Of all the many, many meerkat exhibits that I've seen in zoos worldwide I also think to myself that this is the #1 all-time. It is almost certainly the largest that I've ever seen, and the meerkats have tons of digging and hiding opportunites. As well the wood allows them to have lookouts through the glass vewing area.
My favorite meerkat exhibit would have to be Werribee's enclosure next to the resturant...It's really big and quite hard to see the end of the exhibit because it has so many plants and logs for the meerkats but they love to show off for the visitors and are never hiding.
I agree--Werribee's is fantastic. It's better than Monarto's because the animal area is elevated so the viewing is more eye-to eye. Minnesota has (had?) a similar arrangement, but Werribee's is much bigger with great desert/scrub plantings.
I really like the elevation to...Some of the tables in the resturant are up against the glass and the meerkats are almost as high as the tables so it feels like you're having lunch with them.
I'm a bit blase about meerkats these days. It seems every zoo has them, and they all exhibit them in similar ways, some better than others (I feel the same about Asian Small-clawed Otters).
The largest enclosure I saw housing meerkats - and one that impressed me because it was so different to everything else I had seen - was a large exhibit for Guinea Baboons at Brookfield that also housed a group of meerkats.
I agree that while this enclosure at Monarto has a lot of stuff in it for them to climb on and under ... I think a couple more mounds of dirt would add a bit more dimension to it - there's just not enough burrowing activity happening.
