You've Got to Let Me Know - Should I Stay (away) or Should I Go (to the zoo)?

Have you every seen a trailer for a movie that looked so awe-inspiringly bad that you knew that you had to see it?  Preferably without spending any money, maybe in the comfort of your home so that you and a group of like-minded friends could heckle it and jeer at it, delighting at the awful acting, the wooden dialogue, the nonsensical plot, and the cheesy special effects?  Sure you have.  Everyone has.  There's a difference between Oscar bait and a cult classic - one of them is at least usually fun to watch.

The same can be said about an atrocious book (harder to share in a group) or an outrageously bad song.  But what about a zoo or aquarium?

There are zoos - specific exhibits and entire facilities - that I've seen pictures or videos of that have left me speechless... and in a The Last Airbender kind of way, not a Shawshank Redemption way.  Sometimes they just scream low-effort, low-budget, low-knowledge, knock-ups of chicken wire and two-by-fours.  Others really horrify me because I see them and realize that someone put a lot of time and effort and money into creating something so... bad.

What can be "wrong" can be any number of things.  The enclosure can be too small, or be of a design that doesn't benefit the animal (too low for arboreal animals, too shallow/narrow to allow animals to get away from the public and/or each other).  There could be a general design flaw that makes it a poor habitat, like a habitat that's too open for a shy species, too flat for a mountain one (or too hilly for a grassland species), or a pool/climbing structures/etc that, while present, don't facilitate those behaviors.  It could be an excess of sunlight or of dampness, or a lack of enrichment or natural substrate.  A solitary species could be jammed cheek-to-cheek with too many other animals, or a social species alone, or predators and prey could be in uncomfortable proximity.  Like I said, there's any number of things that could be wrong.

Part of me always wants to take a closer look and take a visit.  Sometimes it's just morbid curiosity, or a willingness to be righteously indignant.  That's what drove me to pay my one and only visit to the Natural Bridge Zoo years ago.  Other times, it's a belief that you can learn just as much by studying bad facilities as you can good ones, in the same way that a compass that only points south can be as useful as one that only points north.  By better understanding what doesn't work, you can help plan for what does.

But these days, I try not to.

A bad movie is one thing - the worse that happens is that the director keeps making more, which can also be fun.  How many Sharknados are we at now?  A bad zoo is another.  Visiting means pumping money into them, which prolonging and encouraging the conditions that those animals are kept in.  It's one thing if a zoo is actively working to improve facilities and you feel that your money will go towards animal care and enhancements.  It's another if you have reason to suspect that it will just go to the owner or, at worse, lead to the purchase of more acquisitions.  In these cases, you've got to vote with your wallet.

I saw a post on social media recently about a petting zoo entirely in a shopping mall in Minnesota that had, among other unusual animals, had a species of small carnivore that I'd never seen before, and would be interested in seeing.  But not at the price of supporting some of the animal care practices I saw advertised.