Should Animals Be Kept in Zoos?

Its a win win situation really. Zoo Keepers take good care of animals and people get to view animals at their own pleasure (Which funds the zoo keepers with the money to take care of the animals further). No, not animals are endangered because we destroyed their habitat. For instance, The Tasmanian Devil is endangered as of recent years. For an unknown reason, the Devils have had a wide spread of cancer. However, this is only true for wild Tasmanian Devils. Domesticated Devils have not had this caner problem. They may be in cages and not tied to what we’d think of as the “ideal” home for these animals, but lets face it, these animals are cleaned, fed nutritiously and even given a roof over their head, usually with a “piece of their own environment”. Its like being taken off the street as a hobo and living in a luxurious suite, fed meals every day, bathed, regular doctor visits to make sure you’re in good shape. Would you complain if this happened to you?

By taking our children to zoos, by educating them and showing them how beautiful animals are, we are entrusting the animal future to them. If they have had a first hand experience of these animals then they will be more likely to take heed of animal needs in the long run. They will be less likely to buy animal furs or elephant tusks. In turn, they will be more likely to buy animal friendly produce and be more likely to campaign for these animals. Even if a few animals are harmed in the process, the outcome outweighs that harm; more animals will be saved in the future.

Knowledge is our only aid in the fight against global warming and animal protection. We need to know exactly what’s going to happen and how animals will respond in these situations. By sending in specialist animal observers to zoos we can begin to unravel the mystery of how to save these animals for the future events to come. We can discover ways to protect them, we can learn which habitats they can survive in, and we can learn which foods they would be willing to supplement their nutrition from. By learning this, we can help wild animals of the future survive the changing environment.

While ideally animals should be free to live in the wild, on occasion their survival as a species becomes threatened, either naturally or artificially. Whatever the reason, zoos have been a major method of preventing animal species from becoming extinct. While it may be the case that some species’ extinction has only been delayed by zoos, in others the zoos have been pivotal in breeding new generations and protecting a gene pool while the animal is re-introduced into a more natural environment.

While protecting natural habitat should take precedent over zoos, many of these regions are politically unstable or financially destitute. It is hard to blame someone who values his own families survival over that of an animal. Because many zoos are in wealthy, stable nations, a secure and nurturing environment can be artificially created to help the most endangered animals survive and continue to breed. A “Noahs Ark”, if you will.

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Rebuttal to “Yes” remark.

Some animals can be successfully released into the wild. See the efforts in New Zealand to have the national bird, the Kiwi, living wild in some protected areas and uninhabited islands, both of which have been largely successful. This has also happened/is happening with a number of other native birds on the brink of extinction.

Yes unfortunately as they are protected and saved from humans in zoos.Cant be hunted and cant be killed off with deforestation.I fear they will be in majority in zoos soon enough.As governments of world dont give a damn.But at least not extinct.

This argument assumes that a) The harm suffered by these animals is tremendous and that b) the only value gained from zoos is human entertainment.

a) Zoo keeping is a trained profession. Animals in the zoo have the regular access to good food and they have vets on standby should they fall ill. This is a far more luxurious lifestyle than they would have in the jungle.

b) As stated above, zoos animals have many benefits that wild animals are deprived of. From human understanding to biological study. To see zoos as pure entertainment is myopic.

There have in the past been many bad zoos and cruel zookeepers. It is imperative that these are reformed and weeded out. Good zoos in which animals are well fed and well looked after in spacious surroundings are becoming the norm and should be encouraged. Zoos can exist without cruelty to animals, however, and so the fact that there are animal welfare problems with some zoos does not meant that all zoos should be shut down.

Zoos nowadays are not marketed as places of entertainment – they are places of education. Most modern zoos have their main emphasis on conservation and education – the reason that so many schools take children to zoos is to teach them about nature, the environment, endangered species, and conservation. Far from encouraging bad treatment of animals, zoos provide a direct experience of other species that will increase ecological awareness.

One of the main functions of zoos is to breed endangered animals in captivity. If natural or human factors have made a species’ own habitat a threatening environment then human intervention can preserve that species where it would certainly go extinct if there were no intervention. There are certainly problems with trying to conserve endangered species in this way but it is right that we should at least try to conserve them. And as long as animals are treated well in zoos there is no reason why conservation, education, and cruelty-free entertainment should not all be combined in a zoo. There is also, of course, a valid role for breeding in different environments such as large nature reserves.

As above we should take a ‘both-and’ approach rather than an ‘either-or’ approach. Animals can and should be studied in the wild but they can be studied more closely, more rigorously, and over a more sustained period of time in captivity. Both sorts of study are valuable and, as in point 4, there is no reason why this should not be done in the context of a cruelty-free zoo as well as in other contexts.

How can we measure animal happiness? Would humans be better off in the wild? There are poachers/hunters/animal-predators/other-animals-fighting-for-limiting-resources in the wild at least with animal captivity comes animal security, food is always on the table and there’s free medical.

Would ‘we’ prefer the wild?

The truth is that these claims are based around the logically-skewed ideas of neo-classical animal rights groups. But their arguments have little or no factual basis/merit. We cannot measure animal happiness. We cannot really say that they would be best left in the wild.

All we can do is review at the information at hand. Domesticated animals; treated well, would you say they were unhappy? Well then how can we argue that taking animals out of the wild is wrong? We cannot. So rather than banning zoos, we should ensure that relevant safety measures are in place to ensure that these animals are as well looked after as possible.

Species have come and gone from time immemorial( Dinosaurs are extinct without our interference); Human beings are part of the animal kingdom thus food cycle and our involvement is part of nature.