Ituri said:
The reason I had a problem with the original thread on this topic was because too often on this site, folks judge exhibits based on a single photo, knowing absolutely nothing about what the exhibit conditions truly are like. The recently posted black milk snake exhibit does indeed appear to be too small. Is it a temporary situation? Is it an education animal that is rotated out of that space frequently? In almost any situation there are factors to how good a situation is for an animal that simply cannot be communicated by a single photograph. If experts have criticisms, sure that's one thing, but most of what we get on here are uneducated guesses by people who have a casual familiarity with animal husbandry. (I'm not singling anyone out in this criticism)
it is quite correct that generally speaking it is easy to misinterpret a single photo of an exhibit, but this specific one is not an isolated example from the Cincinnati reptile house, there are a number of similarly small tanks shown in the gallery. And as nanoboy rightly pointed out in response to your post, while there may be errors of interpretation in some photos it is equally easy to get a very accurate idea of the exhibit space in other photos where the boundaries of the cage are visible and most importantly when there is an animal in the photo for scale (a good example of both sides of this is the puma cage at the RSCC in the UK: the cage by itself looks really tiny but from the photo with the puma inside it is seen to actually be
considerably larger than it would otherwise appear). Sort of the other side of your argument, re: "Is it a temporary situation? Is it an education animal that is rotated out of that space frequently?", I find that irrelevant. The tank is still too small, and it is on display to the public in this cage (see my comments below with regards to that).
BeardsleyZooFan said:
If you look at more photos uploaded recently in the Reptile House, there are even more abominations in terms of reptiles. Hopefully the renovation will do the reptilians some good.
I think the best that can be said is that at least the zoo is (presumably) endeavouring to rectify the situation.
Moebelle said:
By the way the substrate in all the side exhibits have been renovated already, the exhibit isn't as small as it looks and to add on to what Ituri said, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of worse snake exhibits out there and this one isn't as horrible as you may think.
I don't see how that assessment of size is possible: you can clearly see the back, the front, and both sides of the tank, and the snake itself is there for scale! I have no doubt there are many much worse snake tanks out there (of which I shudder to think), but that makes not one bit of difference to the suitability of this tank. As Ituri said just above, having worse cages in existence does not make a bad cage acceptable! I've said it many times on Zoochat but I abhor the way snakes in particular are
very often crammed into tiny tanks, often even shorter in length than the snake's body, and the practice is actually
defended by snake keepers (usually with a statement something along the lines of "snakes don't need room" or "snakes feel safer in tiny cages" or whatever). It seems much worse when zoos do it however because they are supposed to be engendering awe and appreciation for animals, and how is sticking them in a tiny box doing that?
