Richard Lafleur horses around with Benny the Elk at Cedar Meadows Resort in Timmins.

TIMMINS, Ont. -- Every day Richard Lafleur, owner-manager of the Cedar Meadows Resort, gets phone calls from members of the public and the information they relay is always the same: "Your elk is caught in the fence."

Located just outside the city centre, the resort adjoins a 70-hectare wildlife park. But Lafleur isn't overly concerned when he gets the calls. He knows it's probably Benny up to his old tricks again.

Benny is a six-year-old 360-kilo elk who likes human attention.

"He pretends he's caught just to draw you over," insists Lafleur. "People say 'oh poor thing he's stuck,' so of course they go out and try to help, but he just wants to get petted.

"In five years he's never been caught in the fence yet," maintains Lafleur, who carries a pair of pliers just in case one day Benny's antlers really do get trapped in the wire barrier.

Deer, moose

Between the deer, moose, bison, musk ox and elk that roam here, Benny has no shortage of animals with whom to chum around, but he doesn't bother much with any of them, not even the other elk.

Instead he prefers human companionship, something that becomes evident during a recent tour.

We enter the park, travelling in a 20-passenger wagon pulled by a tractor, and one of the first animals to make an appearance is Benny. As we slow to a stop, Lafleur hops out and reaches for a container of grain pellets, but Benny is already caressing his human caregiver on the cheek and arm!

"Don't get too fresh now," Lafleur warns.

Unlike the other animals, Benny had a difficult start in life. He was born through cesarean section, and with no vetrinarian nearby to assist, his mother died, so he never had an opportunity to bond with his own kind.

"Any wild animal what they see at birth is what they think they are," Lafleur explains. "He was delivered by a human so he thinks he's one of us."

In his first few years he had a habit of following people wherever they went. Lafleur's niece and nephew, who gave Benny his name, often arrived at the front door of the hotel with the elk trailing close behind.

Now that he's a bit older, he's learned to play tricks on people. One of his favourite pranks involves removing the pin that connects the tractor to the wagon.

'Dennis the Menace'

"Whenever I don't pay attention to him, he starts doing these nasty little things," says Lafleur. "His name should be Dennis the Menace."

Dennis is one name you won't find here. But there is a long-haired bison who sings, called Elvis, and a moose, who is always the last to come out of the woods, named Snooze. We don't see either of them today, but we do encounter three deer, a couple of swans, several bison, a musk ox named Grump distinguished by a broken horn, and a moose that follows our tractor for about a kilometre as we leave the park.

As for Benny, he was probably disappointed there weren't more visitors in the park today. According to Lafleur, Benny typically "falls in love" with one or two people on the wagon. And when that happens, watch out!