From a Church Camel to George the Giraffe: Scott Allen on Building Pettit Creek Farms

Logan Lewis traded the studio couch for muck boots and a golf cart for episode 474 of Your Morning Drive, spending a full morning walking the pastures of Pettit Creek Farms in Cartersville with owner Scott Allen. What began as a look at a mob of kangaroos turned into a two-hour tour of nearly everything on the property: reindeer, camels, zebras, miniature cattle, a herd of point-two donkeys, and a giraffe named George who has his own heater. Along the way, Scott laid out three generations of family history, the accidental origin of a 26-camel herd, and the philosophy that keeps a farm this unusual actually in the black. "This is some really cool stuff," Logan told listeners before they'd even reached the first stop. "I've never been here before myself."

It's a Farm, Not a Zoo

Scott corrects people on this constantly, and he wasted no time correcting Logan too. Pettit Creek isn't a zoo, it's a working farm that happens to raise "alternative livestock." "Honey bees are farming. So is raising kangaroos, or zebras, or camels," Scott explained, folding reindeer, chickens, and a milk cow into the same operation. The farm breeds and sells its animals the way any livestock operation would, supplying private collectors, other farms, and zoos that need new breeding stock. When Logan asked how a university ends up drawing blood from a giraffe, Scott described a University of Georgia vet visit where his giraffe stood still on a halter and lead rope while six vet students worked on him. "He said, 'He's probably the gentlest giraffe I've ever been around in my life,'" Scott recalled. That gentleness, he said, comes from animals that are handled and "fooled with" constantly, which is also what makes them marketable.

From a Camel for a Church Play to Twenty-Six and Counting

The farm's camel herd, now 26 strong, started with what Scott called "my lie in church." A woman organizing a live nativity scene in Marietta asked if he had a camel to make the scene feel like "walking back into Bethlehem." He said yes on the spot, then went and found one — Sammy Camel, purchased from a man named Mike Jones in Killen, Alabama. From there the herd grew almost by accident: Sammy got too big for church appearances, so Scott bought a female, who eventually got too big too, so he bought another. "And here we are, 26 camels later," he said. The camels have since done more than nativity scenes — Scott and his crew have packed film equipment up Pine Mountain for a movie starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, and he still fields calls asking if he can train pack camels for productions shooting nearby.

George the Giraffe and a Zip Line Built to Feed Him

No animal on the farm gets more attention than George, a giraffe Scott has known since he was 12 to 14 months old — he's eight now. "Everybody talks about George," Scott said, even though the camels and reindeer pull their own weight with visitors. When Pettit Creek installed a mile and a half of zip lines in 2020, right before COVID shutdowns hit (Scott described frantically calling the bank to make sure a check had cleared before the world locked down), he insisted the line be routed directly over George's pasture rather than hidden from him, the way another zoo had required. Riders now toss George a treat every time they pass, and he's learned to listen for it. "Anytime you drive a machine down there, George is like, yeah, here we go," Scott said. "He hears the cables rattle on the thing."

A Farm Built on Land the Government Took

The property's story starts with Scott's grandfather, Raymond Allen, a blacksmith and farmer who was farming in Allatoona Pass when the federal government condemned the land. "They told my grandfather they'd rent it to us, or we'd just take it — it doesn't matter," Scott said. His grandfather moved everything to the current property with two mule-drawn wagons and a Model T truck, buying his own farm buildings back for a dollar so the government couldn't be sued if he got hurt tearing them down. The farm ran row crops and then cattle for decades before Scott, inspired partly by watching Hatari! with his kids, started adding kangaroos, then camels, then zebras — turning a cattle operation into the alternative-livestock farm it is today.

Running Sheep, a Torched Bison, and Other Livestock Lessons

Scott has decades of stories about animals being smarter than people expect. For 15 years at the Shrine Circus, his sheep Wooly led what staff called "the running of the sheep," guiding a parade of goats, a llama, and a pig back into their pen every single night without fail. He also described a bison that got its head stuck in a metal hay ring, requiring Scott and a few teenage farmhands to pin the animal down with a tractor and cut it free with an oxy-acetylene torch — sparks and all. "When I say go, go, don't wait on me," Scott told the boys before the cut. When the bison broke loose, he added with a laugh, "the first person out of the fence was me."

Why He Does It: Family Over Everything

Underneath the exotic animals, Scott framed Pettit Creek as fundamentally a family operation. He and his family have raised somewhere between 40 and 50 foster and at-risk kids over the years, teaching them trade skills from welding to farrier work, without ever taking government funding to do it. He cited rancher Allan Savory's rule that a farm with more than 7 percent "pets" — animals kept purely sentimentally instead of sold or worked — will go bankrupt, which is why even beloved animals eventually move on to new homes, aside from a rare exception like Johnny Ringo, a 40-something-year-old pony Scott has turned down $5,000 for more than once. Today his daughter, Candace Hillhouse, and son, Chris Allen, run the farm's day-to-day operations. "I want to spend time with my kids," Scott said. "My kids are my labor force. So we're out here working, building fences, digging a pond, wrangling zebras — it doesn't matter. I'm with my kids."

Listen to the Full Conversation

This episode is best experienced with the video, since Logan and Scott spend most of it walking right up to kangaroos, zebras, camels, and George himself. Catch the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube, and find booking information for hayrides, farm tours, and seasonal events at Pettit Creek Farms in the episode description.