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For many people, the zoo is a source of childhood amazement and fond memories: swinging monkeys, laughing hyenas and growling tigers. Conservationists say zoos advance their educational and preservationist efforts, but others see zoos as prisons where innocent creatures are unjustly held captive. The next time your child asks you to take them to the zoo, what will your answer be?
This argument assumes that our paternalism is justifiable. I ask, then, to what principle can you appeal to justify this paternalism that shouldn't, to be logically consistent, be extended to humans suffering extreme poverty, hunger, disease, etc. throughout the world? If such a principle cannot be articulated, it's selective reasoning or irrationality at work here.
I would ask further, if the interests of the nonhumans is driving our actions in regard to zoos (as the argument explicitly states) why shouldn't we employ these resources to challenge the paradigm whereby animals are treated as our property? Why not, that is, participate in P.E.T.A.-like advocacy efforts to alter our habits and irrational assumptions and beliefs about nonhumans, which, of course, leads to the endangerment of the gorillas we are now forced to protect?
- Alex M
August 28, 2008 4:43PM
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Zoos Propagate Rather Than Educate
- From PETA
By PETA - People for Ethical Treatment of Animals
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wrong that zoos don't educate
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.
- Gritsforbreakfast August 20, 2008 5:18AM
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Response to Gritsforbreakfast
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.
- Alex M
August 21, 2008 2:56PM
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Odd reasoning
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.
- Curious
March 4, 2009 7:53AM
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