"Entering through a gateway which is flanked by two huge garishly painted tigers you pay your $5.00 entrance. The leaflet I was given stated that this was the 'National Animal Resource Center'. The first enclosure is crocodiles which you view from above, looking down upon a pond packed with water lilies and weed. It would not look too bad except there was almost as many plastic water bottles floating about as there was lily pads. Just outside there was a big garish gory frieze/statue compilation showing people being eaten by alligators.
These big odd fluorescent gaudy statues are all over the zoo. Some are animals, some are people, some are fruit. I am sure there must be a historic or fabled reason behind them. Throughout the park music and some sort of chatter is being piped out over loudspeakers. It is not nice.
Enclosures? I don't think there is a nice one in the whole zoo. There are many that just scrape by because they provide shade but they are all inadequate. Only the bear enclosure had a barrier (which was broken). One of the tiger enclosures had half a barrier. I mean, what is the point? So nothing else, not even the elephants! It would not have been so bad if there was adequate supervision but there wasn't. I only saw two staff members and this place is very spread out. The bull elephant had 2' long needle sharp tusks and was a wicked little beast. Maybe his temperament was because the enclosure had not been cleaned in four days or because there was no food in evidence. Both elephants were underweight. These elephants were not chained, not supervised and there was no barrier. The cow was chewing on a shovel. Maybe they could not clean the enclosure because of this.
There was no evidence of enrichment anywhere. That said I saw no evidence of stress or stereotypic behaviour. It may well have been because everything was too hot and they were taking a siesta. It was hot! One enclosure held two young sun bears which were obviously being hand reared. They were sharing the enclosure with a young gibbon. As I approached the cage the gibbon swung down and held on hugging one of the bears. It looked dead cute and I wondered how the relationship would develop. A little further on there was another enclosure with larger gibbons in with larger bears. It is a mix that seems to work, even in the small space available.
The lions had two cubs. They were white, one especially so. The lion and tiger enclosures at the far back of the zoo were some of the largest and yet were still far too small".
