Animal lovers and furries rejoice: four new websites focusing on animals have been restored! These websites all come from archives taken from the K-CD series, a collection of magazine cover disks that were widely distributed in Scandinavia.
www.wolfpark.org
While wolves historically lived throughout the Great Lakes region, by the early 20th century they had been all but wiped from existence due to being targeted as a result of them preying on livestock. Today, they only remain in its northernmost areas. Wolf Park is one place that seeks to help remedy this. It’s a facility located in Indiana dedicated not only to the conservation and research of wolves, but also to the education of the masses regarding this oft-maligned canine. The website provides lots of information about the animal’s lifestyle as well as the park’s inhabitants circa 1998.
www.cathouse-fcc.org
The Cat House — official name being the Feline Conservation Center — was a compound in Rosamond, California that acted as a breeding center for endangered wildcats in an effort to help revitalize dwindling populations. This was especially true of the critically endangered Amur Leopard; at the time of this website’s snapshot, it was estimated that only thirty individuals remained in the wild. With the help of programs such as this one, today’s population is estimated to be quadruple that.
Unfortunately, the facility closed its doors in 2023 due to the impact of the COVID pandemic.
www.foxbox.org
This website is dedicated to foxes, specifically in regards to their cultural legacy. There’s stories and legends about foxes, pictures of foxes in media, lyrics of songs about foxes, and even some foxy desktop toys for those of you running ancient Linux distros.
www.lpzoo.com
The official website for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, IL, circa 1998. This is the one that’s far and away the most exciting to me personally, as I’ve actually been to this zoo before. Chicago was only an hour and a half drive away from the home I grew up in, so this was always a place the family would visit whenever we took a trip down to the city. Due to that, it was a bit of a shock to see this website being preserved on a Scandinavian shovelware collection, but the more I learned about it the more sense it began to make. It seems to have been highly regarded and a valued source of information about animals in its time, not to mention that it’s all presented in a visually pleasing and easily navigable fashion (an achievment for 1998!). It won loads of awards and many of its pages regarding specific species were listed in web portals such as Yahoo, so it isn’t all that weird that it would’ve garnered attention from abroad.
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Hopefully these websites help fill in the void a bit when it comes to websites about animals. Conservation efforts were in the public consciousness much more in the 90s than they are today, so it’s only right that there be at least a few websites with a focus on animals if the early web experience is to be properly replicated.
