Your zoo shots in your port don't look that bad, but perhaps it's Pop is the word that you are looking for... making certain areas of the photo jump out at the viewer instead of an even feeling across the frame.
Remember that a lot of it has to do with your settings in the cam and not on the cam. Internally before we even start shooting we will either choose one of the Presets (Canon calls them Parameters) or tweak the individual settings ourself... The Presets and Custom settings control Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation, Color tone.
By default a dSLR is set to Weaker Sharpness, Contrast and Saturation and Color tone is Neutral. If you are taking your pics straight from the cam and doing little post processing then you will want to bump up the sharpness and saturation, bump up or down the contrast, and color tones very in dSLRs but you will find stuff like vivid, neutral, warm etc.
In post processing that is where we bring em to life by adjusting Contrast (moreso Levels and Curves), Sharpness (or blur), Color tones/Saturation (will set the mood).
Composition is important because the more we can do in the cam the less we do in post processing. DOF, and Framing are the biggies that I can think of.
What editing software are you using?
BTW: What lens did you use for the zoo shots?
Andy
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