@DAVID: you made me laugh, and so hopefully I'll do the same with my scathing review of Hogle's Primate Building!
An excerpt from my 2010 review:
Primate Building – This ancient monstrosity is ugly as hell, stinky as a peccary and in desperate need of some loving care via a bulldozer. Mandrills have an iron-barred cage that is painfully small, black howler monkeys have a similar metal cage, black-and-white ruffed lemurs, ring-tailed lemurs and Schmidt’s guenons all are in either outdoor metal cages or inside mock-rock nightmares. The whole place is disgustingly outdated, and even the white-handed gibbons seemed embarrassed to be found in such a hellhole.
It may be the ugliest thing I've ever seen, but as a British zoo-goer I have to stick up for the practicality of the sphere! Looking at it, it seems as if the primates have access inside and outside of the cage, and the way it's designed means that the primates have true 360degree climbing. Using well designed cages like this really helps make the most of space, even if the enclosure looks small this structure probably doubles or even triples the amount of room they have to move about.
My mistake, I thought that the ladder coming down into the 'enclosure' was for the primates to have access to the small grassy area - I did wonder how effective the height of the wall was
