[ribalda]

I went to "according to tripadvisor" the best activity in Tenerife, a zoo called Loro Parque. I described the poor situation of the animals with photos and my comment got censored by tripadvisior, probably due to the great amount of money that they get from the park. From that day I stopped using Tripadvisor after making 100s of reviews.

[pvaldes]

Disclaimer: I'm not related with them in any form and there is a lot of time since my last visit, so I could be wrong.

Loro parque is known to host and reproduce a lot of endangered species of parrots and help it to recover from extinction with private money. As private zoo it has a very good reputation of taking lots of troubles to keep the animals as happy as they can.

They had an escape bat incident some years ago, solved, and there was the history of the killer whale Morgan with several animalist organisations figthing to avoid the park rescuing a deaf and starving dutch killer whale. It seems that some people would prefer the young lost whale dead than in captivity, for ideological reasons. Eventually Loro parque won all trials and collect all legal permits to keep an animal that would not survive a year in the ocean but is still alive and well and even has a calf in 2018. They even had to feed the calf with a bottle.

https://www.loroparque.com/morgan/

I'm not aware of anything really dark or wrong with them. Looks like a good modern zoo; In fact it is classified routinely as one of the bests zoos in Europe if I remember correctly.

What do you feel was wrong with them?

[acollins1331]

All zoos are like that and incredibly sad from the inside even if they look fine to the guests. The only ones that have a moral leg to stand on are the rehabilitation ones that use proceeds to help the animals, but it's still a very wishy washy thing to be running an animal prison for profit.

[KineticLensman]

Yes. I support a local non-profit ape rescue centre. The vast majority of their primates were rescued from the pet trade, medical research, beach photographer props, circuses. Some have disease (e.g. rickets) / deformities from poor diet in their pre-rescue lives, while others lack social or survival skills. Some have physical injuries, e.g. from their teeth being knocked out by their previous owners. These factors mean that a return to the wild is rarely possible (assuming the original environment still exists).

The staff are passionate about looking after these primates and do not see the centre as a moral issue. The fact that the animals need to be rescued in the first place is the real moral issue.

Interestingly, the centre's worse reviewers are those who expect a zoo run for the visitors benefit, and who complain about the ‘untidy’ enclosures (i.e. good climbable trees that make it hard to see any action) or the fact that a given primate might have chosen to sit quietly in a sunny area where it has good privacy, rather than perform on demand.

[nradov]

Almost all zoos in the US are non-profit.

[ilikehurdles]

TripAdvisor has some of the most consistently over-inflated reviews of all user-driven review services. I've been burned as well and now when I end up in a country that only has TA I'll do the physical legwork to find what I'm looking for, or search for independent blogs or better curated local resources.

[waylandsmithers]

What shows up on the website search results is determined by an auction run by tripadvisor between all those hotels, restaurants, etc.