If you grew up in the Capital District, at one point in time you visited the Catskill Game Farm. You saw all the animals in the cages, you visited the petting zoo, and you had a great time doing so.
In 2006, the Catskill Game Farm permanently closed. The animals were auctioned off (I think I recall that Tommy Hilfiger purchased one of the rhinos), and the property remained fallow. There were plans to restore the property into a campground, or a bed and breakfast, or some other attraction. But as of now, the former Game Farm exists only for scheduled urban exploration visits, and the occasional “starry night” astrophotography excursion.
Trust me . In 2019, I undertook such an astrophotography adventure. Blogged about it here.
But in 2022, someone discovered a tremendous cache of 16mm home films in a portion of the Game Farm property. And upon reviewing those films … ugh. What we knew as a peaceable kingdom may have in fact existed as an animal breeding program with ties to Nazi Germany.
If I tried to sell this as a movie script, I could get laughed out of Hollywood.
But these films prove otherwise.
According to the Catskill Overlook newspaper (link here), the film footage – along with interviews from former Game Farm employees – revealed that the Game Farm’s animals were subjected to horrific breeding conditions. The footage and interviews are now compiled into a documentary, American Zoo, that recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Here’s the logline from the Observer newspaper. Please sit down and make sure you are well-protected before you read this.
“The film tells the story of Heinz Heck Jr., a German scientist who joined the zoo in 1959 and was obsessed with trying to breed extinct animals back to life. Heck was particularly interested in reviving the aurochs, a large species of wild cattle that went extinct in Europe in the 1600s. The zoo kept his experiments hidden from regular visitors, and the breeding program resulted in serious birth defects in many of the animals.”
That’s right. This person, Heinz Heck Jr., was trying to bring extinct animals back to life with unsafe breeding programs.
And it gets worse.
“The documentary also examines how the Catskill Game Farm sold animals to hunting ranches and shows, in one of its most disturbing montages, cattle from Heckโs breeding program being butchered for hamburger meat.”
Fuck. This is absolutely frightening. And sickening.
At the moment, American Zoo has not scheduled any other screenings outside of Tribeca, but there is at least one YouTube review of the film. I’ve linked it here.
Trust me on this. I’ve blogged in the past about the horrors of small, roadside zoos that try to draw people in because there’s a rare monkey or a gazelle on the property. And it’s never worked in their favor.
And yeah, those were small operations. I would never have thought a large entity like the Catskill Game Farm would fall under that sinister aegis. No freakin’ way would I have ever thought so.
But … man, oh man … was I ever wrong. If even a single scintilla of truth exists about those Nazi animal experiments – or anything else on that property – it would destroy yet another childhood memory for me.
And I have so few of those left …
I can’t spare many more of them.
Chuck The Writer 