Jihlava Zoo Short Review


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January 2nd 2017
Published: July 13th 2017
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The final zoo that I had time for on this trip was Jihlava Zoo which is located in the town of Jihlava, also about an hour from Brno by car. The zoo is much closer to the centre than Zlin or Brno, and some parts of the centre of town look over the zoo. I didn't have time to visit the town because we only got to the zoo at 11, and by the time I was done at 3:30 it was already getting dark, but my parents spent the day in the town and I have been told that it is very nice.

During winter, Jihlava is certainly my favourite of the three zoos, and I suspect I would have had the same impression in the summer, but I can understand the different, more open, appeal of Zlin. The mammal collection at Jihlava is excellent with a huge range of species including many quite unusual ones, and if I am counting correctly, 16 felid taxa, of which the Jungle Cat was a new species for me. The herpetological collection was also quite extensive with a fair few species in the tropical house (brief note here; when I was going around Brno Zoo, HOMIN96 mentioned the large amounts of cabling and wiring inside the reptile enclosures at Jihlava, and I’m not sure if I would have noticed otherwise, but I certainly noticed and thought it looked very odd and probably rather dangerous), but the bird collection was very small and Zlin certainly exceeded on that front.

Jihlava Zoo doesn't have nearly as much space as Zlin, so the exhibits are much more tightly packed with less breathing room between exhibits, but I don't think the zoo is excessively crowded. The zoo also has a rather odd long, thin shape and there is no obvious path around the zoo unless you really planned carefully (unlike Zlin and to a slightly lesser extent Brno, both of which had obvious routes) with exhibits that were a bit more higgledy-piggledy. This problem is, unfortunately, made much worse by the map, which is horrendous. To start with, I only saw a single board with a map in the entirety of the zoo and none were given or sold at the entrance. This single map only had a few of the major pathways marked, and didn't have the exhibits or buildings labelled but instead had extremely childish cartoons of animals dotted around the map. Then surrounding the edge of the map were random drawings and hieroglyphics that I could make absolutely no sense of (though there were some words in Czech that would probably have helped with understanding), and though it is a minor complaint, I wanted to mention how awful the map was.

Another complaint that I have with Jihlava is that in a few places, the theming crosses the line I mentioned in my Zlin review of going from decorations to superfluous rubbish (in my opinion). The two places I feel where this was worst was with the Australian house where the indoor area for the Australian exhibit was supposed to look like an outback house thing with Red Kangaroos sitting inside, and also with the crashed 'Jihlava Airlines' plane in the tropical house and I thought both of these were excessive and just looked silly. In the Australian house, there was also one example where I felt these decorations made the exhibit worse for the animal where the Australian Water Rat just had a small bathtub as the water area rather than something larger as I felt it should have had. Generally, I also felt that although all the exhibits looked very new and they were all very attractive - the zoo advertises itself as 'a zoo without bars' - many of them were just mediocre for the animals and not all were excellent both in looking good and in being good for the animals. Though of course the actual quality of the exhibit can be very difficult to judge beyond the superficial appearance. And just as a passing note, ‘a zoo without bars' does have disadvantages in winter, I was completely unable to see into the outdoor tiger exhibit, I don't mean the viewing was obstructed, I couldn't see in at all, because the viewing is entirely glass which was completely frosted over.


So, I think that's all for my thoughts on each of the zoos. I very much enjoyed my trip and would have loved to have stayed in Brno longer to visit some other local zoos, but I'm very pleased with the three I managed to visited and overall, I liked them all very much.

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