When The Legend of the Lion King show opened in 1994 in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, it wasn’t the first time “the king of beasts” took up residence in The Vacation Kingdom of the World.

When WDW opened in 1971, there was a facility devoted to housing guests’ pets during their vacations. It was called Kal Kan Kennel Club.

The kennel was sponsored by Kal Kan Foods, a pet food company popular in the 1970s. The facility was located near the Ticket and Transportation Center, which is on the south side of the Seven Seas Lagoon, where the monorails, ferries and trams pick up and drop off guests

Kal Kan Kennels could accommodate up to 80 pets in different-sized metal cages, mostly dogs.

But a lion?

Ted Kellogg, who was in charge of all the on-property watercraft when Walt Disney World opened in 1971, tells a great story of the time a lion came calling.

“Some of the most interesting things that happened while I was in watercraft involved wild animals,” Kellogg said.

“I hired a guy named Mike Beaver to run Kal Kan Kennels. He was just back from Vietnam, where he was in the canine corps and he knew a lot more about dogs than I did.

“It was about 8 o’clock one night when I got a call from Bob Matheison [the vice president of operations for Walt Disney World at the time]. Bob said that there was a very unusual pet that a guest wanted to check in at the kennel and I needed to take care of it,” Kellogg said. “So I drove out to the kennel with Mike.

“The ‘pet’ turned out to be a 6-month-old African lion. He was in a wooden crate box with a sliding door and he was one ticked off lion. He was mean, nasty and smelled horrible!”

The lion was in the back of the guest’s Cadillac. Kellogg and Co. got the crate out of the car, placed it on a cart and took it to the back door of the kennel.

“This guest was staying at the Contemporary Resort with his family for a few days,” Kellogg said. “He bought the lion in Miami and was taking it back home to North Carolina as a pet for his children.”

With great effort, they managed to get the lion out of the crate and into the largest metal cage inside the kennel.

But as they did, the other animals inside the kennel became frightened.

“As this was going on, all the other pets in the kennel became very quiet,” Kellogg said. “They would just sit there and shake and quiver. Plus, it was instant diarrhea. They were just scared beyond belief.

“Well, we got the lion into the cage and he stunk to high heaven. Plus, there was crap everywhere. We spent most of the night washing down the kennel, cleaning all the cages.

“Finally, the stench was so bad, we brought in a fire hose and washed down the lion. We got a bunch of towels and threw them in with the lion so he could dry himself.

“We were afraid that the latches on the door wouldn’t hold him, so we took barrels that held Kal Kan dry food and we rolled them out and wedged them in front of the door so that there was no way the lion could get out.”

It turned out that the guest who owned the lion got sick. Instead of leaving in two days, he was at Walt Disney World for two weeks.

“And that lion raised hell the entire time. After two weeks, the guest finally left, but he didn’t want to drive the lion back to North Carolina in his car, so he hired one of the employees from Kal Kan to do the driving for him.

“We managed to get the lion back out to the guest’s car and we were never so relieved to get that big cat out of the kennel and away from Disney property.”

The hell-raising lion is long gone. And so, too, is The Legend of the Lion King show in the Magic Kingdom, as well as the Kal Kan Kennels.

There’s now an on-property facility called Best Friends Pet Care, located near the entrance to the Port Orleans Resort.

But lions are an integral part of the Kilimanjaro Safaris attraction at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. They can be found lounging on rocks in their open-air enclosure toward the end of the ride.

And then there’s the popular Festival of the Lion King show, which has been entertaining guests since the park opened in 1998 in two different locations.

Chuck Schmidt is an award-winning journalist and retired Disney cast member who has covered all things Disney since 1984 in both print and on-line. He has authored or co-authored eight books on Disney, including his On the Disney Beat, The Beat Goes On, Passport to Pixie Dust and his latest, Marty, Mickey and Me, all for Theme Park Press. He has written a regular blog for AllEars.Net, called Still Goofy About Disney, since 2015.

Comments (1)