While slaking off at my first day back at work, found thgis web site, it may be of interest to others.
British Zoos, Wildlife Parks, Aquariums
British Zoos, Wildlife Parks, Aquariums
britishzoos.co.uk/
- Thread starter zooman
- Start date
Interesting, written by a southerner I'd guess since the home page mentions southern collections & not the mighty Chester. The one entry I've read properly contains numerous inaccuracies.
Chester is on there (under Northern England in the column on the left). It's kind of interesting that London and Whipsnade are mentioned in the text on the home page but not actually included in the individual zoo pages.
I wonder if the site is the work of someone on here (they must certainly have at least visited Zoochat when researching because it can't really be helped finding it when doing Google searches on zoos!!!). I can't speak from personal experience of the zoos of course, but the entries are all very tourist brochure-ish, by which I mean everything is glowing. Read the South Lakes one for example, a zoo which "is widely acknowledged as Europe’s premier tiger conservation centre" and has "an enclosure housing both the rare Amur and Sumatran species of tigers – the world’s largest and smallest, respectively – a combined sight to be seen at no other family attraction in Britain". Not something most zoo-enthusiasts would be too enthusiastic about (except Yorik I guess) but it is presented as a fantastic highlight.
Its all good though, and a lot of work seems to have gone into writing it all.
Someone (or some people) have worked hard on this site - but I think there is still an awful lot of work to do. It won't take ZooChatters long to spot many mistakes (African elephant and pygmy hippo with rhino and tapir in the Elephant House at Chester!). As Chlidonias remarks, Whipsnade and Regents Park get a paragraph each, while Paignton and its associated collections and the HWP are not even mentioned.
Even worse, for my sensitive soul at least, is the style in which it is written: it reads rather like the script for the commentary on a 1950s newsreel (I could almost hear MacDonald Hobley's voice overstressing all the 'jokes').
But what is it for? It seems to me that an inaccurate list of the things that you can see in the zoos is almost useless without some sort of comparisons between them - it would not be hard to add a 'don't miss' feature selecting the best exhibit(s) in each zoo, but it would need some knowledge and judgement and a little bit of explanation.
PS perhaps someone ought to tell Diamond Publishing Ltd that there are 2 giant pandas at Edinburgh now
Alan
Even worse, for my sensitive soul at least, is the style in which it is written: it reads rather like the script for the commentary on a 1950s newsreel (I could almost hear MacDonald Hobley's voice overstressing all the 'jokes').
But what is it for? It seems to me that an inaccurate list of the things that you can see in the zoos is almost useless without some sort of comparisons between them - it would not be hard to add a 'don't miss' feature selecting the best exhibit(s) in each zoo, but it would need some knowledge and judgement and a little bit of explanation.
PS perhaps someone ought to tell Diamond Publishing Ltd that there are 2 giant pandas at Edinburgh now
Alan
Just looked at the Chester page.
African Elephants and Pygmy Hippo not kept since 1979.
Ankole Cattle not kept since 1992.
Barasingha not kept since 2004.
Mauritius Kestrel not kept since 2009.
Snowy Owl not kept since 2010.
It does not seem to have been well researched.
African Elephants and Pygmy Hippo not kept since 1979.
Ankole Cattle not kept since 1992.
Barasingha not kept since 2004.
Mauritius Kestrel not kept since 2009.
Snowy Owl not kept since 2010.
It does not seem to have been well researched.
Evidentally whoever wrote this website has never heard of Dudley Zoo
Other particularly overblown bits:
This amuses me as it seems to be promoting Sumatran tigers as something really unusual
Visit now, and get an adjective with every animal!
Deadliest maybe, but certainly not largest
@TLD, before you know it .. they will have Phyllobates terribilis eating from their hands! Well as long as they have been out of the rainforest for a very long time you should not have tooooo much to worry about! 
I had thought maybe errors could have been only apparent rather than real (i.e. I couldn't find a date on the site so thought perhaps information was current at time of writing) but what you present here is pretty damning of the accuracy on there!!!
Pootle
Well-Known Member
Because for some unknown reason many British people seem to love to put an apostrophe before a word ending with the letter S.
The zoos that I read about and know about are out of date on this website, maybe it was a student project to create a website and it has not been updated for sometime, or someone with poor grammar decided to do a website with inaccurate zoo information just to annoy us.
Pretty sure students in 1979 didn't get projects to create websites
as that is how out-of-date the Chester page is!
Pootle
Well-Known Member
Pretty sure students in 1979 didn't get projects to create websites
They must have carried out their research for this project well in advance of the web being around then
.Joking aside, this website also probably contains information that is correct by default. One certain eg of this is that it states Knowsley has Zebra's, well until the last couple of years they didn't have any for a few years. There must be more examples of this hidden on this site. I think I have seen this site myself a few years back around the time I found Zoochat. I must have been googling for some animal information or something.
nanoboy said:
Pootle said:Because for some unknown reason many British people seem to love to put an apostrophe before a word ending with the letter S.
Pootle said:
sorry, I couldn't resist!
indeed they do. It is worldwide unfortunately. I think it is commonly called "the grocer's apostrophe" (you know: potato's, tomato's...). I actually just saw a good example yesterday on a pamphlet containing a list of native birds where it said something like "bellbirds, fantails, herons and tui's". As in that case it quite often seems to be used when the singular word ends in a vowel but not when ending in a consonant.
Pootle
Well-Known Member
There, I've corrected it for you.
Actually, apart from a greengrocer's apostrophe in the first para of the first page, the other pages I have looked at are apostrophised nicely. The Howletts page even mentions the animals' keepers properly.
Alan
Alan