Well if animal welfare is the metric being used, then the point still stands about the facilities being separate. The animal welfare at the aquarium doesn't have any impact on the animal welfare at the zoo, and vice versa. The same thing would also apply to WCS, San Diego, Zoo New England, Sea World, or anywhere else with two or more gates. Furthermore, I highly doubt an only animal welfare based methodology was used, as doing so, whether in the '80s or today, would not yield only large zoos at the top of the list, as the Parade ranking does. In reality, the zoos with the best animal welfare does include some big zoos, but also some much smaller zoos as well- which is not something displayed in the ranking, hence there must be additional factors at play, whether that be name recognition, size, animal collection, visitor experience, or what have you.
Yes, the original article that was written 40 years ago in Parade that I read and the subsequent improvements of the Oakland Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, etc. as a direct result of the article.
I read the article, Neil. It was primarily about how there were some really shockingly bad zoos in America in major cities, and that the animals at those zoos did not live in good exhibits. The article was a major deal that had profound impact on zoo quality in the United States. At this point I am not sure what point you are making, or even what we are arguing about.
Well, me and others who have visited did bring up that exhibits are starting to feel outdated and in neglect. If management is actually still pumping a heavy amount of funding into modernizing the zoo and what we have all seen is the best result, a change in leadership might be necessary. I don't want to come accross as someone who hates Audubon Zoo or anything, that's far from it. I still quite enjoyed my visit and think its a good facility. I just don't get a "best in country" feeling that was asserted back in 1989. I'm far from an expert at judging these things, and they're in either event subjective to an extent, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone seeing Audubon's elephant and many of their primate enclosures compared to what has been done in a plethora of other zoos in recent years would still view this as a "top 10" institute, welfare or otherwise.
I get that the Audubon zoo is not a destination zoo for zoo nerds as it might have been years ago when the swamp exhibit was considered a must-see immersion exhibit. (It is a destination zoo for me, because I want to see the swamp exhibit that I have read about for years, and the Insectarium when it reopens). I think what is getting confused here is what the point of the Parade article was, which is that even in the 1980s there were some really bad zoos in major American cities. The effect was to turn around zoo quality for the better. The "best zoo" list in that story was to show people what good zoos were, not to rank them as some kind of awards list as seems to be assumed here. The Parade article was a big deal because that was the only way really to see what was going on at other zoos, unless you were a zoo professional who traveled a lot and had very deep knowledge. There was no internet and no way to see what was going on at zoos beyond your local zoo. Zoochat now serves the purpose of monitoring what is going on with zoo quality around the world in a way that the authors of that Parade article would never have been able to imagine in the 1980s.
I wish that I could find it, and have been looking for it for years (see my first post in this thread).
No one is arguing that there weren't bad zoos, of course there were, probably more so then than now. People talked to each other before the internet existed. People traveled. People used telephones. People read magazines and books and sent postcards. It wasn't some dark ages. The argument is about your specific defense of Audubon. You have never been to the zoo, and you're arguing with people who have worked there, even, about the quality of the place currently and what counts as being part of the zoo.
I found a prior thread from a decade ago that also looked at the Parade magazine: 1984 "Worst zoos in the U.S. list": time for a new one? And an earlier one too: 1984 Parade magazines 10 worst USA zoos
