Here is Bronx (from the few photos I could actually find of the Mouse House)
View attachment 414247
A meh on the small side enclosure for armadillo
View attachment 414249
A large, generally good exhibit for Damaraland mole rats (although there is no soft substrate and they cannot burrow down!!!)
View attachment 414250
Possibly one of the worst pika exhibits I have seen - these are extremely energetic little rodents ; they need space!
View attachment 414251
A sub-standard and small exhibit for red rumped agouti, a species that can grow up to 70 cm in length!!!
View attachment 414252
A decent exhibit for South African pygmy mice...
View attachment 414253
And a very good exhibit for flying foxes in Jungle World
Make what you will of this.
In my book, Leipzig's enclosures are better, and I think Bronx have not quite adjusted to modern standards of exhibitry in their Mouse house - perhaps they should cut out a few species in order to give others more space...
What a horribly disingenuous post. What you have done here is taken photos that merely show small corners of an enclosure and then declared their quality based off of nothing other than the fact that you want Leipzig to win (which is why you and
@pangolin12 have given it 3-0 while refusing to give your reasoning, similarly to how the latter and several others randomly switched to 3-0 Pairi in the last round as soon as Denver started to win while refusing to respond to requests as to why Denver deserved no points). You didn't even bother to qualify your claims, you just declared each enclosure to be either good or bad when you can't even see the actual enclosures for most the examples. You can criticize Bronx's enclosures if you feel they are inadequate as
@Vision has done, but you very clearly have no idea what these enclosures actually look like or how these animals are actually housed-- something which is blatantly obvious to people who have visited both zoos as
@ShonenJake13 and myself have considering some of the enclosures you including for Leipzig are of similar size or even smaller than the comparative enclosures you used for Bronx.
I'll be going through the Bronx enclosures you and Vision have pointed out one by one and giving my personal thoughts on them as well as adding information about them that I feel you both have missed. I won't be doing the same for Leipzig simply because I agree that they generally are of very nice quality. Starting with the armadillo:
-I agree that the enclosure is not a great size for its two inhabitants, but it's definitely incorrect to say that it is empty. The enclosure is filled with sand for them to dig in as well as various piled up rocks and logs for them to move around through and hide in. The animals have plenty of spaces to escape the public eye if wanted as well, which is why I couldn't spot any on my visit last Friday.
-Bronx's mole-rat enclosure is larger than Leipzig's. I'm not sure how you can claim that there is no soft substrate for them to burrow down into when the photo you used shows sand on the floor. Of course Leipzig offers a lot more depth than Bronx, but Bronx does have plenty of sand and straw for them to burrow through.
-The zoo no longer houses pika, so this point is irrelevant. Regardless, you very obvious have no clue as to how pikas are housed in captivity. Berlin's set-up aside, that was one of the largest pika enclosures ever because pikas often prefer smaller, more cramped settings (hence why they continuously stuffed the enclosure with more rocks and logs as time went on). Despite your false claims to have seen Berlin and Minnesota's set-ups for these species, I can fairly surely tell you that Minnesota had smaller enclosures than Bronx, as well as many more individuals. The Bronx enclosure also had/has an off-exhibit section that the pair of pikas had access to 24/7, as many of the Mouse House enclosures have I might add.
-I agree with the criticisms on the agouti enclosure, I have no idea why their single animal is kept in there as opposed to one of the outdoor cages.
-I don't know if you're aware of how small pygmy mice and harvest mice are but Bronx's enclosures are absolutely huge for them. I noticed you used the worst of the available photos of the enclosure in your post, so here's a
better photo. The photo still isn't great but it does show how small they are and gives an example of one of the several tall grasses (as well as straw) both the pygmy and harvest mice have available to climb around in.
-The flying foxes are kept in a roughly 20,000sqft (1,858m/sq if I have my calculations right) free-flight aviary, far larger than the one Leipzig's are kept in. The zoo's Prevost's Squirrels also have this space to roam in, which is definitely a much more appropriate enclosure to describe as 'massive' than the admittedly nice
Leipzig giant squirrel enclosure.
-This is the current
elephant-shrew enclosure. I agree that it's definitely on the small side for the species, but "way too small" is an exaggeration I think. They also have access to a behind the scenes enclosure.
If I'm honest (and I'll admit I'm biased) I think people are being overly harsh on the Mouse House enclosures. Some of them are too small, most are perfectly fine for their tiny rodent inhabitants. They are all excellently furnished as well, giving each species enclosures tailored to their natural habits. Most enclosures either have access to a bts space or give access to multiple enclosures at once, as can be seen
here. Arboreal species have plenty of height to climb, and terrestrial species have plenty of amenities to hide in and forage through. The better enclosures at the zoo are also being ignored here as well. For example, the Aardvarks have two feet of dirt to dig down into, the anteaters have a large and well vegetated enclosure, and the bats have access to large and well vegetated expanses.
Secondly Leipzig holds more species that are rareties/people/personal favorites.
This is an interesting point: how many of Leipzig's rare species are apart of viable populations? When one of Plzen's matches was for miscellaneous mammals, many of the people currently voting in favor of Leipzig criticized Plzen for many of their species not being viable or apart of captive breeding programs. Pangolins aside for obvious reasons, many of Leipzig's rarest species aren't in that boat. They've done amazing work with the quolls, but they are the only zoo with their flying fox (IF Walsrode still has any, they only have one or two left), they are one of only four zoos with the mole-rat which likely isn't a long-term viable population, and their famous giant squirrels were a dead-end species from the start. Obviously this is not nearly to the same degree as Plzen and personally I love rarities like these in zoos but if Plzen's much rarer collection gets overshadowed by this fact shouldn't Leipzig's as well? Remove these few species and you have a collection of relatively common animals for the most part.
Bronx on the other hand has breeding programs and large numbers for almost all of their rodents. For example, Bronx have roughly two dozen mole-rats between the Mouse House and off-show housing, all apart of a captive breeding program for the species which is slowly becoming more common in US zoos. Many of their other rodents have populations that are even larger than that, and they breed most of their species yearly. 19 of their species are rarities in the US zoo world (and in general for most of them), vs 8-9 for Leipzig. Beyonds species like the mole-rat, Bronx has actively worked to import their cloud rats from Europe in order to further grow the small US population.
In addition to all of the above, does anyone have any information on the conservation programs Leipzig has for various miscellaneous mammals? I'm genuinely curious as to what they do in the wild for pangolins (surely they have major efforts contributing towards Chinese Pangolin conservation?) and others? Do they actually do any conservation work in Australia for quolls and/or Kowari? Do they have any projects helping to conserve small rodents, tenrecs, or others in the wild?
And on a final note:
EDIT: Wait- how was that relevant again?
Because
YOU brought it up in a shallow attempt to bash one zoo even though your constant contradictions make it obvious that
you know that you don't know what you're talking about and that you're heavily stretching (to put it nicely) the facts you do know in order to make very easily disprovable points before then accusing people of being overly aggressive or for dragging on about pointless details when they inevitably disprove said points. You knew you never saw photos of Berlin's pika enclosures before you brought up the point, what you didn't know is that other people here had. Your style of voting for the zoo you simply like/know better regardless of all available information and then making up 'facts/statistics' to "mathematically prove" falsehoods and then shouting "just trust me" before throwing fits if people don't is getting very old very fast. If you genuinely prefer one zoo over another in a category that is fine, what's not fine is the way a select few and especially you have conducted yourselves these past couple matches.
~Thylo
