Zoos Propagate Rather Than Educate
Zoos claim to provide educational opportunities, but most visitors spend only a few minutes at each display, seeking entertainment rather than enlightenment. Over the course of five summers, a curator at the National Zoo followed more than 700 zoo visitors and found that “it didn’t matter what was on display … people [were] treating the exhibits like wallpaper.” He determined that “officials should stop kidding themselves about the tremendous educational value of showing an animal behind a glass wall.”
The purpose of most zoos is to find ways to breed and maintain more animals in captivity. The Chinese government, for example, “rents” pandas to zoos worldwide for fees of more than $1 million per year, but some question whether the profits are being directed toward panda-conservation efforts at all. Protecting species from extinction sounds like a noble goal, but for the most part, animals bred in captivity, including threatened and endangered wildlife, cannot be released to the wild because they never have the opportunity to learn important survival skills. Some animals also pick up diseases at zoos that could endanger wild populations.
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Based on recent experience with my 23 month old granddaughter, I'd disagree. She didn't view the animals as "wallpaper." She stared in wonder, asked questions, and in the case of the rhino and the monkeys, for whatever reason, obsessed over the experience for more than a week afterward. As a result, we began looking the animals up online, where she can spend a surprising amount of focused time sitting in a lap watching, say, a Flicker slideshow of baby animals or real-time aquarium footage of sea otters. She would have had no access to that aspect of the world without a zoo, and no institution to spark her interest and wonder regarding animals.
PETA loses credibility by making this argument. Zoos may or may not be cruel. But to claim they "propagate rather than educate" simply doesn't stand up beside most people's personal experience ... certainly my family's.
There seems to be an internal conflict in the zoos-educate-people argument: If your child were to truly learn about the nature of monkeys and the rhino - their lives, their habitats, their relationships, etc. -it stands to reason that he/she would challenge the justness of keeping experiencing beings such as these encaged for our "education" and amusement.
This seems like the reasonable conclusion for anyone who spends "a surprising amount of focused time" learning about the lives of these creatures, unless the underlying message that "we don't need to ask questions because we are humans and they are not" is successful. Zoos do not educate they propagate because here you are saying that PETA looses credibility for raising these questions that follow from your child’s experience.
It seems to me that once a child does "truly learn about the nature of monkeys and the rhino - their lives, their habitats, their relationships, etc." they would get concerned about poaching and human developments that threaten wild populations rather than obsessing over the zoo animal that got them to fall in love with wildlife. That's what I don't get about these anti-zoo arguments. They are rarely pro-wildlife. Simply anti-zoo. Makes me think it has more to do with building a political and financially successful organization here (one that gets animal lovers to donate) rather than about improving the lot of animals.