I have some code where a good inheritance model has gone downhill and I am trying to understand why and how to fix it. Basically, imagine you have a Zoo hierarchy with:class Animal  class Parrot : Animal class Elephant : Animal class Cow : Animaletc. You have your eat(), run(), etc methods and all is good. Then one day someone comes along and says - our CageBuilder class works great and uses the animal.weight() and animal.height(), except for the new African Bison which is too strong and can shatter the wall, so I am gonna add one more property to the Animal class -- isAfricanBizon() and use that when choosing the material and only override it for the AfricanBizon class. Next person comes and does something similar and next thing you know you have all these properties specific for some subset of the hierarchy into the base class. What's a good way to improve/refactor such code? One alternative here would be to just use dynamic_casts to check for the types but that clutters the callers and adds a bunch of if-then-else all over the place. You can have more specific interfaces here but if all you have is the base class reference that doesnt help much either. Any other suggestions? Examples? Thanks!
Inheritance gone wrong
c++;object oriented;design