A Day At The Detroit Zoo

Walking From the Parking Structure

Aviary and Butterfly House (used to be the Aquarium)

Ibises in the Trees

Giraffes

Gorilla Enclave

Walter Chrysler Train

I remember my visits to the Central Park Zoo in New York, where the reigning paradigm was to enclose animals in cages - as if they were violent felons - with barely enough room to turn around. Of course, that has all changed now; I am talking, though, as recently as the 1980's. Having visited the Detroit Zoo since my childhood, I was quite taken aback.
My wife tells the story of the elephant in the Central Park Zoo in New York who was placed in a routine cage: barely big enough to turn in, and how the poor beast would watch the keeper insert a hooked winch bar into a socket, which he would then turn to open the door to the small outdoor area the elephant was allotted.
All day long while in his cage, the elephant would put his trunk outside the bars of his cage, and he would try to get a grasp on the winch, and try to turn it time after bleeding memory time! Gosh, what a sad story! You would think that the first time back in 1950 when someone saw that, all heck would have been raised, and the Central Park Zoo would have been totally re-thought! Alas, it took a while for "animal huggers" to raise the level of awareness of the dumb clods of the rest of us.

There would be a lot of bad karma floating around New York, all those suffering beasts, not to mention all the hamburgers and pastrami being consumed...
The bad karma might have resulted in Donald Trump...

Anyhow, good day at the Detroit Zoo, which originally was designed following the idea of Carl Hagenbeck of Germany, who introduced the idea of natural animal enclosures in the 19th century.

Which picture is a bit whimsical? --