In this day and age, human starvation is often, perhaps primarily, a weapon of war, inflicted intentionally.
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Uh…where to begin. You think no one has thought of this argument before? You think it’s not possible to “let them down gently” by stopping breeding them and letting them live out natural lives, instead of some worldwide orgy of slaughter? More to the point, do you think any of them “survive” captivity as farmed animals? They are killed by the billions (the figure most often cited is 9 billion chickens annually in the US alone).
If the point is to alleviate individual suffering, don’t make more unnatural altered animals to kill. If the point is to preserve species, maybe we don’t need unnatural altered animals.
Obviously it would be a big deal economically to end animal farming; a straight-up economic hit on a large scale. But that’s not really the question of what’s right to do. The US South took a huge economic hit when the slaves were freed. All that lost capital, but would you argue that it was too expensive? Nazi Germany took a huge economic hit when its labor camps were overrun and liberated. But suffering was ended. Would you balk at the cost?[/QUOTE]
Are you seriously comparing human slavery with the food production?
Is that supposed to be a valid argument?
Because the two have nothing to do with one another in a rational conversation.
And please feel free to present a sustainable model (after all it has to WORK or no one is going to bother trying it) that will feed 7+ billion people. That does not include animal protein.
Or please present a sustainable agricultural model that has worked and is currently working that will feed people using the limited amounts of arable land and the limited amounts of fertilizer feedstocks.
Most plans are, as I said, pie-in-the-sky ideas which are are only “sustainable” if small amounts of food are expected and limited numbers of people need to be feed. For greater numbers, larger scale efforts have to be undertaken. That’s where factory farms have come in.
Are they “perfect?”
No
Could they be better?
Certainly.
However, any changes have to be sustainable and they have to be introduced in a manner which doesn’t exacerbate existing food shortage issues. Do you know of any of those in work currently?
Again…returning to the main subject: Zoos are a necessary evil. Many animals would be (and in fact are) extinct in the wild without zoos. If the decision is for those animals to become extinct, then close the zoos and natural selection, habitat loss and human predation will allow that to occur.
Are zoos the “best” solution?"
Probably not.
But again, I have yet to see another one which doesn’t include a sharp decline in the human population.
Actually, there WERE mass slaughters of wooly mammoths.
There were wooly mammoths on Wrangell Island in the Arctic until about 3k years ago.
That’s when man finally came to the island and killed them.
Pleas feel free to present a working model of sustainable farming that is actually feeding more than a few hundred or a few thousand people. That does NOT use current methods of agricultural. And that takes into account limited arable land and land rights.
That implies that it’s not okay to do. I feel that, with proper care, the benefits of making those animals available outweighs the “harm”. So I have no problem with the message that it’s all right to maintain good zoos; it’s a message I believe in.
I’m not the one who made the economic argument instead of a moral argument. Economically, I am indeed on point – saying “It’s too expensive to do, even if we wanted to do it for moral reasons” is precisely an argument used to support slaveholding.
You want to back away from economic arguments, be my guest. You first.
If we’re sticking to moral comparisons, your argument that keeping a bunch of primates in captivity to pick cotton is orders of magnitude different from keeping a bunch of other primates in captivity to sell Sno-Cones is noted.
That sounds like maybe you didn’t read the UN report?
Well, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we can live on a plant-based diet. And from the laws of thermodynamics alone, we know that recycling plants through animals is less efficient.
Okay, that ought to do it.
How did “sustainable” get into the conversation about animal or plant diets? Raising the bar, are we?
Well, yeah. Different primates.
Hell, I’d say that keeping a lemur in a cage with a bush in it is different from keeping an orangutang in a cage with a bush in it. Even though they’re both non-human primates.
I said slaughterhouse. Are you trying to tell me there was a wooly mammoth factory farm churning out McWooly Burgers?
Of course not. They were free range mammoths that lived enjoyable mammoth lives before they were eaten by a predator, most likely a human.
There is absolutely no reason why animals need to be kept in crates all their lives (just one example of how factory farms treat their animals) to feed the human population.
Now back to the topic of zoos, perhaps if hunter gatherers had zoos they would have kept some wooly mammoths on display and perhaps we could enjoy seeing their descendants today.
Them’s fightin’ words! 
(San Diego has the nice combination of a downtown Zoo and a “Safari Park” out in the country, a spiffing one-two punch of different approaches to animal handling. Small one-species enclosures…vs. very large enclosures with many species interacting in ways that are closer to their natural environment.)
Seriously…good for Singapore! (I’ll likely never be able to visit there myself, but I did just look over their web site – and looked in from above using Google Earth – and it all looks mighty wondrous fine indeed!)
Not all zoos are created equal. Some are much better in their care of the animals than others. So the OP’s claim that Lucy The Edmonton Elephant is miserable, however true or not, doesn’t necessarily generalize to argue that all zoos should be shut down.
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums is a professional organization of member zoos that, among other things, accredits them. From a quick glance at their web site, it looks like they do (or sponsor or coordinate or at least maintain contact lists) a lot of things you might expect such a group to do: Education; research and conservation programs; legislative lobbying; etc. They may also publish ratings of their member zoos; at one time for example, IIRC (about 25 years ago) the Oakland (CA) zoo was rated as one of the worst, although they’ve since renovated and cleaned up their act (AFAIK).
Overview of the organization Wikipedia page.
List of AZA member zoos and aquaria Wiki page. I’m not finding Edmonton on that list.
Thing is the AZA is primarily an American accreditation, if you look there are very few international listings on that list (only 2 Canadian ones). I wouldn’t automatically slam Edmonton for not being on it.
The Canadian version is the CAZA and does include Edmonton (both the Valley Zoo and the Marine Life Department at the West Ed Mall.
The wife and I have visited the San Diego Zoo and Singapore Zoo both, and they’re both of at least the same quality. I’m afraid Singapore may edge out San Diego if anything, but San Diego’s good, no dissing that zoo.
Singapore has a Night Safari too, adjacent to the zoo. It was the first one in the world. San Diego didn’t have theirs yet when we were there, so that I can’t compare, but I would expect it to be nothing less than excellent too.
(The Zoo and Night Safari are both out in a rural area. People tend to think of Singapore as one big city, but there’s lots of countryside too.)
I’ve read that that’s a psychological escape mechanism. If I was stuck in a cage with strangers staring and pointing at me all day, every day, I’d likely resort to that.
On the other hand, I’ve heard that in some ways, animals don’t necessarily suffer that much in a good zoo–emphasis on good. Animals in the wild go through a certain amount of stress having to find food every day, going through cycles of plenty and near starvation, as well as drought or winter, and fighting for their lives against deadly enemies. A simple injury can mean death. In a zoo, they get three squares a day, are safe from predators and the elements, and get unlimited health care. But whether that makes up for the lack of independence they’d have in the wild will probably always be debatable.
A zoo in my region (Illinois) had two elephants, who had to live indoors during the winter, and they were recently sent to a zoo in Arkansas that had a larger herd, not just because the climate was unsuitable, but because they are such social animals. Some people protested, but relented when it was explained to them that this was what was best for the animals.
News report on Canadian elephants frolicking in the snow.
And ugh, can we avoid rehashing the old ‘factory farming is evil!’ debate for the 10,000th pointless time? It barely even has anything to do with the debate about zoos.
Something more like a drive through safari or visitable rescue park might be better than a conventional zoo. But I find the notion that animals are obviously and inherently better off in nature to be somewhat suspect considering the amazing effort humans have gone through to avoid that same fate.
That is hilarious! 
My view on zoos is I dont like them, the rescuing, breeding, and reintroducing into safe areas would take care of the endangered, Birth control and education about birth control with humans would take care of the habitat.
This is very different from seeing one live, hearing it and smelling it live. Making Christmas decorations is a big industry in Costa Rica: pretty much all of my customers there had made sheep figurines at some point. Once they grew confident enough, they asked “how big is a sheep?” They knew how they scaled up in relation to other figurines, but couldn’t really grok how big would they be in relationship to a human being, or whether the wool would be soft, or what they smell like. For us, a handful of Spaniards among whom even the most staunch urbanite had found himself surrounded by sheep at some point, what had been surprising had been “bulls with humps”; it’s not as if my coworkers who were surprised by those had never seen a Brahma bull, but it hadn’t registered.
Not only did they clean up their act, they raised the bar on other zoos. After hiring a new director Oakland was one of the first zoos to adopt a “Protective contact” method with elephants rather than the older (and still used) “Free contact” method.
Under protective contact, zookeepers work with elephants only when separated by a protective enclosure. The other system is “Free contact”. Elephants are many times larger than a human, so if you want to work with an elephant without getting injured you have to take the role of the alpha elephant. That means using a bullhook, i.e. inflicting pain on the elephant. Because if you’re not in charge, you risk getting hurt. Elephant handling is one of the most dangerous occupations statistically. Elephant goad - Wikipedia
Once humans removed themselves from the pack-leader role, the social dynamics of the herd began to shift. Among other developments, pregnancies occurred.
http://www.oaklandzoo.org/blog/tag/protected-contact/
http://www.zoochat.com/22/protected-contact-vs-free-contact-211703/