Developments of the Zoo am Meer

The zoo buildings and zoo hedges in all zoos have experienced a big development within the last decades. The cages and dioramas of the 20th century have been replaced by big natural plants. Whereas the directors of many zoos had been proud of the visible boarding  concrete in their plants within the seventies, just this boarding concrete became a stain within the nineties and it was tried to make it unvisible again using natural decoration material.

The trend in the zoo landscape went and is going to biotic communities being large and near to nature enabling the animals to live the spectrum of their natural behaviour pattern as wide as possible. Not only the animal is the focus but also the animal in its living space.

Relating to the husbandry of so-named “flag ship animals” in zoos the attention is drawn to the problems of the destruction of environment and resulting from this to the destruction of  living space. The presentation of ecological relations had become a further target. However this also requests the visitors to change their mind. Whereas the animal was always directly visible to the visitor in the old small zoo premises, the animals now have the chance to  withdraw in the modern large premises sometimes. Only under this condition the zoo animal husbandry can still be justified in such premises today.