Snow leopard enclosure

Taken from near one of the chimp viewing areas

Looks like they've got a lot of vertical space, but not that much floor space?

It's not too bad space wise, especially when they have free access between the two sides most times. Not ideal space when they're separated though.

For a pair of mice, maybe. It's a shockingly small, outdated enclosure.

you should see the rest of the zoo, great animals not so good enclosures

I have seen the rest of the zoo and would summarise it as being quite hit and miss, with a strong bias towards the latter. The paddocks have a lot of potential, but on the other side of the coin, the spider monkey and gibbon cages were horrible.

I agree I'm not a fan of the gibbon and spider monkey cages, but knowing you visited Twycross the other day, all I will say is do you think Himalaya! has much more space, if any more, for it's snow leopards. How I remember it was it was a similar size, but with no hiding spots?

I think you may have misremebered slightly! The Welsh Moutain exhibit is bigger than it looks here, but the Twycross exhibit is surely three times the size of this.

My apologies, at the time I couldn't picture the dimensions of the exhibit at Twycross but now yes, I do recall it being bigger. It begs the question, are there smaller exhibits for snow leopards? (Port Lympne springs to mind [the one next to the Barbary lions] but again it could be memory failing me).

We looked at Himalaya from a couple of angles and the discussion turned to the snow leopards at WMZ in comparison. The cage at WMZ is about 220m², whereas the enclosure at Twycross is probably about six times that. The enclosure at Twycross is better suited to their habitat, but is certainly more open. Having said that, they don't really do much climbing so what use the trees in the WMZ cage are remains to be seen.

Perhaps you were thinking of the Amur leopards' enclosure at Twycross? It is no great shakes and the cats were both pacing.