Should Animals be Kept in Zoos?

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Zoos are simply not in animals’ best interests, and we must do what is right for them—anything else is merely self-serving. While larger, well-known zoos are taking steps to provide token enrichment for captive animals, these artificial enclosures still cannot compare to an animal’s natural habitat.

Zoos teach people the wrong lesson—that it is acceptable to tear animals away from their families and homes and put them on display for our amusement.

Keith Lindsay with the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya believes that zoos have “next to nothing to offer” with regard to education. He feels, “It is much better to watch films of real elephants behaving naturally—walking, feeding, playing, mating, fighting—in truly natural social groups of up to hundreds of animals ranging widely across ecosystems than to see miserable captive elephants standing around in a bare enclosure, no matter how ‘naturalistic’ the landscaping design may be.”

Because zoos breed animals to provide cute babies to attract zoo patrons, they often become overcrowded, and older animals may be “warehoused,” sold to roadside zoos, circuses, or exotic animal dealers, or sent to auctions. At auctions, they can be sold into the exotic “pet” trade or to a “canned hunt,” in which hunters pay for the “privilege” of killing them at point-blank range. This is surely not something the public wishes to support.