The Eastern Discovery Tour
Day 3

Visiting Shijingshan park on day 3 did leave me all of day 3 for the zoo, which is just as well as it did take up most of my day. In fact I missed a few things, which I came back on the afternoon of day 8 to do. To simplify things I'm just doing one report on the zoo, with photos and reporting on both visits.

I had heard some bad things about Chinese zoos, and it's true that a lot of the enclosures weren't as modern as I'm used to in the West. I think the main problem was the poor lighting, and lack of bedding material in a lot of the enclosures. There were two really bad issues that stand out. I've heard the zoo might be getting a new elephant house, which can't come soon enough judging by what I saw, plus they need to increase the number of outdoor enclosures available to the big cats pretty quickly as well.

Another big problem was a lot of visitors were throwing food and rubbish in the enclosures. This they really need to crack down on, by only allowing people to feed food brought from the zoo were appropriate, and if necessary fine people who throw anything else in to the enclosure.

Overall though it's a very nice zoo, which I hope they will continue to modernise, to catch up with the West. Even as it is it's still a place I would recommend a visit to.

Just inside the zoo gate was this collection of Pandas that had all been individually decorated.

A reminder of one of the main attractions of the Zoo, the Panda enclosure with a large number of the rare black and white pandas.

These ones are only about 2 years old, a result of the Zoo's breeding program.

My next stop was the Pheasant Garden, which had a collection of exotic birds and this. It's a concrete box with two chickens in it. Quite possibly the worst zoo exhibition I've ever seen, sadly not the worst one I saw at Beijing Zoo.

Next to the Peasant Garden was the small mammal area, which included these Skunks.

One of the most impressive enclosures at the Zoo was the macaque enclosure, that was about the size of 3 double decker buses parked side by side. It also had a large amount of climbing equipment for the large group of macaques to use, which made it a great enclosure to view.

At first glance the cat enclosures don't seem to bad. There's an impressive selection of tigers, lions, leopards and panthers, all of who seem happy in their outside enclosures.

Some of them had even bred successfully. This cub was outside with it's sibling and mother.

It's only when you go inside the real problem becomes apparent. There's more groups of big cats than outdoor enclosures, meaning a lot of them are trapped in a small cage inside for a length of time. It's distressing to see some of them going mad with boredom. In the long term they're going to need more outside enclosures or fewer cats to stop this happening. In the short time they at least need some enrichment in these cages, with some more toys, and making them work for their food, rather than just placing it in a pile on the floor.

The bears had a reasonably good enclosure. Not up to some of the good grass covered ones I've seen, but a large multi level rock based one. The more worrying thing here was seeing how the bears spent a lot of time begging, from where they're used to visitors throwing them bits of food.