When I hear that word (unless it's in a very obvious context, like what side do you want for dinner), I almost immediately tack on the word "crib." The associations, while nostalgic, are not entirely pleasant ones.
The corn crib cage, also called a silo cage or a Behlen cage (after one company that produces them) is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a round wire cage, that looks pretty much like a modified corn crib. They are the workhorse of much of the unaccredited zoo community, not that they don't make some appearances within accredited zoos as well, especially for birds, primates, and small mammals.
I've spent a lot of time working with them, caring for a variety of species in them ranging from spider monkeys to pheasants to macaws to a clouded leopard. I've hated every single bit of that time.
Corn cribs are not ideal for animal care. They're good at holding animals, but that's just about it. They are open all around, allowing 360-degrees of viewing, so unless you make some modifications, your animal is completely exposed on all sides. Even if the enclosure has a fence around it to keep the public back, you can still have problems with wildlife, such as raccoons or foxes, prowling around the exhibit at night and stressing the enclosed animal out, as it has nowhere to go but the center of the cage. The round, wire sides also make it hard to add much in the way of shelter, so for tropical animals your options generally are to either add a box with a heat lamp (and hope that it doesn't die out in the middle of a winter night), or catch the animal up and bring it inside.
Finally, there's something about the proportion of the size of the cage and the spacing of the wires that I don't like. You could, theoretically, put very small animals in one of these cages, but the bars are spaced so far apart that the animal would be able to escape. If the animal is too big to fit between the bars, it might be too large to comfortably be housed in the crib.
Part of it is just psychological too, I suspect. I mostly associate corn cribs with some of the shabbier places I've worked at, where the caging was either that or something knocked together with chicken wire and scrap lumber. I really grew to hate the onset of winter, unlocking corn cribs to see animals shivering in their nest boxes, and wasn't crazy about the summer, when they were surrounded on all sides. The enclosures just seemed lazy, minimalistic, and the perfect embodiment of the "good enough" school of keeping. It didn't help that they were beloved by my boss, who thought it was impossible to do better and would periodically swap species out with no enclosure modifications. A corn crib might hold a binturong one year, than peafowl the next.
You can make them work, I suppose. A few years back, the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, for instance, took three old corn crib enclosures that housed lemurs and linked them, and the nearby Chimpanzee Forest building, with overhead passages to create an intertwined habitat that allows small primates not only to change exhibits, but to connect with the indoor exhibits nearby. It was definitely a major improvement over keeping monkeys and lemurs in wire silos with no easy access between indoor and outdoor spaces. But I still can't help but scowl a little bit when I see them.
Sometimes you just need a structure to house an animal and, if all other needs are met, I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with a corn crib. But there's something about its bland, impersonal utilitarianism that never sits quite right with me.
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