Baboon Cages Cefn-yr-Erw

It looks exactly like a Howletts cage! I'm comparing this tragic little collection to a world-renowned breeding centre...but both places use the same enclosures.

apart from the fact that the Aspinall parks monkey cages are a world apart from this place?

Indeed, although these do look to be the best enclosures at this place and they don't seem all too bad. To me, they look pretty acceptable, just a bit small.

It must have cost a lot- for a place with very limited funds-to build these cages. AFAIK they contain Hamadryas baboons, an essentially ground dwelling species. For a similar cost they could have created a much larger ground area with rock piles etc perhaps with a hotwired fence and let all their odd Hamadryas go together as one group. I though their Baboons already lived on 'islands' anyway?

These cages are perfectly functional and modern, but seem wasted on baboons, they look strong enough to house Chimpanzees.

I spoke to the owner, and they are chimp cages. The 2 chimps from Molehill are next door, I guess they'd be using these cages too if they hadn't had the baboons arrive as an emergency case. And they do have an island for baboons, the ones from Causeway in Ireland. It's pretty good actually, quite big with rocks, lots of enrichment and trees.
I don't understand why they don't just hotwire an area for a lot of their primates. It would cost hardly anything and they'd get a lot more room than they do in the majority of the cages they have at the moment.

okay, so only holding baboons temporarily- I thought they looked very expensively built just to house baboons...

I think one of the problems about providing hotwired enclosures here might be the cold & rather exposed site-hardly ideal for prmates from the tropics- so the monkeys actually benefit from the protection given by the conventional cages, even if most of them are really too small!

Although they have already built the baboons a hotwired enclosure! Seems to be the way they're going, and although the new enclosure isn't huge it's better than the cages. If they go that way with their enclosure reconstruction then they'll all have half decent homes. Let's hope they can do it for all their species.