Let’s kick off the second round of matches. North Carolina. Munich. Miscellaneous mammals. The rules: You have three votes to award. If you think it's a tight match, award 2 votes to the stronger zoo and 1 to the weaker one. But if you think it's a wider margin than that, award all 3 votes to the winner. Your criteria for how you make your decision is entirely up to you, *except* that you must stay only within the given category. That includes ignoring the results of the other match: no strategic voting. All votes are public, and all votes can be changed. The purpose of the game is to provoke debate, so make your case for why people should vote the same way as you do. Be open to reconsidering your vote.
As with many zoos that are mostly outdoors, this is an extreme weakness of the NC Zoo. Vampire bat, rock hyrax & cape porcupine are the only species I can think of on display, with a few more species used in the education department.
That's unfortunate, because not only does Munich have a decent smattering of marsupials, it also has a nice selection of rodents. Highlights include mountain hare, Desmeret's hutia, alpine marmot, cape hyrax, fat sand rat and a good nocturnal bat exhibit.
Well only focusing on Africa and North America has its downsides (aka marsupials). Yet in a few years Australia will be added.
North Carolina has been unlucky with the category draws - I suspect if it had hit both carnivores and ungulates it’d be romping into the next round. Alas, it looks very hard from here.
Even though ungulated agains Munich would be very tough, as Munich has some of the prettiest hoofstock enclosures in Europe.
North Carolina is a fantastic zoo and I have fond memories from my 2010 visit. It's a big, 6-7 hour zoo with a ton of walking and I'm not sure that there is a poor exhibit in the entire 500 landscaped acres. In fact, I've repeatedly called North Carolina one of the Top 10 zoos in North America on numerous occasions over the years. However...it is a zoo that is not really geared to do well in this type of competition. There are only around 250 species and the animal collection isn't vast enough to challenge in many categories in the ZooChat Cup. North Carolina will be eliminated, and that's fair enough, but nevertheless it truly is a must-see zoo and will only get better with the upcoming Australian and Asian continental additions. The zoo is so large that a few years from now it might become a struggle to see it all in a single day...and it will still likely have less than 300 species! It's like an American 'Berlin Tierpark' but with less animals. I voted 3-0 Munich
