My very right-on parents never took me to a zoo when I was a kid because they didn’t agree with depriving animals of their liberty. Now that I’m almost a very right-on parent myself I’m trying to decide if I want to take my kid(s) to zoos or not. So, to zoo or not to zoo? That is my question.

Zoos do a lot of work understanding and preserving rare species – it’s not all about caged animals being on show – although being able to see/hear/touch unfamiliar animals also makes the public care more about them.

One for you to decide really. I’ve been to zoos that claim to be helping rare animals survive, which would seem to be a good thing. My favourite is the South Lakes Wild Animal park, where they feed the tigers on their keepers…

Just ask yourself ‘What would Nigel do’?
[video]https://youtu.be/Q1N22LJlhhs[/video]

Pretty clear, tbh.

Personally I have not been to one since I saw psychotic animals in too small cages years ago. I think they are cruel. Yes as Scotroutes says behind the scenes some zoos do good work and animal welfare perhaps ranks higher than it did but seeing distressed animals exhibiting badly damaged behaviours put me right off them

If they made sausages out of tigers, problem solved…

Don’t think it’s any different from having a pet tbh. you’ll get some good some bad.

I didn’t like what happened to poor Marius the Giraffe (in 2014?), or that family of lions (not long after the media frenzy over Marius) that were put down (by the same Copenhagen zoo?), when all were perfectly healthy.

But they can do great conservation work too.

I remember visiting Marwell, our local around summer 2010, lots of empty bits and/or poor info.

There are zoos, and there are zoos. Are they about conservation, or are they about putting animals in too-small cages for profit?

It’s not exactly round the corner but one of the best (/heartbreaking) “zoos” I’ve been to is http://bigcatrescue.org/ – incredible place, their raison d’etre is to recover animals from idiots.

I’d agree with that. Our nearest “zoo” is effectively a breeding centre for endangered species. I’ve been going on and off for 15 years and still haven’t seen the Lynxes, as the animal is a) shy and b) in a massive overgrown enclosure. Mates been going regularly for 10 plus years and only seen them twice. The nosey animals you see all the time. As they like looking at the freaks.

One of those they can do good work but i am personally against the caging of animals for our leisure/pleasure time

I have never taken my kids to one.

Not a fan of them myself TBH.

My kids and I went to Edinburgh zoo a few years ago, and all of us came away a little depressed, we had a chat about over dinner that night, all of us thinking that individually we’d not really enjoyed it, but thinking the others had. We agreed that we wouldn’t do it again.

A lot of the animals seem to enjoy sitting on their aris as much as I do, tbf.
The birds, though – caged eagles and owls just looks very wrong. Be mitigated somewhat if they could be trained such that you could let them fly around freely, then back to the cage for dinner and a kip whilst people stare at them. But I guess this is impossible and they’re never let out.

The ethics of zoos

Well, there’s White Rhino and Black Mamba for a start…

Was thinking the same at Chester zoo yesterday. I don’t like seeing wild animals ‘penned in’ but as not everyone can afford to take their kids on safari to see animals in the wild they have a place. I would rather my kids see these animals in a zoo than not at all. Also as mentioned above if it wasn’t for the conservation efforts of zoos a lot of these animals may not exist.

I thought the film was good, especially the snails.

Not sure all Zoo’s are as good as each other. On one hand it’s amazing to see some of these animals up close – the Snow Leopard at Twycross is amazing, and without doubt they do alot for conservation and do need the support from the visiting public. Like alot of these things it’s not a black and white situation – they’re not completely ideal or completely bad. I mean where would Panda’s be without Zoo’s? They’d be extinct. And the way US dentists and trigger happy teenage hunters are going the only place you’ll be able to see Lions and Giraffe’s in the not to distant future will be Zoo’s.

Zoo’s – hmmmmm a difficult moral situation I’m afraid.

I totally disagree with depriving any wild animal of its freedom.

However; many, many people are ignorant and stupid. Exposing them to wild animals and teaching them about them just might educate people to behave better towards wild animals or just animals in general.

Zoo’s also do great conservation work and bring animals into many more peoples lives than would be the case without zoo’s.

GENERALLY – I consider them a force for good and feel sorry for the few animals they inconvenience 🙁

I agree with Snowrock. We take our girls to zoos (Doncaster Zoo is particularly good) and I fully intend on taking them on a safari but they generally have an >10 yr old policy (at least the one in the Mara that I have looked at) so a few years to go yet.

“Life of Pi” has an interesting perspective that is worth considering.

Please excuse the massive CutnPaste but it is very good:

I have heard nearly as much nonsense about zoos as I have about God and religion. Well-meaning but misinformed people think that animals in the wild are “happy” because they are “free.” These people usually have a large, handsome predator in mind, a lion or a cheetah (the life of gnu or of an aardvark is rarely exalted). They imagine this wild animal roaming about the savannah on digestive walks after eating a prey that accepted its lot piously, or going for callisthenic runs to stay slim after overindulging. They imagine this animal overseeing its offspring proudly and tenderly, the whole family watching the setting of the sun from the limbs of trees with sighs of pleasure. The life of the wild animal is simple, noble and meaningful, they imagine. Then it is captured by wicked men and thrown into tiny jails. Its “happiness” is dashed. It yearns mightily for “freedom” and does all it can to escape. Being denied its “freedom” for too long, the animal becomes a shadow of itself, its spirit broken. So some people imagine.

This is not the way it is.

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context? Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations. In theory—that is, as a simply physical possibility—an animal could pick up and go, flaunting all the social conventions and boundaries proper to its species. But such an event is less likely to happen than for a member of our own species, say a shopkeeper with all the usual ties—to family, to friends, to society—to drop everything and walk away from his life with only the spare change in his pockets and the clothes on his frame. If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won’t wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why would an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative? For that is what animals are, conservative, one might even say reactionary. The smallest changes can upset them. They want things to be just so, day after day, month after month. Surprises are highly disagreeable to them. You see this in their spatial relations. An animal inhabits its space, whether in a zoo or in the wild, in the same way chess pieces move about a chessboard—significantly. There is no more happenstance, no more “freedom,” involved in the whereabouts of a lizard or a bear or a deer than in the location of a knight on a chessboard. Both speak of pattern and purpose. In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season.
…
Don’t we say, “There’s no place like home”? That’s certainly what animals feel. Animals are territorial. That is the key to their minds. Only a familiar territory will allow them to fulfill the two relentless imperatives of the wild: the avoidance of enemies and the getting of food and water. A biologically sound zoo enclosure—whether cave, pit, moated island, corral, terrarium, aviary or aquarium—is just another territory, peculiar only in its size and in its proximity to human territory. That it is so much smaller than what it would be in nature stands to reason. Territories in the wild are large not as a matter of taste but of necessity. In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with our houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out. Whereas before for us the cave was here, the river over there, the hunting grounds a mile that way, the lookout next to it, the berries somewhere else—all of them infested with lions, snakes, ants, leeches and poison ivy—now the river flows through taps at hand’s reach and we can wash next to where we sleep, we can eat where we have cooked, and we can surround the whole with a protective wall and keep it clean and warm. A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely. A sound zoo enclosure is the equivalent for an animal (with the noteworthy absence of a fireplace or the like, present in every human habitation). Finding within it all the places it needs—a lookout, a place for resting, for eating and drinking, for bathing, for grooming, etc.—and finding that there is no need to go hunting, food appearing six days a week, an animal will take possession of its zoo space in the same way it would lay claim to a new space in the wild, exploring it and marking it out in the normal ways of its species, with sprays of urine perhaps. Once this moving-in-ritual is done and the animal has settled, it will not feel like a nervous tenant, and even less like a prisoner, but rather like a landholder, and it will behave in the same way within its enclosure as it would in its territory in the wild, including defending it tooth and nail should it be invaded. Such an enclosure is subjectively neither better nor worse for an animal than its condition in the wild; so long as it fulfills the animal’s needs, a territory, natural or constructed, simply is, without judgment, a given, like the spots on a leopard. One might even argue that if an animal could choose with intelligence, it would opt for living in a zoo, since the major difference between a zoo and the wild is the absence of parasites and enemies and the abundance of food in the first, and their respective abundance and scarcity in the second.

I’m all for conservation and preserving rare and endangered species but zoos and wildlife parks otherwise leave me feeling sad and uncomfortable; the one outside Aviemore an example – seeing the wildcats pacing manically.

Receptacles for animals so we don’t feel so bad about killing them in the wild and destroying their habitat.

Cougar
…http://bigcatrescue.org/

Nominative determinism?? Is that the place Tippi Hedren runs?

http://www.animalarium.co.uk/ in Borth is (or at least was when I visited a few years ago) a nice ethical rescue type zoo.

Personally, I prefer heavily “policed” wildlife sanctuaries, but seeming as they are mostly impractical and very difficult to manage, I guess zoos are a necessity for conservation. However, the size of animal kept (including their territory size) has to correspond to the amount of space available eg. smaller inner city zoos shouldn’t keep anything larger than, say, a meerkat (at a guess).

It also goes without saying that levels of care should be beyond reproach, by experts, and not glorified circus ringmasters.

Oh, I’d assumed that somebody else had been put on their arse by a silverback taekwandad

Great point Mikey – let’s all guess at what is acceptable in a zoo enclosure.

Great point Mikey – let’s all guess at what is acceptable in a zoo enclosure.

That’s the job of expert biologists and zoologists, who study that sort of thing.

I think most of the major points have been covered above.

The difference between good and bad zoos is huge.
We went to one in Northern France last year Zoo de Champrepus which made me very sad – big cats in small manicured enclosures with very little shade/space to get away.

However we also went to Beauval which was incredible – huge enclosures with content/happy looking animals.

I also just spent the weekend at Port Lympne which is amazing – huge open paddocks with different animals roaming around doing their thing.

The way Africa + Asia are currently treating some of their species (big cats/Rhinos/etc) there will be none left outside zoos within a few years. The horn from one Rhino is worth £250k on the black market, which has turned poaching into organised crime.
Progressive Western Zoos are doing some amazing conservation work – as an Example, Aspinals are now sending Gorillas breed in the UK to their own reserve in Africa, which is fully protected against poachers.

I actually feel pretty good about the fact that my entrance money is being used to help fund the protection/preservation of many critically endangered species.

It would be wonderful if all these endangered species could live happily in the wild without being poached, or their habitat being destroyed. But it ain’t going to happen anytime soon – so if you don’t want to see these animals become extinct, supporting good, progressive zoos is one of the best things you can do.

Last zoo I went to was the one in French Guiana. You go there so you can learn which animals will eat you. Some of it is semi wild. Other bits probably wouldn’t meet UK or EU standards for caged wild animals (if there is such a standard).

Never had any issue with the Aspinall zoos. Went there quite a bit as a kid. Although one of the cubs on our cub/scout troop trip got pee’d on by a Tapir. I don’t think he’s too happy about zoos. Stank the bus out all the way home too.

Support

http://www.bornfree.org.uk/campaigns/zoo-check/about-zoo-check/

I remember seeing various animals in their natural habitat in Tanzania, and then seeing a lion in a zoo a few months later. The physical difference between the wild and enclosed animals was striking. I can’t look at an animal in an enclosure without being reminded of this.
That said, would I be as interested in animals, donate to various charities and do the (admittedly tiny amount) of conservation work I’d done if I hadn’t seen them in zoos when I was young? Who knows.

As above, zoos are a big driving factor in getting kids interested in animals and conservation. Yes, there are some rubbish ones but they are dying out. I work with zoos wildlife parks and the common factor with all the individuals I work with is a passion for animals, their welfare and habitat.

crikey

If they made sausages out of tigers, problem solved…

This is exactly how the Peoples Republic of China have “solved” this problem.

The most unethical thing about zoos, in my mind, is how incredibly boring they are.

I have been to a couple of major zoos in my life and was perfectly at ease with the fact that they were there, but perfectly ill-at-ease with having to wander around pretending to be interested in sleeping giraffes or tigers.

but perfectly ill-at-ease with having to wander around pretending to be interested in sleeping giraffes or tigers.

Yeah! They should make them jump through hoops or balance balls on their nose. Whatever happened to a good old fashioned chimps tea party? 😀

but as not everyone can afford to take their kids on safari to see animals in the wild they have a place

I did the safari thing a few years back and wasn’t that impressed. I stupidly thought it would just be Mrs FD romantically travelling through the African plains.

Nope it was like the M25 with big 4×4’s full of shouty Americans, and lots of pollution etc.

Only when we went out very early in the morning or in the evening was it at all quiet.

Will never take Jnr FD to a zoo.

3 years ago I went to a “silent” firework display at Bristol Zoo.

It was far from silent and the poor animals were scared sh*tless, can’t believe the stupidity of the Zoo for doing it

Without zoos, the animals would be hunted to extinction.

We arrived in modernity, and the previous inhabitants of our progress just had to go. Without zoos, the people in these countries would decimate them.

Its great to say SAVE THE TIGER. But Tigers dont roam about this land so having a ‘oh save the tigers’ attitude isnt really that effective.

dyna-ti
Without zoos, the animals would be hunted to extinction.

We arrived in modernity, and the previous inhabitants of our progress just had to go. Without zoos, the people in these countries would decimate them.

Its great to say SAVE THE TIGER. But Tigers dont roam about this land so having a ‘oh save the tigers’ attitude isnt really that effective.

Without zoos, the animals would be hunted to extinction.

We arrived in modernity, and the previous inhabitants of our progress just had to go. Without zoos, the people in these countries would decimate them.

Its great to say SAVE THE TIGER. But Tigers dont roam about this land so having a ‘oh save the tigers’ attitude isnt really that effective.

Sadly agree with this. There is next to nowhere on this planet where animals can be “free/wild”. Everywhere they get hunted, or more commonly, their habitat destroyed. The areas in Africa where the animals roam are very limited/controlled and only their because of the tourists. I had much the same experience as FuncyDunc on safari – the masai mara and all the other areas/parks round it areas are nothing more than game parks full of people in landrovers (saw a cheetah sitting quietly – it had 25 (yes 25 as I counted) landrovers parked around it). Little wild or natural about it.

So if we want to keep these species alive we either (a) fundamentally change the way we live and reduce the human population by, say, 50%, or (b) we have zoos.

Agree however that they can sometimes be unpleasant – 2 recent examples: San Diego zoo polar bear. 35 degree C. it was not happy. Central park zoo – a snow leopard. 32 degree C. Again it was not happy. Having these sort of animals in hot climates is misguided. However, apart from the polar bear San Diego zoo was awesome. Those I have been to recently in this country (Bristol, Marwell, Whipsnade) have also been pretty good imo.