Izu Shaboten Zoo

I visited Izu Shaboten Zoo by bike on Friday, and it was lively with many tourists and local schoolchildren. In the nocturnal animals’ area, I saw bats for the first time in my life, which was a memorable experience. The zoo has a spacious layout where animals move around freely, and of course the capybaras were a highlight. The best part was the cactus-picking activity, where you choose your own cactus and pot to create a unique arrangement to take home. Although the entrance fee felt a bit high, the experience and atmosphere made it worth it.

Mixed feelings. Let the bigger animals have a bigger home‼️The park itself was better than expected, whole park took 2-3 hours. The staff was friendly & the small animals look reasonably well kept. I would give it 5 stars for the smaller animals but for the larger animals it was depressing!!There was a bear/cat animal that was in one of the indoors enclosure and it was 5 steps for the entire home. Totally messed up. Some of the apes looked depressed. It rained but they provided umbrellas at the entrance & it was totally fine in the rain. I hope more people can speak out about the small enclosures.

Great zoo size that we covered in about 4 hours with a 4 and 6 year old. Nice cactus greenhouses with an impressive collection of 100+ year old specimens. Animal enclosures didn't many intrusive barriers which allowed us to get nice and close. There were plenty of food stations to buy feed for practically all the animals too. This type of experience would be really expensive back in Australia. General admission was also reasonable too. Definitely recommended for a family outing if you're in the area 👌

Mixed feelings about this zoo. Coming from Canada where most Zoo's have way more space than this, some of the enclosures felt pretty sad. We were originally going to go to the top of Mount Omoro but it was closed due to weather so we went to the zoo instead. Half of the zoo enclosures were absolutely tiny, and others were fairly large. For example the one with the penguins looked very small and dirty, and same with most of the indoor ones. The gorilla exhibit was also very sad and small. You could see some of the animals pacing around very fast in the small enclosures which is a sign of stress. The owls were also chained to the ground which felt very sad to see, at first I thought they were statues. You could also feed most animals, sometimes through tubes and you could see the animals just essentially begging for the food, although they looked well fed for the most part. Some cleaning and larger enclosures would make this way nicer. However we did absolutely love the capybara parts and being able to feed them. They are so funny! The bird exhibit was also quite cool.

Animal welfare is definitely not even towards the top of the list here. Most of the enclosures were so very small and pretty barren, especially for mammals. The monkeys towards the entrance had only a concrete room painted to look like a sad jungle, with only a couple of trees and no enrichment items that I could see. The sloth had a tiny concrete room with a couple of sticks, like many of the other animals. All of the owls besides one were tethered to stands with very short ropes. Many animals that every other zoo I’ve been to had in enclosures, were somehow left in open areas with no fence. Kangaroos included. The “iconic” capybara onsen is literally a muddy concrete pool that they can jump into. It was very small per the number of animals. The Agouti enclosure smelled very strong of ammonia and it was behind glass minus a small opening that you could drop food into….the ammonia smell was that strong. Many animals were dirty looking and a couple paced in circles or just back and forth. All of the parrots looked to have almost half of one whole wing clipped to prevent them from flying. The animals that were free roaming just went wherever in an odd way - I’m not sure what even kept them in the zoo. My kids liked it because you could pet many of the animals but I wonder how many animals or people have been injured due to the closeness. The only redeeming factor, and the reason for two stars, was the plant areas. My son loved seeing the different cacti, and it’s cool how you could plant your own the bring home. Overall wouldn’t recommend and definitely wouldn’t come here again. We wouldn’t have visited if we would have known just how depressing this zoo is.