I-Team: Bear Cub Mystery at Yellow River Game Ranch
By: Randy Travis
Aired: Oct 17 2016
LILBURN, Ga. -Through the years, one of the biggest attractions at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn has been the park's exhibit of Georgia black bears.
But former employees told state inspectors and the FOX 5 I-Team they still have questions years later over what happened when those bears... secretly gave birth.
Former employee Matt Chadwick worked at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn in 2012. He eventually lost his job after complaining about conditions at the long time family park: he claimed he saw animals neglected, abused and intentionally killed by workers. Ranch owners responded by saying they've had problem employees in the past, but all the animals have been cared for.
But Chadwick had another concern: the Georgia black bears.
Every year the male was in there with four females, Chadwick remembered. They would breed.
According to his complaint to the Department of Natural Resources, Chadwick found a pair of newborn cubs one morning.
Well, I run up front, he recounted. I'm excited. That's when I was made aware they weren't allowed to let them breed. And if DNR came in there and you got two cubs, you're in trouble.
Ranch owner Reeves said they didn't know the female was old enough to breed. But we had a larger question. What happened to those cubs?
We didn't know what do with them and then they disappeared, Reeves explained.
Disappeared meaning what happened to them? I asked.
We assume the female ate them. Later I heard they might have been stolen.
But in his complaint to DNR in 2012, Chadwick told it differently. He said he asked his boss to have those cubs removed but I was told by ranch management that it would be better for the ranch if the cubs died because the Georgia Department of Natural Resources had warned the ranch not to allow the bears to breed and the ranch will not pay to have the bears neutered. Chadwick wrote he was told the cubs were crushed to death by the adults and he found them dead in the enclosure.
No one here killed them? I asked owner Reeves.
No, he responded. No.
According to Chadwick's DNR complaint, the next year he told the owner he once again found two newborn cubs in the bear enclosure.
I let them know, hey there's cubs up there, Chadwick told us. And if I come back in here Monday morning and those cubs aren't there, I'm going to report it. And Monday morning when I showed up for work, they met me on the front porch and had me escorted off the property.
Ranch owner Reeves said Chadwick was actually fired for posting negative comments on social media, and he knows nothing about a second set of bear cubs during that time.
DNR took no action, even though the previous game ranch owner admitted in a local newspaper their bears had bred in captivity. It turned out another former employee insists he also warned DNR years earlier about the same concern: bear cubs disappearing at the Yellow River Game Ranch.
It was a very awkward situation cause you could tell the uncomfortableness in the air that something was going on, Mike Little remembered.
Little said he made a phone complaint to DNR about bear cubs in 2009. The state could find no record of his call, but Little was so concerned he filed a written one this year. According to that complaint, Little came in early one morning to find people at the bear enclosure carrying something moving in a burlap sack. He said a veteran employee told him the Bear Cubs that were being born were being removed from the cage/mother.
That was three years before Chadwick's DNR complaint. The two said they've never met. Neither knew the other's story when they talked to the FOX 5 I-Team.
There is no way he would know the same things and be aware of the same conditions that I was aware of at those two different points in time, stressed Little.
The ranch's previous owner Art Rilling admitted they'd had a few bear cubs over the years, but insisted they all died of natural causes or disappeared.
If someone said they were killing bear cubs that would have gone up pretty high on the list, said a DNR spokesman, but the department could not find any record of investigating either employee's complaint.
Current owner Codi Reeves said the ranch eventually paid to have their lone male bear sterilized. He died a few years ago. Both former employees say they lost their jobs trying to reveal the bear cub secret.
FULL STORY:
I-Team: Critics to Yellow River Game Ranch: Clean it Up
By: Randy Travis
Aired: Sep 12 2016
LILBURN, Ga. -
For many who grew up in metro Atlanta, a visit to the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn was always a treat.
But these days the iconic petting zoo has faced criticism not just from animal rights activists and government inspectors, but from those kids who are now adults and see the ranch in a much different light.
The Yellow River Game Ranch has been around for more than 50 years, moving from Stone Mountain Park in 1982 to its present location along Highway 78. If you haven't been there in a while, you may not recognize it today.
Customers come up to me and tell me, what happened to this place? said former employee Matt Chadwick.
The Yellow River Game Ranch markets itself as a chance to meet wildlife on a close and personal basis. You can touch some of the animals... feed them. Learn about what makes them special to Georgia.
We're not bad people, insisted owner Codi Reeves. We're not trying to do bad things here.
But for years state and federal inspectors have responded to complaints Reeves' animals are neglected, starved, and even intentionally killed.
Complaints from people like former employee Chadwick.
I was willing to be fired if need be, Chadwick stressed. It didn't matter. I was going to speak up regardless.
According to his 2012 complaint to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Chadwick claimed ranch workers intentionally injured or killed the animals, often forgot to feed them, and had a deer choke to death on a bag fed by a customer.
Chadwick told us he worked there while on federal probation at the time for a drug conspiracy conviction. Ranch owner Reeves admitted some workers may have neglected the animals, but still called Chadwick a disgruntled employee.
Help's hard to find these days, Reeves told us. But even four years later, Chadwick is still defiant.
If seeing animals killed in a rusty facility and animals choked to death on plastic bags makes me a disgruntled, yes, I was very disgruntled, he agreed.
In his complaint to PETA and the DNR, Chadwick attached photos of dead or malnourished animals he said he found during his 18 months as a park employee. And he blamed lackadaisical employees and management too cheap to do anything more than the bare minimum.
There's so much that goes behind the scenes in that environment, it's almost sickening, Chadwick remembered.
A DNR spokesperson said there's no record of any action taken by the state regarding Chadwick's complaint and could not explain why.
The ranch actually put part of the blame for its financial troubles on the state itself. The destination's biggest attraction used to be the dozens of deer allowed to wander among guests and their children. But five years ago DNR said that was wrong; such interaction could be dangerous to the deer and the public. The state required the ranch build a fence around the deer, treating them like any other animal in a zoo.
A lot of people that came here years ago when the deer roamed freely and there were a lot more animals, Reeves explained. If they come back now, they're disappointed.
State and federal inspectors still come back. A lot. In February of this year, the US Department of Agriculture found the ranch had corrected violations discovered in a January inspection.
But just two months later, the USDA cited the ranch again for seven more violations including sanitation, feeding and multiple examples of sharp edges in the fence line that could injure the animals.
So this month a FOX 5 family paid their own visit to the ranch. We spotted sharp edges, unclean pens and rocks piled up to keep the bobcat pen door from accidentally opening.
We also saw a coyote running in seemingly endless circles inside his small enclosure.
Do you think it's psychologically healthy for this coyote to just keep going around and around and around? It's a small pen, I asked the ranch owner.
I don't know, Reeves replied. I'm not a coyote psychologist.
A bigger pen is planned, but no one knows when it will be ready.
Do you just not have the money to fix it up?
Money and help, Reeves answered.
The problems haven't been limited to animals. Last year, a ranch visitor sued after failing to notice a crudely written warning sign on the unlocked door of the women's restroom.
When she was walking to the door she was holding her child's hand, looking down at the child and she looked up, opened the door and fell through, attorney Jeff Jonap recounted.
Fell through the exposed floor still under construction. Attorney Jeff Jonap won an $11,000 settlement for his client even though he generally doesn't take cases that small.
But even the owner admits this may be as good as it gets.
How long can you keep this up? I asked.
I don't know, he said, searching for the right words. Then Reeves found them.
It's no longer fun.
FULL STORY:
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