Louisiana Purchase Gardens & Zoo

This zoo is a bargain! The boat ride is a must. Beautiful shade all over on a hot day. Many exhibits. The tiger at the back of the zoo used to be a circus performer according to a zoo employee. He put on a show for us! If you live in the Monroe area you need to support and/​or volunteer here. The only negative about our zoo visit was that you can tell zoo has suffered from lack of funds over the years. Please stop in and support this zoo!!!

It’s a nice small zoo… it would better if somehow they made the animals more interactive but it was a pleasant size and I enjoyed it.

I feel bad giving this place a poor review, but I’m hoping that it may help to spark some improvements. This zoo is such a sad place. My husband commented, «I feel like we are at an abandoned zoo. Like, a Walking Dead zoo.» Everything is overgrown, the upkeep is non-​existent, the animals have awful living environments, there is trash everywhere (including animal cages– not food scraps, trash).
We are used to much bigger, better zoos. However, we are not upset about the small size, just the deplorable conditions. Is there some national zoo society that checks on zoos once every so often to make sure standards are met? If so, they have not visited Monroe in ages.
The drive to get to the zoo adds to the sad impression you get from visiting here. Everything is run down and abandoned.
They can’t necessarily help that, but it’s worth noting. If you feel like you might be in a scary movie, you’ve almost arrived at the zoo.
Here’s to hoping they make improvements. I’m all for a good price, but if they could bring in some professional zoo management/​inspectors/​designers/​biologists, I’d pay more.

This zoo amazed me. Going in I had the lowest expectations as I come from an area with a spectacular zoo in a huge city — so I thought this would be a small zoo similar to Little Rock. The front does not do it justice and even walking in, you still might think this place is small. But it just keeps going and going. Make sure you have a map and see it all, some areas aren’t well advertised and don’t have signs. Make sure you see the indoor insect area and the indoor night animals place. And they have a petting zoo area/​education area.
Being an animal lover, I wasn’t too sure how I felt about the concept of zoos in general. But we had a great tour guide Gary, who I think is the zoo director and saw us interested in some reptiles and ended up taking us around the zoo and showing us EVERYTHING. It was great. He said all the animals are either rescued and cannot be freed into the wild again, or born into domestication/​zoo-​life. Thus, no animal is there voluntarily or when he could be living a free life in the wild. We met some cute zoo animals, make sure you see Honey Bear the friendly bear that was a bit too social and like campers too much so she ended up there because she kept getting into trouble. There are also the 2 monkeys (ack, can’t remember what they were — gibbons maybe?) that used to be NOLA entertainers and are very fond oif each other and groom constantly. Then there is «Boss» the tortoise that tries to turn over the other tortoises, and then of course you can the ULM mascot bird too. So much to see, make a day of it. We were here longer than we expected.