How are these acceptable enclosures? These cages are brutally stark exhibits, but they also fail as primate enclosures. There is no natural substrate on the ground in the nearest cage, which means that the others are probably equally barren. The sad-sack species that live in these cages can probably cross from one side of their entire existence to the other in about 3 seconds. Perhaps marmosets and tamarins would flourish here, but any other primate would surely be cramped in such outdated cages.
I do realise that they're smaller than they look as I noticed one of the monkeys in the cage in the background. However the comparisons to other legislation and expensive exhibitry gets a bit boring, not all zoos can afford such things and, if these cages were a bit bigger, they'd be fine (IMO).
I don't think that these are quite as small as to be actually cramped - if you look at the benches for scale there's quite a lot of height (in the front one at least).
I agree about the lack of substrate, and they could do with a good amount more climbing equipment going in there. They are also not exactly easy on the eye. But they could be made into perfectly adequate enclosures for small primates. From the list above the lemurs and guenons should be fine, maybe some of the langurs too. A little disconcerting to think of gibbons in these enclosures, though...
Maybe a group of lemur or guenons in the large one and marmosets in the others? Or better still - switch them to aviaries, as suggested above.
Agree entirely - these 'dodgy'/sometimes just bad exhibits always get compared to the 'ideal' exhibit of whoever is dicussing them - which is scarcely fair comparison - not being the ultimate exhibit is not the same as being a bad one (though this applies more to other debates than this particular case).
Indeed, chalk and cheese. Although I would agree that these aren't suited to gibbons at all. Maybe smaller monkeys like squirrel monkeys or even capuchins I think could use these cages well.
I guess that the bit about "other legislation" is directed at me, since, as far as I know, I am the only one here at ZooChat constantly pushing legislation (in my case the Swedish legislation).
I am afraid that I will continue to bore you and many others here at ZooChat with this theme, now and then, ashely-h...
