Unlike other organizations, Zepp said he pays for everything himself, aside from a few donations. And so, yeah, we might not have the best enclosures, but we don’t know what’s coming to us.'

'We get a knock at the door with someone saying 'we have a lizard in a bin outside that needs a home,'' he said. It's not a situation where he tries to acquire animals, Epp said. 'We found quite some abnormal behaviours - so those are behaviours that we only see in captivity that they’re usually related to stress, like pacing in wolves, feather plucking in parrots and self-mutilation in monkeys.'ĭennis Epp, the owner of Northern Exotics, said he’s disheartened to be on the list especially since he said he doesn’t consider his store to be a zoo necessarily. 'We found group animals or very social animals like monkeys and parrots to be kept alone, which is heartbreaking to me,' Hamers said. In particular, the conditions in which they are kept are radically different from how they live in the wild. While the report doesn't single out individual zoos for problems, it points to widespread issues with the way the animals are cared for and handled. We found very small enclosures in which animals aren’t able to engage in natural behaviours.' 'Tigers can clear fences higher (than) four metres, so there are some public health and safety issues there. 'We found different things from very flimsy built cages to tigers being kept behind fences lower than three metres,' said Michèle Hamers, the group's wildlife campaign manager. The investigation reviewed the operations of 11 zoos across Ontario, including Northern Exotics in Sudbury, as well as 10 operations in southern Ontario. The report, titled 'Nothing New at the Zoo,' highlights numerous problems with the way exotic animals are housed, cared for and interact with the public. The World Animal Protection organization has released a new investigative report on the state of so-called roadside zoos in Ontario.

The division 2 exotics