Things people do that irritate you when you go to the zoo?

Ha! That'll teach her!
Yeah, most of these comments are adressed at reptiles, amphibians and insects, though any animal that stays still enough becomes a suspect. Worse yet is the conspiracists who say they're all animatronics...

 

My biggest surprise with this is that you saw Amish people visiting the zoo and one had a plastic drink bottle.

 

Not reading signs. My zoo, Brookfield, has amazing signs on every exhibit with engaging graphics and conservation messages in addition to information about the animals in each enclosure, and it seems like very few read them at all.

Yesterday I was in the Australia house, viewing the echidnas. I was there for ten minutes and at least that many kids asked what they were and the adults all said either porcupines or hedgehogs. One adult wondered where they lived... in the *Australia House* exhibit.

 

I think this is a form of milestone for any zoo to have so congrats on that.
In seriousness I think this does highlight a beneficial aspect to having a tour guide instead of visitors freely walking around- misconceptions can be cleared up easily and these kinds of mistakes can be fixed.

 

People who insist reptiles aren't "real animals", or say birds and reptiles are a waste of time when they can see "bigger stuff". If you go to a zoo to only see "bigger stuff", what's the point? That means you end up ignoring over half of the collection.

 

people that just pass haf of the animasl to see the big abc animals

 

That indeed is a great benefit. After visiting WdG, visitors have learnt, among others, that snakes do not disarticulate their jaws while feeding and are neither slimy nor poisonous (except for Rhabdophis tigrinus)...

 

Yeah, I read up a few bad reviews of small urban zoos, like London Zoo and the Menagerie des Plantes based on that argument. Bunch of dumbasses...

 

Yeah, I see it all the time, though I get a big chuckle when zoo guests are obsessed with "seeing the lions" and get massively disappointed when they see them lounging about doing nothing! XD

 

I go to the zoo predominately to see the small mammal and bird collections. Big ABC stock isall well and good but the smaller animals tend to be much more active.

 

And usually more interesting!
Again, I have nothing against large animals, I'm a huge fans of big cats, hyenas, tapirs, rhinos and crocodilians, for example, but at the same time, you usually get more variety with smaller critters, and lots of them are quite obscure and unusual. Very few people know what a potto, a northern Luzon cloud rat, a kinkajou, a mouse bird or a tuatara are, for example.

 

Around a month ago when I was at the San Diego Safari Park, I witnessed something that I thought I'd never see. I was in the Nairobi Lagoon section and was admiring a pair of Egyptian Geese. Then, a little boy walks up behind one of the geese and kicks it! Luckily for the goose, the boy just grazed its leg and the goose jumped back out of reach.

 

Vile. I really can’t stand appallingly behaved children and their pathetically useless parents.

 

In the kids defence, he was only 4 or 5 so I bet he didn't know better.

 

I highly doubt that - by the age of 4 or 5, children should already know the basic difference between right and wrong, unless they have been very poorly brought up.

 

You're damn right about that! We can't let kids get away with blue murder, as it often happens. Heck, if my kids did that, they'd be super-grounded!

 

I hate it when someone is in a walk-through butterfly house and they pick up a butterfly by the wings.

 

On Sunday I saw two things that annoyed me when I was at Chester.

Someone attempting to feed a tangerine to a camel. And people using iPads to take photos.

I find it hilarious how the general public complained about having big animals in city zoos and now they complain there is nothing to see.

 

Doesn’t that cause them severe damage? I was always taught to gently scissor them between two fingers without applying any real pressure if I needed to move them.





{Note from mods - thread continues here: Things people do that irritate you when you go to the zoo? #2}