National Visit The Zoo Day: See What’s Happening Near Boulder

1. Localize hed, short hed, dek, lede and second graf. See if your city’s AZA zoo has any National Visit the Zoo Day activities and highlight; if not, just add a graf about some of the activities.
2. Add an engagement callout: What’s your favorite exhibit at YOUR CITY’S ZOO?
3. If you have rights to a photo specific to your zoo, switch it out so this looks more local.

BOULDER, CO — If you’re looking for something to do while the kids are out of school, a visit to the nearby Denver Zoo might be just the ticket. Thursday, Dec. 27, is National Visit the Zoo Day.

If you're looking for something indoors — and closer — the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster is a perfect snowy day activity. Denver Zoo will still have its popular Zoo Lights exhibition on until January 6, so be sure to pick a slot, if you haven't seen it already, and make a reservation!

Zoo exhibits have changed significantly over the years. Before the 20th century, animals were often kept in cages with bars that left them very little room to move around, let alone explore their surroundings. In today’s zoos, enrichment activities — things the animals enjoy doing and that demonstrate their species-specific behavior — are viewed as essential to animals’ welfare as proper nutrition and veterinary care.

Tell Us: What’s your favorite exhibit at a Colorado zoo and why? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Zoo animals’ habitats have expanded, too. The movement to house animals in a more “natural” space began in the early 1900s when Carl Hagenbeck, whose family was involved in the wild animal trade, created “Tierpark” in Stellingen, Germany.

Gone were the bars and cages and in their place were moats to separate some of the animal groups, according to Smithsonian Library blog written by Polly Lasker. Hagenbeck encouraged trainers to treat the animals kindly and use gentle coaxing rather than some of the harsher methods that were typical at the time.

“What is now taken for granted by almost every visitor to a zoo — moated exhibits in a landscape simulating nature; gregarious animals of mixed species kept in herds in large enclosures; and animal performances based on conditioning and sensitivity, not on brute force and intimidation — all started at Hagenbeck’s Tierpark,”Herman Reichenbach wrote in “New worlds, new animals: from menagerie to zoological park in the nineteenth century.”

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