When you take, say, an orangutan and put him in a zoo in, say, Chicago, what does the poor critter do during the cold season? I would assume that he has an indoor heated enclosure to hang out in, but how do they keep the poor beast from getting depressed from being all cooped up inside for months at a time?
I don’t know about ourangs, but I’ve heard that elephants greatly enjoy the snow. Of course, with their surface-to-volume ratio, they can maintain temperature pretty easily in any environment.
The zoo closest to us is privately owned and they tell you what they do with them. Some of them are put in heated enclosures. However, many of them are shipped as a winter loan to warm weather zoos. They have a 12 foot alligator for example and he gets shipped South and comes back when it warms up. I have no idea how they ship him but that is what they do.
That’s pretty much it. Zookeepers will add various “toys” (anything from rugged rubber/plastic gizmos to an apple frozen in a block of ice depending on the animal) to enclosures to help stimulate the animals or even spend some one-on-one with them but, yeah, they stay inside for the winter. Lots of animal advocates bring this up as a reason why zoos are cruel.
Although it’s not all bad. I don’t even think the apes go outside at Brookfield Zoo near Chicago anymore since they all live in TropicWorld Asia/Africa/S. America which is a big, indoor simulated rainforest habitat. I’m not sure what Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago looks like these days. I visited National Zoo in DC a week ago and was surprised to see the apes still living in big empty box enclosures with a couple ropes and a tire swing.
Helsinki Zoo has its warm-weather animals inside during winter; when I visited there a few weeks back, the parrots and monkeys were all still inside the Amazonia house, but during summer they have outside enclosures. The peacocks stay inside during winter, but roam freely around the grounds during summer, etc.
Many zoos in colder climates will try to adapt their animal populations to reflect that. The last elephant in Finland was relocated to warmer climes a few years ago because of the stress it was going through being cooped up all winter. There is a herd of baboons at Helsinki Zoo which have to be inside all winter because they cannot handle the cold climate; the Zoo has previously stated that they would like to replace the baboons with, say, Japanese macaques, which are much better suited to the cold and would not have to stay inside all winter.