Schwaben Park - A Terrible Zoo?

[snowleopard]

The link below contains a 176-page investigative report on Schwaben Park, a small zoo in southern Germany. While some ZooChatters instantly dismiss articles (even vast reports) from animal rights organizations, I like to analyze them as I honestly feel that there is often some validity when such establishments are reprimanded. At Schwaben Park there are 44 chimpanzees and one of the main criticisms is that 75% of the youngsters born at the park (18 out of 24 newborns) were taken from their mothers at an early age in order to be trained. The apes wear collars, leashes, human clothes and they act in circus-like stunts in order to entertain the public. With 200,000 annual visitors there are a lot of people seeing what many would regard as badly outdated forms of entertainment.

There are plenty of photos within the report, including several of parrots and cockatoos with severely plucked feathers. The privately owned zoo does not appear to be in the upper echelon of captive wildlife facilities, and with pictures like the one on page 47 of an obese tiger, plus the many recorded stereotypic behaviours of chimpanzees, one would estimate that Schwaben Park is in fact one of the lowest ranked zoos around.

Has anyone visited in recent years? Is there someone out there with a positive image of the zoo?

http://zoocheck.com/reportpdfs/SchwabenParkReport.pdf

 

[Chlidonias]

I find it difficult to read reports by organisations such as Zoocheck due to their overbearing and explicit "all zoos are evil" message. It should be noted that Schwaben Park isn't really a zoo now, it is (I gather from some googling) an amusement park that additionally holds some animals. The animals are primarily for shows (e.g. the chimps and parrots) or for a farmyard. There are some youtube videos showing the chimp shows and they are quite depressing to watch (and I was really surprised by the photo in the report showing a mostly bald cockatoo still being used in the show). Apart for the many many chimps, the farm-stock and the parrots, there seems to be little else except the two tigers?

From my googling I would say this place should absolutely be shut down (the animal side of it; I couldn't care less about the amusement park side), but the transparent agenda of the Zoocheck report is laughably pathetic with comments such as the following.

"The animals at Schwaben Park are held captive throughout their entire lives without ever having the opportunity to live in a natural environment."

"Despite a widespread assumption amongst the public, both government-owned and private zoos often result in stress, pain and suffering for detained animals. Animals in these facilities are caged for life and deprived of the opportunity to develop and fulfill a range of interests and species-specific needs. Incarcerated individuals have little control over their lives, and the environment in they are forced to live in, and consequentially often show an overall decrease in interaction with their environment."

"Further, Animal Equality has been provided with images taken in the deep freeze storage area of Schwaben Park. Carcasses of dead goats were observed and it is possible that the goats at the park are fed to the Siberian tigers also housed there."

"Zoos often justify the incarceration and exhibition of animals with claims of species conservation and public education. However the vast number of captive animal facilities do not even house animals considered to be ‘Endangered‘ in the wild"

"...animals languishing in zoos...."

etc etc etc