SEQUIM — A California animal protection group says that visitors to the Olympic Game Farm last year were in an unsafe environment.

But a member of the Beebe family that owns and operates the popular game farm on Ward Road says the Sacramento, Calif.-based Animal Protection Institute is “off base” with its complaints to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Animal Protection Institute, in a letter to the Agriculture Department following a visit by API members last fall, said a bear enclosure had a “very crude and ineffectual safety barrier,” giving the bears “no real privacy or shelter from the elements.”

A rhinoceros “with what appeared to be an exceptionally long horn was in a pen with a wood and wire fence that looked inadequate to pen the animal, the Animal Protection Institute, or API, said.

A “perimeter fence” around the farm, the API letter said, was “only around 4 feet high, in violation of the Animal Welfare Act requirement of 8 feet.

The letter was sent to the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s legislative and public affairs representative, Darby Holladay, and urged an investigation of the game farm.

‘Under review’

“The API complaint is under review,” Holladay wrote in an e-mail to the PDN.

“If the Western Regional office believes there are possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act, the complaint will be referred to [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s] Investigative and Enforcement Service for a formal investigation.”

Alice Beebe, a member of the family that has owned Olympic Game Farm since before it opened to the public in 1972, dismissed API’s complaints.

“They’re way off base,” she said.

The bears are no longer kept in the enclosure where Wilder saw them last fall. They have been moved into the yard, where an electric fence encircles them, Beebe said.

“Bears are extremely intelligent animals. They know what an electric fence can do,” she said.

The fence also keeps people from venturing too close, she added.

Predatory animals — lynx, bobcat, two Bengal tigers, 12 wolves, six cougars including the blue-eyed Jasmine, among others — are in padlocked pens.

The game farm’s 25 bears live in the yard or in roofed enclosures. Visitors can walk up to the enclosures, but they are not permitted to get out of their cars when cruising past the yard, Beebe said.

Farm’s fence 8 feet tall

She said the visitors from the institute mistook a lower interior fence for the farm’s perimeter fence. She pointed out the fence that encloses the farm is 8 feet tall, as required by the Agriculture Department.

“We’re working on a secondary fence that will go 3 feet in from the first one,” Beebe added.

It will be finished by summer, she said.