt very quickly.

That's kind of the animals in the Roos and Crew building.

So what makes Wilstem different is we always tell people that when they come to Wilstem, they come to actually meet our animals, not just see them.

So our encounters are super interactive, hands on.

They are up close and personal.

Our animals have names.

So when they leave, they know that they met Luna the sloth or Burt the giraffe.

It's just a lot more interactive and personal in that manner, our animal encounters are.

So all of our animal encounters are driven completely by educating the guests, and talking with them about the specific species that they are seeing and that they are meeting.

So our keepers are fantastic.

They are all very well educated on those specific animals, and they do a great job of giving facts to the guests as they present their encounter to them.

The encounters are also very interactive, in that there's always a question portion where the guests can ask any questions that they might have about that specific animal.

Our keepers are happy to answer those questions, and that's really how the encounters become interactive in that manner, and basically focus completely on educating the guests while they're here.

So all of our encounters are unique to our facility.

So we've actually created those all of ourselves.

And like I said, they're very hands on.

So our goal is for guests to leave here with an experience that they remember for years to come, that they are laughing through, that they are talking about with their children and grandchildren and so on and so forth and their neighbors and spreading the word about what we're doing here.

So they are structured to be interactive, to be hands on and to be educational in the manner that they can take something away with them when they leave our park.