How much do you weigh the amount of animals/babies in exhibits when judging?

[mweb08]

I was at the Virginia Zoo recently and reviewed it on the U.S. forum. I rather enjoyed my visit and thought most of the exhibits were of high quality, but at the same time many of them had a low number of animals and I don't know if there were any babies to be seen.

Is this something that should heavily factor into how I rate the zoo and individual exhibits?

As far as babies, for the most part this is not a consistent thing, but obviously some zoos and exhibits have more than normal. For instance I recently argued on behalf of the San Diego Safari Park's elephant exhibit in part because it always has babies. If an exhibit has a baby occasionally, I'm not going to really consider that, but if it's basically a given, then I will increase my rating of it.

What do you guys think?

 

[Devi]

It depends on the species for me. If I am constantly seeing young animals in certain species that are heavily represented in zoos then I'm wondering where they're going and if the zoo is putting visitor numbers above animal welfare.
However a large number of baby elephants would suggest a happy balanced group to me.
As far as general numbers, I really value a zoo that can make a huge exhibit for a few animals and still make them visible. My local zoo Dudley has recently made a quite large lion enclosure that has 3 lions in but all the interesting places for the lions to be are around the edge, so they are always visible. I also love these large walk through lemur enclosures with a forest type set up but the food stations along the path. There's often only half a dozen lemur in there, but you get to see them as naturally as possible.