I was there with zg and this lion exhibit is rather small. I call joking.
What's there is quite nicely done (outside at least), but it's just small (same goes for the hippo, elephant and giraffe exhibits at Karlsruhe, as well, actually).
Serioulsey, altough this exhibit is opened in 1987, its one of the worst lion enclosures in germany. Not only its quite to small. The water ditch is twice that big as the enclosure itselfs....The indoor cages are ridiculous small. This exhibit would be evry nice for a small carnivour species, so for otters, or, without the water ditch, for merkats, fennec foxes, banded mongooses, which all of them are in the zoo in not really good, but otherwise not too bad exhibits. I would like to see here Aardvarks together with Bat eared Foxes...
The zoo got only the permission to keep old lions here, but nevertheless, even for old lions its not good enough. But some zoos are happy, if they can send away their old"garbage"animals ( Sorry for this hard word, but it is the truth in some"Zoos"like that one, Karlsruhe goot the old lions from...) to get the space for breeding, because lions cubs are a main attraktion to the visitors, and with more visitors, the park gots more money.....
I think they'd get away with large carnivores here if they filled in the moat and put in a full-height barrier instead. Like a lot of similar exhibits (Munich, for example, or the old exhibit at Antwerp) the moat just represents a massive waste of space.
But, as I said, there is a second enclosure, a cage, of the same size of the island. Wehre no moat smalls it down. For two very old lions who sat in the other zoos in tiny cages behind the scenes this is quite good.
The whole carnivour house at karlsruhe Zoo isn't good for keeping big cats in it. The best option is, to destroy it fully and replace it with just one exhibit for one species of big cats.
There are lot of tigers around Karlsruhe, so Lions or Leopards were a better choice than tigers.
