Vinpearl Safari Vinpearl Safari Phu Quoc

I visited today. I will write a view and post photos later, but if people have questions then it's best to strike while the iron is hot :)
 
Did you spot any of the following?

Klipspringer
okapi
Indian wild ass.

Looking forward to your review and thoughts.
 
The klipspringer are here already, the okapi will be arriving from South Africa and I neither saw nor heard anything about Indian Wild Ass. They could be off show, but I think it's more likely they will come in the near future; the zoo is still regularly processing large numbers of new individuals.

I counted 4 Asian elephants. There could be more. Their enclosure, incidentally, is fantastic. That is largely because it is a fenced off area of South East Asian rainforest!
 
FunkyGibbon said:
The klipspringer are here already, the okapi will be arriving from South Africa and I neither saw nor heard anything about Indian Wild Ass.
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interesting about the okapi coming from South Africa (is that okapi singular or plural?). The only ones in South Africa that I know of are the two males at Pretoria Zoo, originally from San Diego in 2006.

How many giraffes and white rhinos did you see at the park? Press releases consistently say 60 giraffes and 100 rhinos...
 
I counted 12 Rhino and 9 Giraffe, so nowhere near the numbers reported. There could be more off show but not enough! There are at least 40 zebra, which is kind of cool.
It is two okapi coming but I don't know about the sexes. I'm sure they want a breeding pair though!
Review should be in a week. Between Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur I have a nice long train ride to get it written.
 
Just to confirm for you they do have Klipspringer and Douc Langur - they don't have Okapi and i think it will be hard for them to get, but there are some in Asian zoos. Elephants came from within Vietnam - they have 5 females

There are long term plans for a night safari but not for a while, they have enough things to deal with having being built and opened so quickly.
 
animal numbers

they have only 16 rhino at the moment - they have been told to stop quoting 100 - which is the aim for them
they do have more giraffe but not sure of numbers but they have more arriving
 
that is a disturbing piece indeed. Some big numbers posited there too ("... the deaths of over 1000 birds and nearly 700 mammals, including twenty Giraffe").
 
It seems to me the wildlife authorities in Vietnam should get a little more serious about their administration and regulation of zoos in the country.
 
Bear in mind there are no animal welfare laws in Vietnam. Beating dogs to death with an iron bar and killing live cats in boiling water is common place.
A business consortium buying hundreds of animals with no concept of how to look after them or the real cost of such a venture does not surprise me in the least. While tour buses, safari uniforms, and an impressive entrance will be high on the list of priorities, animal welfare will be ignored. Even if they have paid for good advise, it will be will not be taken. This is not deliberate cruelty, just ignorance. The real blame for this appalling waste of life is with the animal dealers only interested in profit.
 
I'm not going to argue which side is true or not, but with regards to that last article by vogelcommando, I do have to question the statement in it:

As for the reported animal escapes, Thirumurugan confirmed that 135 small monkeys, weighing 150-200 grams each, have fled their cages.

The cages are designed to host bigger monkeys so those smaller primates have been able to get through the holes in their safety nets, he explained.

The animal expert added that those monkeys are native to Phu Quoc Island, and the primates return to the zoo for food every day.

Once feeding, they return to the forest, he said, adding that besides those monkeys, no other animals have fled from Vinpearl Safari.
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The only monkeys found wild on Phu Quoc are Indochinese silvered langurs and a couple of species of macaques. What sort of monkeys were they expecting to be housing to allow langurs and macaques to escape through the cage mesh!!? And a weight of 200 grams? Not even pigmy slow lorises are that small, and in any case it would be doubtful they had 135 lorises escape and that would keep returning for food every day.
 
Chlidonias said:
I'm not going to argue which side is true or not, but with regards to that last article by vogelcommando, I do have to question the statement in it:



The only monkeys found wild on Phu Quoc are Indochinese silvered langurs and a couple of species of macaques. What sort of monkeys were they expecting to be housing to allow langurs and macaques to escape through the cage mesh!!? And a weight of 200 grams? Not even pigmy slow lorises are that small, and in any case it would be doubtful they had 135 lorises escape and that would keep returning for food every day.
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Unfortunately I literally saw this happening on my visit. Many of the primates are housed in cages with a mesh large enough for juveniles macaques to move through at will. And so of course they do. The long-tailed macaque enclosure had plenty of monkeys in the trees surrounding it, and I saw many youngsters entering and leaving. Presumably no-one really knows which ones were imported and which ones are native to the island anymore.
Needless to say there are plans to replace the mesh....
 
another note to ponder is contained within this article:
Over 100 animals die at Phu Quoc Vinpearl Safari - News VietNamNet
According to Zing, some international experts are interested in the origin of the rhinos at the Safari.

Experts checked information from South Africa authorities, who said they did not know about the transportation of the rhinos. There is no information on the supplier of rhinos to the Vinpearl Phu Quoc Safari.

In an interview with BBC, Ms. Loraine Liebenberg, from the Save Our Rhinos in South Africa, said she had known that the Department of Environment of South Africa (DEA) had not granted any license to transfer rhinos to Vietnam.
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Googling found me at this Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/InternationalAnimalRescueFoundationAfrica?fref=photo - which has lots of accusations, although it seems little actual evidence. Interesting though (albeit of the ranty anti-captivity sort).
 
Some extraordinary claims on that facebook page.
I did not see any Saiga, B & W Lemur, Texas Longhorn, Black Rhinoceros or Pangolin. Which is not to say they aren't offshow; I think that is likely for the pangolin and lemurs.
One point that keeps cropping up in these articles is the assumption that the remaining 80 odd Rhinos will still be arriving. I have no idea how much offshow holding the park has but exhibit space is already arguably overfilled. So it's really unlikely the zoo will be receiving anywhere near this number, if in fact they do receive any more at all.
 
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