What is the worst zoo you have been to?

What is the worst zoo you have ever been to? Mine is either the Las Vegas Zoo or Wildlife world Zoo and aquarium.

 

Without any doubt the Limburgse Zoo in Genk - Belgium, which is now luckily enough closed !

 

I really don't think this is a very productive thread.

 

I don't think this is that bad of a thread myself. For me it was the Point Defiance Zoo. I visited in 1995 and thought it should have been closed. The polar bears were in a grotto with brown water and they were very skinny and their fur was yellow. They had nothing but oranges to eat. The elephants lived on a cramped cement pad. The beluga whales had a tiny pool and the penguins had a pool with almost no land. Based on some of the comments I've read on here, I'm guessing the zoo is not like this now.

The Hogle Zoo has promise but there are a great deal of badly outdated enclosures.

 

Mine is probably Penrith ostrich world (now closed). From my memory the exhibits were poor, and there was a lot of bad conditions for the animals

 

Although I can see your point,I do actually think the thread has a place,if it only directs the zoo antis from causing problems for collections that are at the very top of there game,and directing there campaigns towards collections that even us zoonerds struggle to defend!

 

I agree! jb you should be going off about G.W. right now!

The worst zoo I've been to actually isn't that bad of a zoo and I only have a few things wrong with it. Since me zoo-visiting career is quite young I haven't visited many zoos yet so the worst one isn't that bad. Based on zg's comment, though, I won't name it as I don't want those "zoo antis" getting the wrong idea about this place.

~Thylo

 

Southern Nevada (Las Vegas) Zoo. I'm sure the core staff love their animals. That said, but most of the residents were sweltering in barren exhibits in the desert sun, with mice (and chickens!?) running rampant everywhere.

 

The worst zoos I ever visited would probably be Newquay or Dudley at the end of the eighties and start of the nineties, thankfully both collections have improved tenfold since then!
Worst animal collection I ever visited was Knowle animal sanctuary which is now closed. It had a small paddock for a llama, 2 tiny cages (about 60 square feet each) holding a tiger and puma respectively, with concrete floors and metal housing for both animals and a cage the size of my stair cupboard which housed a single male hamadryas baboon. The places saving grace was the work it did with unwanted pets and injured wildlife, if they'd put as much effort in with the exotics then it could've been a passable collection.

 

I find nothing wrong with this thread. And I refuse to self-censor based entirely on what anti-zoo fanatics might think or do. (I don't know if this is why jbnbsn99 made his post, though).
The future of zoos lies with the purpose for zoos, the need for zoos, and zoos' mission... not in hiding from the fanatics. They want to own the discussion about zoos and we, of all people, ought not to let them do that

And the worst zoo I can remember seeing was in San Jose, Costa Rica (although that was perhaps 25 years ago and it may be very very different today)

 

Emperor Valley Zoo in Trinidad & Tobago in late 2008 (photos are in the gallery) is the worst zoo out of the 180 zoos/aquariums that I've visited. The worst aquatic facility would probably be Seaside Aquarium on the Oregon coastline, although the CAZA-accredited Sea Life Caverns in West Edmonton Mall, Canada, is also very poor.

 

The Morro Bay Aquarium in Morro Bay, California was built in the 1960s and is frozen in time. It has a small outdoor section with a couple of tanks the size of bathtubs that have some California sea lions. No respectable modern zoo or aquarium would have tanks this appallingly small. The main aquarium is a dark room about the size of a McDonald's that has several tanks with local sea life. Many of the species are specimens that were donated by local fishermen and are damaged. It's a really sad place.

 

Soco gardens and Zoo was a little roadside zoo in Maggie Valley North Carolina its closed now.

 

Out of the zoos I've been to, all of them were very nice. However, the zoo I least enjoyed was Louisville. Some of the things that bothered me was the outdated style of fencing, which were chain-linked. Most of the buildings seemed rusted up and it was like I kind of went back in time. The Louisville Zoo definitely was some great surprises but most of the place needs work.

 

When I was a child, there was the most depressing little zoo in a park in Cyprus....not sure which town, could have been Limassol. All the animals were pacing around in the tiniest cages. I think there was a lion and a tiger (or leopard) living together in a little prison style cage, and a couple of baboons in the neighbouring one, with only bars in between them. I think I saw a keeper turning a hose on them all to clean the cages out. My memory is a bit sketchy, because this was about 25-30 years ago.

There was an elephant that would pace around a tiny concrete yard, with no access to water, and it broke my heart. So I would beg my parents to let me return to the zoo every day, just so I could take the elephant some bananas, peanuts and a drink of water. It was so sad.

The last I heard (or seem to recollect that I heard), there had been so many complaints, that the place was shutting down. They needed to find homes for the animals, or they would be destroyed. If they were, then no doubt they would have been stuffed and put into the tiny natural history museum that was opposite in the park. A small room that stank of mothballs!

 

Santa Ana Zoo at Prentice Park

This zoo WAS AWFUL! Being a herpetofauna aficionado, it was bad enough that they had almost no reptiles or amphibians, except a frog tank in the Discovery Outpost shack with webs, moss, humidity, and no frogs. The camels and the blue-and-gold macaw in the Crean Family Farm (at the southeast corner of the zoo) could live better in a 7-Eleven parking lot. No joke. The Reptile Zoo in Fountain Valley (a glorified pet store that charged ten bucks admission) was almost as bad. I would rate the now-closed DC National Aquarium as #20, Reptile Zoo as #21, and Santa Ana Zoo as #22.

 

Where I live, there is an animal park named "Owlcatraz"; named after the several Moreporks that are kept in a dark enclosure there. I found it to be very entertaining when I was very young, but when I visited it at the beginning of this year, it was inexcusably poor. The fact that one could not walk through the "forest park" themselves without a tour guide (probably to make the park seem larger than it really was!) was bad enough. The Moreporks that were kept were not given much time for observation, and apparently farmyard animals are good enough to be deemed attractions; one of the stops during the tour was to feed a pig, and another was to feed a pair of donkeys. There was very little to see overall; I found the tiny aviary of a roadside café that I visited on the same day (which contained a Chinese Painted Quail and a Diamond Dove) to be more entertaining.

 

The Payson Zoo (long closed) was one of your typical road-side zoos. I was only 7 or 8 the one time I visited and didn't think it was horrible at the time, but as I grew older and saw what a zoo should be like, that place was horrid I know now. Bears in cages so small they didn't have room to move around. Southern Nevada Zoological was definitely a bad one. Chickens overran the place and very little shade for the animals. I got to meet and talk to one of the keepers. She was a very nice person and loved the animals, but her hands were tied about what she could do for them and said she was thinking about leaving. I'm also not a fan of Wildlife World Zoo in Litchfield Park, AZ. Dirty. It seems as though they never pick trash up off the ground. They separate babies from parents as soon as they're born. They breed for the white color in tigers. They don't enforce the 'no smoking' law. Employees are rude.

 

I myself never visited a bad zoo (Except my school which is a brick building home to 500 Bonobos)

 

Not really a zoo, but most of my bad animal display related experiences have come from the Woodstock Fair. One year my older brother and I went into a traveling aquarium. It was sort of a miniature version of what Mystic Aquarium used to be, blue upholstery everywhere, but the upholstery is where the resemblance ended. There was a supposed "Giant" lobster (I have seen bigger in the lobster tank at Price Chopper). There was also a 16 foot python (yawn), and and small school of piranhas (I see those regularly at pet stores, legally you can keep them in your house). Really less of an aquarium and more of a parade of "oddities", basically what I would expect to see at the county fair. It was same year they had a supposed man eating snake from the amazon, I didn't go to see that and spent weeks losing sleep thinking about it (but I suspect the snake wasn't really a man eater, aren't man eaters usually shot?).

The same fair has a awful habit of putting together an exhibit where you can watch a cow give birth. They brag about it, but I think it is cruel, taking a cow out of familiar surroundings (even if it is just up the road) in order to give birth (a very stressful experience even under the best of circumstances) in front of a bunch of noisy, gawking city slickers and bourgeoisie. Only a few hundred feet away from the noisy sound stage where an assortment of washed out acts from decades ago and lame (I'm a metalhead) country singers- I'll stop ranting but you get the point. What about when they take the calf away 12 hours after the birth? Do they show that too? Oddly enough very few of the cows actually delivered there, I wonder if the stress of being there has anything to do with it. Thankfully the other animals there are treated very well.