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While Animal Kingdom might be the Walt Disney theme park with the least amount of rides to go on, it certainly makes up for that with its vast amount of animals from around the globe. But what happens if one of them gets loose? It's quite the rare occurrence for anything life-threatening to happen at the Happiest Place on Earth, but I just learned a bizarre fact about Animal Kingdom that’s associated with a potential animal emergency.
At Walt Disney theme parks, the bathrooms are specifically designed to not have exterior entrance doors. This is an intentional way to allow crowd control to run smoothly when people enter and exit the facilities without any bottleneck going on. However, Disney’s Animal Kingdom is the only one of them to actually have exterior doors on all their bathrooms as a special precaution. Apparently, in the unlikely event that a dangerous animal does get loose, park employees can ask guests to hide in these bathrooms and lock the doors shut.
This is pretty wild, right? It’s actually a rather ingenious way to have an evacuation location on the premises that is otherwise functional. This fact has previously been confirmed by a Disney cast member on TikTok and just resurfaced on my feed via an Instagram post.
Not only does this knowledge absolutely have me thinking about Animal Kingdom in a totally different way, I never totally realized the other bathrooms at other Walt Disney theme parks simply don’t have doors. Animal Kingdom isn’t a zoo where all the animals are in cages. They rather have fences, moats or other structures that look natural to their environment to keep them in their section of the park. It totally makes sense though for there to be an additional precaution like this.
There’s nothing really to worry about considering I’ve never really heard about an animal causing danger to guests before at the park, but there have been instances . For example, about a year ago, a Reddit user experienced a giraffe wandering into the safari road for a few minutes during one of the Kilimanjaro Safaris. The car paused for the giraffe before it was coaxed back to his section of the park, but, this is a pretty harmless situation. And, if it happened to me, my day would probably be made, honestly.
The more potentially dangerous animals like lions have deep moats separating them from guests, and specially designed terrain that they couldn’t escape if they tried. I don't know about you, but I love that Animal Kingdom allows the animals to roam without being constrained by a cage, and the Imagineers are sort of geniuses.
There are a lot of upcoming Walt Disney World attractions on the way, and Animal Kingdom will be gaining a new land called Tropical Americas. It’s expected to open sometime next year. Now that we both learned something new about its bathrooms, I know I will be seeing Animal Kingdom with new eyes.
