Ellis Daw, who has died aged 89, founded Dartmoor Wildlife Park in 1968 and spent the next 38 years doing battle with animal-rights activists, health-and-safety officials and the local council.
He had little time for regulation, and even less for campaigners such as the Captive Animals’ Protection Society. “They’re a bunch of idiots really,” he told the Plymouth Evening Herald. “They’re old biddies … standing there with their glasses and dressed funny.”
In the park’s early days Daw would wander around the centre of Plymouth with a tiger on a lead; in retirement he kept a mound of elephant dung in the corner of his sitting room.
He was given a conditional discharge in 2002 for illegally breeding...