I am surprised not to see India featured in any of the forums? Many of India's zoos are better than Malaysia's and even Singapore's!
Hi Psittacologist,
First of all welcome to the forum. Please leave an introduction in the general section so other forumsters know who they are dealing with. I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised.
I suppose we do not have many forumsters from the Asian region anyhow, which I personally find sad and lacking. So, often these zoos are undervalued and underrepresented simply because we do not have forumsters from these countries at all. Rather, the individual and admittedly subjective experiences of those forumsters that have been lucky enough to travel to the Indian subcontinent or SE Asia.
However, on the point of India's zoos being better than those in Malaysia or Singapore ... you are treading a thin line.
Indian zoos have only recently discovered masterplanning or collection planning exercises and conservation breeding programmes do not function properly yet (admittedly a federalist system and a bureacratic approval system from CZA do not help matters amongst other things).
Zoos in Malaysia and Singapore are far more developped in this respect and have concurrently running scientific conservation ex situ and in situ work on offer. India's zoos are far removed from that stage: e.g. the Bengal tiger does not even have a coordinated breeding programme in the subcontinent, whereas the species is now less secure in the wild then it has ever been since the proclamation of India as a republic independent from the UK.
I would like to confer with you on the subject and do urge our moderators to open an Indian zoo forum for us to provide input. I also urge my co-forumsters to be more open to the local perspective on things and for this we need you and other interested zoo friends in the subcontinent to correspond, write about their zoos and provide details of new animals, comings and goings.
Love to hear more from you!
Jelle