Should Animals be Kept in Zoos?

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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.