Rodbaston Animal Zone is home to around 750 animals and includes species from meerkats to monkeys, rabbits to alpacas, reptiles to owls plus much more. It opens to the public during weekends and school holidays as well as supports students at South Staffordshire College who study animal care and animal management. Students are able to put skills learnt in the classroom into action while working alongside qualified keepers and instructors.
Rodbaston Animal Zone was recently visited by inspectors as part of the BALAI directive which is a piece of European Legislation, regarding standards of health care, biosecurity, quarantine facilities and record keeping exhibited by a collection, and sets a strict guideline for animal imports and movements into and out of collections around Europe. To achieve and retain BALAI status, an animal collection must undergo a rigorous annual inspection by the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, which looks at all aspects of a collection’s health care, quarantine facilities, bio-security measures and the accuracy of record keeping.
Gill Collins, Rodbaston Animal Zone’s Operations Manager, says ” We’d like to share the excellent news that Rodbaston Animal Zone has once again, passed the BALAI inspection, which is vital for some of the exciting developments we are planning for the future. It’s great news to have achieved this again and demonstrates all the hard work that the Animal Keepers do behind the scenes to maintain the standards required to retain this status. Well done team.”
We are currently closed to the public in response to the recent announcements regarding COVID-19. We are looking forward to re-opening to the public as soon as it is safe for us to do so. Our exciting activities such as animal encounters, meet the keeper, junior and adult keeper experiences, birthday parties, craft sessions and much more will resume as soon as we are able to re-open to the public. We have lots of new animals for you to meet including lambs, micro pig and our American miniature horses. So please follow us on social media for updates of our animals and exciting news from our keepers – www.facebook.com/RodbastonAnimalZone
