Inspired by the thread about SeaWorld and Orcas here, I thought I would bring up for discussion the ethics of actual zoos. I am a little obsessed with animals and used to LOVE zoos as a child. I went to the famous san diego zoo a few months ago (my first zoo visit in years) and was sorely disappointed at how “caged-in” and lethargic many of the animals seemed. I can’t help but assume they would like to have more freedom, room and opportunities to interact with their environment (i.e. socializing, scavenging or hunting for food, etc).
But here are some questions.
We assume that animals, particularly non-domesticated ones, want “freedom.” I think we can all safely say that chickens (which are domesticated, but I’m using chickens because it’s an extreme example) who are allowed to roam free and peck at feed off the ground and have sex and lay eggs and etc are probably “happier” (whatever that means for animals) and better off than those stuffed four to a cage, whose legs and malformed since birth because they have no room to move around, who live in a warehouse and wallow in their own filth and never see the light of day and then are slaughtered for meat.
But what about the hippo who spends most of his time in a 0.5-1 acre (making these numbers up from what the exhibits look like) enclosure with a small pool and tons of vegetation and maybe another hippo. Is he truly worse off than the wild hippo? Life in the wild is nasty, brutish, and short, and most animals in captivity live much longer than those in the wild. Given the proclivity of most animals, including humans, to want to conserve resources by moving little and eating much, are animals in exhibits so much worse off than animals in the wild?
What about all the work with conservation and education that zoos do? If these exhibits disappeared, what would take their place? Zoos do a lot of work in terms trying to breed/preserve endangered species and I imagine much scientific work on animals is done on animals in zoos. They are a very important controlled environment to try to manage species that, for whatever reason (usually because of human involvement) are now in trouble.
And I’m sure many, many individuals who now are dedicated to improving animal life in whatever way (whether they be vets, animal conservationists, or administrators at the ASPCA) initially developed their love of/interest in animals from zoo exhibits.
So what do you all think? If anyone knows of any studies which address the above, I’d love to hear about that as well.
There’s room for improvement…but zoos are doing that. They’re improving. I’m old enough to remember small cages with iron bars. Now, modern zoos have environment enclosures, with running streams, grass, and terrain.
Also, zoo animals get top-notch medical care. I was once at the San Diego Zoo, and saw a “freeloader” rabbit, which had gotten into the zoo grounds (but not into any of the enclosures.) The rabbit had a ring of fleas around each of its eyes. That doesn’t happen to zoo animals.
Zoos have brought a number of species back from the brink of extinction. The San Diego Zoo (hey, I live nearby) is experimenting with surrogate motherhood to try to save the white rhino. It may be too late, but it’s a fine and noble effort.
My guess is most animals don’t have a sense of the future or where they “should” be. I don’t think they know what the are missing by being in captivity, unless they are restricted or constrained from their natural behavior somehow, or were captured from wild populations.
The ethical work zoos do is sometimes clouded by their attempts to turn a buck. Pandas are like the football team at your local university - they bring in all the money so the smaller programs can exist. I guess that is ethical since funding for saving animals no one has heard of would not exist at all otherwise.
Then there was that zoo in Europe that found they had one-too many giraffes, and decided to butcher him in front of the crowds, and feed him to the predators. Unethical.
I know it’s a joke, but the giraffe would probably end up kicking most of them to death. It takes a lot of lions in favorable terrain to take down a healthy adult giraffe. They ain’t no punks!
As a kid I went to a zoo. They had stairs, leading to a platform. From there I could look a giraffe in the eye. It was incredible! I couldn’t do that in the wild.
It is unfortunate that the giraffe wasn’t with his siblings.
But, with zoos of today, the giraffe probably has cable to view. After he has entertained the customers. Good food, medical care and cable. All is good.
Thing is, a lot of animals really don’t do much for most of their day. Cats, for example, will happily sleep 20 hours a day. The reason they don’t do that in the wild is because of the need to hunt or escape their predators, or protect their young from other predators. When cats in the wild CAN sleep 20 hours a day they do so… but in a zoo exhibit that looks really boring for the humans coming to see them.
Birds like enough room to fly… but flying for birds is work, it’s like running is for us. Birds don’t want to fly constantly. They certainly don’t want to have to worry about being eaten by something else.
So a lot of the “standing around napping” behavior you see in zoo exhibits may well be the natural and normal behavior of a well-fed animal that feels safe.
On the flip side, there are other animals that require mental stimulation. For them, being safe and well-fed is boring and without proper stimulation (i.e. “something to do”) they may start engaging in self-destructive behaviors. For those animals, performing tricks for an audience may provide a welcome stimulation. It’s not “natural”, but they’re actually happier and healthier than if they didn’t have that interaction. Provided, of course, it is done in a humane manner.
Look at the situation with falconers. They capture a wild bird and teach it to hunt alongside a human being, sometimes also with dogs. That’s not natural or normal raptor behavior. But, although the birds can always fly off (and sometimes do) they stay with the person. Why? Well, maybe the bird understands that having safe shelter from the elements and a guaranteed meal anyway if the hunting goes bad is the trade-off, and maybe the bird is OK with that and chooses to stay.
Then there is the behavior of African honeyguides, wild birds that lead people to beehives so the people can break it open and both the people and the bird can eat what’s inside.
Complex interactions between people and animals are nothing new, or unusual, and they’re not unnatural. Sometimes people act like people and the natural world should be rigidly separated.
One of the San Diego Zoo’s tragedies was the polar bear who went insane. She was simply in too tight and small an enclosure. She took to repetitious pacing, very stereotyped behavior. (Two paces left, squeak, two paces right. A very sad little vocalization at each turn, something like a kitten’s mew.)
They got funding to build a whole new enclosure. Bigger. Huge pool, waterfall, stream, rocks and logs and other “enrichment” facilities. They moved her in there.
She almost immediately died. She couldn’t cope with the change.
The polar bears in the new enclosure, now, are doing quite well. The keepers come up with clever things to keep life new and unexpected, like halloween pumpkins full of ice and fish.
The first enclosure was a failure, and the results were horrible.
We learned. That’s progress, in the human fashion: slow and unsteady.
Well, they tried, but there was a language obstacle.
An employment opportunity for millions. I’d take the job, but I have an allergic reaction to being near Polar Bears. I get big red tooth-and-claw marks on my skin.
In the US the Association of Zoos and Aquariums provides accreditation, but not all zoos are members. I say it really would be better to avoid road shows. Furthermore sucky zoos need to level up or close.
They still exist in parts of the world, even in middle income countries. That sort of thing sends a message of unprofessionalism.
Highly ethical I say. Giraffes are not endangered species. It’s not surprising that zoos occasionally have to cull the herd. Better to do it openly and feed the parts to a real predator.
Me too. I’m not convinced of your claims, but getting solid info on the subjective experiences of animals is difficult, though there has been some research, at least in the farm animal context. I once saw a handbook on the subject at Amazon, but it was $100+. No thanks.
That’s what I wanted to point out in the other thread: not all animals get stressed by the same circumstances. We should allow for variation across species (heck, maybe across individuals). I understand that farm chickens won’t necessarily go outside when they have access to an open door. Evolutionarily, I could understand that: maybe they are wary of predation. Or maybe they’ve been twisted from selective breeding. Absent investigation, I’m wary of making assumptions.
Overall, I’d say the San Diego Zoo is A Good Thing. I’m not too bent out of shape by the odd insane polar bear now and then. What’s key is to discourage cruel practices and have sufficient transparency so they aren’t ignored or swept under the carpet.
You have this wrong.
It’s the egg-laying chickens that are sometimes kept in cages, not meat chickens. It’s done so that they can collect their eggs easier. There is no point to doing this for meat chickens. In fact, it would be counterproductive – chicken legs are a desirable meat item, so you want them ti be walking around and growing muscles in their legs.
I volunteered at a major zoo for years. In the course of that work I got lots of exposure to the behind-the-scenes aspect of the zoo and some of the keepers are still my best friends.
Very often I’d be standing out the lion exhibit (or tiger, or bear, etc.) and hear a visitor say “Look at the poor lion, just lying there on a rock. They’ve broken his soul. He’s so bored and depressed that he can’t do anything. So sad.” They were disappointed that the lion wasn’t running around like a frisky house cat and assumed that he would be if he were home in the plains of Africa.
But I had many discussions about this sort of thing with the keepers – people who were very, very dedicated to these animals – and they had a different perspective. One had just returned from a research stint in Africa, and told me that if you pay thousands of dollars to go see one in the wild, that male lion is quite likely to be just lying there on a rock doing nothing. Only that lion may be ridden with internal parasites, in constant pain from a fight with other males, and hungry because there hasn’t been a gazelle around for days.
The old zoos with big animals in concrete enclosures and iron bars were terrible, but when you improve their surroundings and care you can reach a point where the animal is content, stimulated as necessary, safe, and far healthier than it would be in the wild. That goal is harder to reach for the big, intelligent, and emotional animals like elephants and gorillas, but it doesn’t take a whole lot to give a tortoise or an aardvark a life far more comfortable and enjoyable than living in the wild.
My hometown the zoo, the Columbus Zoo, gets high marks for mostly doing away with old cage enclosures. They have pretty natural looking habitats for all animals. Jack Hanna ran the zoo for a long time and realized that to do it right costs a lot of money. And nobody raises money like Jack Hanna.
I went on a photo safari in South Africa about a decade ago, and had the chance to see (mostly through binoculars) lions in ‘the wild’ (specifically, the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi nature reserve, yes, it’s as hard to pronounce as it looks). Said lions were, as your keeper friend said, just lounging around - one in a tree and two others in the tall grass near it. Our guide confirmed that that’s pretty much what lions do. It was, nonetheless, a really cool experience.
I’m a big fan of zoos, at least the competently-run humane kind we have in the US. The average person isn’t going to care about wildlife conservation unless they can see and interact with the animals involved.
I just read an article on Przewalski’s horse recently. It’s the only true wild horse (feral horses like American Mustangs are descended from domesticated horses; Przewalski’s horse is not).
In 1945, there were only 13 left in the world, all in captivity. They were labeled “extinct in the wild”. Now there are over 1500, several hundred of them in the wild, and they’ve been downgraded to “endangered”. That’s a success story. And one that wouldn’t exist without the zoos who saved this animal from extinction.
There are some unethical zoos. But most of them are bastions of conservation, science and animal welfare. And most people only give a shit about animals they’ve seen. Zoos make people care about endangered and threatened animals in a way I don’t think a few Animal Planet documentaries can.
I’m going to have to defend the small cages they used to have because at least with those you can see the animal.
Here at the Kansas City zoo they made these big enclosures for the animals to roam and often you cannot actually see the animal because they are hiding far away or at the most you see a tiny dot. The big complaint with the “New Zoo” was “where are all the animals”?
Zoos are there so people can see the animals so what good is it if you cannot see them?
A good compromise is have the animals rotate in and out of cages and enclosures.
Um, no, that’s not a very good compromise. Making the animal uncomfortable part of the time is not as bad as making it uncomfortable all the time…but it isn’t the right answer.
Better display design is a much better answer. The San Diego Zoo Safari Park (“Wild Animal Park” to us old farts) opened their new Tiger Trails, which is very well designed: the human trail winds through the tiger trail, so that there is almost always some very good visibility of one or more tigers.