Great news for Ralph, the featherless penguin!  Keepers at England’s Marwell Wildlife have fitted the penguin with designer duds made especially for him.

Feathers, crucial in keeping penguins warm and dry, provide insulation and protection from the wind and weather.  Each year, new feathers grow underneath the old, worn-out feathers. Once a new feather is in place, it pushes the old feather out until all the old feathers have been completely replaced.  The annual process, called molting or shedding, normally takes about four weeks, depending on the species.   

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Writing out my thoughts was a sort of preparative exercise, mostly to try to articulate the main dilemma I have with zoos: do the potential education benefits of zoos outweigh the cruelty of caging animals in small spaces that I personally believe typically don’t provide them with fulfilling lives? I still am not sure of the answer, but my trip to the Huachipa Zoo did answer another intriguing question for me. When zoos are bad, would I personally prefer that a bad zoo exist rather than have no zoo at all?

Before I reveal the answer to the aforementioned question, I should explain that my wife and I came up with some criteria for rating zoos. For the purpose of reviewing more zoos in the future, I wanted to have some reasonable means to compare them.

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