Lol alright i get hippos, tapirs and giant anteaters. Ive read it wrong as well i thought it also said the writer was completly against the ideas of aardvarks and wombats.
I think the criticism is much because of current nocturnal houses: small, build several decades ago, generally a row of glass-fronted terraria. I think nocturnal houses should change like other types of zoo exhibits: build much larger animal exhibits (several tens to over 100 square meters, not few to 20 square m), more natural (include natural ground and shade-tolerant plants), immensive exhibits, perhaps introduce some animal contact and presentations of more cute small mammals. Possibly the house might switch day-night cycle for 80%, letting visitors and animals see some day light. Kerzers is a good example of how nocturnal houses might evolve. It has exhibits spacious enough for crab-eating raccoons and such largish animals.
London did this in the Moonlight World in the 1970s, and they believed that it stimulated their fennec foxes to breed. I think they turned the lights off at the same time each day, so that the keepers could do their work in the light, but varied the time the lights went on again at night. I expect that this is common practice now.
The main point is that most nocturnal enclosures are too small for sufficient holding of larger mammals and that the writer's opinion is that larger mammals like sloths, tamanduas, aardvarks and wombats have proved to do well in normal enclosures. I've seen a couple of more or less active wombats in outdoor enclosures earlier this year, so I see no need to keep wombats in nocturnal houses. Besides that, the enclosures these wombats were kept in, were way too large to fit in a standard sized nocturnal houses. For aardvarks nocturnal houses are a good place in my opinion to see them active, but only in a good sized enclosure like those of Berlin or Antwerpen. I've seen them in daylight enclosures in Prague en Arnhem, but almost always sleeping.
I have read the section about ungulates again and I think I misread it the first time. The writer thinks the Americans would be crazy enough to put tapirs and pygmy hippos in a nocturnal house as supposed nocturnal animals, but that even for US standards these species are a bit to big. For giant anteaters, wombats, clouded leopards, beavers and Indian porcupines are several (mainly US) examples given.
Largest that I have seen is an ocelot or a binturong. The binturong was one of the oldest left so it thrived perfectly well
Well, with only 3 aardwolves at one zoo, that may be the largest species in Cincinnati, but not the general nocturnal houses.
I should have specified in previous post for regards to cincinati but that is a good question for large I think aside from the clouded leopard could other leopard species fit that bill for that.
