Extending over 18 hectares (44 acres), including 14 of landscape garden, it offers the visitor the opportunity of observing more than 1600 animals of all kinds, divided into 145 species, over a distance of more than 4 kilometres (2.5 mi).

La Palmyre Zoo officially opened its doors in 1966, but the project really began in a semi-official way in 1957, thanks to the efforts of its founder, Claude Caillé.

In his twenties he met his future wife, Irene, whose brother had a small zoological gardens in Croustille, close to Limoges.

He left then to Kenya where, helped by Kĩkũyũ, he captured zebras, antelopes and giraffes, but did not have sufficient money to pay the taxes and the transportation for the animals.

This time the operation succeeded, and he returned then to France with a livestock of exotic animals, and settled in Palmyre in the heart of a forest of maritime pines and holm oaks, near the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean.

At that time, the animals of the zoo were regarded as forming members of the family and, thus, babies which mothers abandoned were suckled with feeding-bottles.

The probe carried out by the French Agency of medical safety of food (AFSSA) of Lyon highlighted the fact that the animal had bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known by the name "mad cow disease".

[2] Certain rare species, like Bali starling, from which there remain only some pairs in the world, needed particular care from a possible epizootic of aviary influenza.

Association manages a programme of European breeding in controlled environment (zoological gardens) and collects funds which are used for creation of a zone protected in Madagascar for the blue-eyed black lemur.

Among these list, one finds the gorilla of the plains, the orangutan of Borneo, the scimitar oryx, or the golden lion tamarin of South America.

Hardly less than about thirty years it still occupied the whole of Sahara, the oryx is today at the edge of extinction, victim of hunting (for its horns) and of the human activities.

Om March 11, 1999, fourteen individuals coming from seven European zoological gardens, including two males raised at the zoo of Palmyre, were reintroduced in Tunisia,[11] in the reserve of Sidi Toui, in order to form a reproductive core.

Today, the last wild populations remain mainly out of the protected reserves, in degraded zones subjected to human exploitation (deforestation, and agriculture).

In 1992, the zoo sent a family of tamarins lions to Brazil within the framework of a rescue operation of this species, threatened since the end of 1960 because of the forestry development and the extension of the human population.

[14] In France, since closing for maintenance of the zoological gardens of Vincennes, only the zoo of Palmyre controls the reproduction of the Asian elephants.

These animals, very abundant still a few decades ago, today are threatened by extinction, not only because of the destruction of their habitat, but especially due to poaching for their horns, which although being made up only of simple keratin, like the nails and the hair, are very coveted by Chinese traditional medicine or for the manufacture of handles of daggers in Yemen.