Two weeks ago on Sunday, the boyfriend and I made use of the RuhrTopKarte again and visited the zoo in Duisburg for free. The zoo offers a lot of animals you don't see in zoos very often like dolphins (although I'd like them to stop breeding them or freeing the animals into the ocean) or Koalas (although I'm not happy that the eucalyptus tree branches have to be flown here every week). Zoos are always a bit problematic for me, as I don't like that the animals are held captive. On the other hand, (illegal) hunters and destruction of the natural habitats probably doesn't make animals happier than being bored in a (large and intelligently designed) cage...
On a happier note, we watched the dolphins doing their training which the do in a pretty large aquarium and seemingly enjoyed as they did a lot of extra jumps when the trainer was focusing on one animal. There was also a young dolphin called David who was still learning the commands and always did the same thing when he did not recognize what was asked of him... He was really cute! Again, I'm not quite sure if I'm happy about breeding dolphins in captivity and keeping them in a basin that can never be as large as the ocean. But at least they had training sessions three to four times a day, so they will probably not be bored!
We also saw the aforementioned Koalas and kangaroos, which were really cute. I don't remember if I ever saw live Koalas before, but I was a little afraid that I would see something (warning, the following link shows the most scary Koala ever!)
like this! But the Koalas were cute and fluffy, if a bit slow:
After Australia, we visited Africa with Elephants, Giraffes, vultures and monkeys. The Liszt monkeys had a little baby which was only 3 weeks old:
We also saw some South-American animals including a river dolphin (who looked quite tattered and sad, but her partner died some weeks ago and she will most likely not live for long as she is 30 years old), Toucans, Tapirs and Coati mundis...
It was a really cool and exciting day, I loved seeing all these animals and the weather was really good, too. By the way, all pictures were taken by my boyfriend and I have to say that he really improved his skills with the DSLR camera!