20 years ago Emmen was hands down the best Dutch zoo.... The amount of mistakes made since then is pretty much unbelievable... If only a fraction of the sum that was invested in the new park was used to completely rebuild the Biochron into a major aquarium and modern evolotion museum, they would have had a top attraction. With some additional renovations throughout the park the old Emmen zoo would have been ready for the future....
I like the bird news, their more general news is not ....! Really, their overall financial management situation and visitor news is rather disconcerting. The very fact that the Municipality's veiled threat of the need for "a plan" to convince them all is back to normal is particularly disturbing. They should never have agreed to this deferred loan system bearing down on the zoo finances (including ... the Theatre complex that is - more generally everywhere - an operating loss and responsible for the largest hole in their finances). What bothers me most is that ... I have not myself found any inclination to visit the place after its opening. I may be a dinosaur zoo fan on this, but I absolutely loved the old style zoo for its pleasantly layout and parklands with large groups of certain species - for which the bigger more mainstream zoos would stick their noses up for (colobus, pelicans, Hamadryas baboon) - and with several indoor houses displaying the world's ecosystems and various continents all overlooking an immersive African grassland exhibit. Now this new zoo with attractions, a restrictive pathway where you are supposed to only go to area A, B and C, the contrived way that you have to go on a 10 minute boat ride, a safari truck "experience" and all kinds of "adventure park" tack and tactics and without any information boards and labelling with decent information on what animals and plant you are looking at ... and a lacklustre management that really does not have a clue what a zoo really is .... and should be DOES KEEP me away nor does it SOUND inviting to even go there (aside from the fact that this public transport afficionado without owning a car must make a 3,5 hour journey there even)! I sad for this state of affairs where Emmen's Wildlands is concerned. Just it seems I am not alone in this and many regulars actually do not feel inclined to visit or re-visit the place with any great expediciency.
I forgot to mention the large hippo enclosure as hightlight of the early nineties. Instead of constructing "De Es", the zoo should have invested that money in the original zoo. It was stupid, a second "zoo" on the other side of the city with just the penguin enclosure as highlight. The old pampa was far better compared to the quite simple enclosures for South American ungulates (guanaco, pudu and later collared peccary) at "De Es". Giving up the unique shorebird exhibit and owl ruïn for a quite bad designed bison & moose enclosure was also something I couldn't understand. The old zoo was worth the long trip from the Amsterdam region. I visited the new one last year because I got a free ticket and because I was curious about it, but if I had to travel such a distance again, I rather go to see river dolphin, koala and Tasmanian devil than revisit Wildlands.
This morning a second Asian elephant calf was born, it is again a male and got the name Manoa. I don't know what is wrong with the Asian elephants in Emmen, but the number of male calfs born there compared to female calfs, cannot be chance anymore....
I had to look up the exact numbers, but fortunately the excellent reference site www.elephant.se is being updated again...
Wildlands decided to profile itself as a zoo because of the financial failure of its current obscure identity with animals, a rollercoaster and other attractions. There will be more animals with better visibility. Next to that, the entrance fee will be reduced.
A loss of 8 million euros is really shocking for one year, the situation thus seems worse than I expected....
Curious to see how they want to make a profit with this much debt. Just new animals is not going to work.
That financial loss is first and foremost the cultural center. When the new "zoo" was developped and built the zoo management was to manage both the zoo and cultural center. The center now runs without much in terms of public funding (which is contrary to what is generally the usual going practice in cultural sector funding).
In June 2019, Mekong again covered Ma Yay Yee. Hopefully he was successful. But he still does not cover Swe Zin, even though he is in heat.
For all of the overly negative opinions of Wildlands Adventure Zoo, I thought I'd add a contrary "respectfully disagree" viewpoint. I personally LOVE the new Wildlands Zoo! I will admit that when I heard they were closing the old Emmen Zoo and re-creating it across the main road, I was quite surprised, as I too really liked the old zoo -- despite the rather boring Biochron museum at the front. But once I visited the new zoo, I was won over! I totally understand that most ZooChatters want your zoos to be "serious" places of learning, and some of you have even said you'd like a zoo to be "more like a library" than a theme park. This is fine, and quite clearly, most zoos are this way, with possibly an added carousel, train ride, or sea lion show. But in 1998 Disney's Animal Kingdom (DAK) opened at Walt Disney World in Florida, and thus we were introduced to the concept of the combination zoo and theme park. There are a few others that are similar, such as Busch Gardens, the USA's Sea World parks, Loro Parque (in the Canary Islands), Kolmarden (Sweden), Kristiansand (Norway), Longleat (UK), and a few others. But overall, the theme park zoos are few and far between. Most zoos are much more like you serious zoo fans desire. For me, my desire in writing zoo guidebooks has always been to help zoos become more attractive as tourist attractions, thus I'm looking for zoos to distinguish themselves from each other, offering different things from every other zoo. I'm a big believer in Walt Disney's famous quote, "I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained." His point was that if the customers are entertained, they will come back and both spend more money and a by-product is that they'll be educated. But if the customers are bored with an over-emphasis on education, they won't come back and then no one wins. I personally believe Walt Disney would love Wildlands, just as much as I do. The other group that Wildlands is successfully aimed at is .... families! And while some of you have pointed at the money Wildlands has lost in its first few years, I would point out that Disneyland Paris also was losing money in its first few years. But now it is making tons of money! As I alluded to above, Wildlands is a lot like Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida, and a key thing to remember is that DAK is the world's top attendance zoo -- by far!
