Zoos
Every bank holiday weekend the queues at zoos and aquaria are huge. Everyone wants a glimpse of the exotic animals and cute babies. What most zoo patrons don’t stop to consider is that although they are likely to be in the zoo for a couple of hours, the animals never get to leave. Many visitors will spend less than 3 minutes looking at most exhibits and some get looked at for less than 8 seconds.
Even
the ‘best’ zoos cannot give animals the space which they would
live in, in the wild. If they did, the visitors would never be able to
see the ‘exhibits,’ besides no zoo could afford to own land
large enough to give large mammals their natural range. The vast majority
of animals in zoos are not from the UK, so their natural habitat is different
to the one here. To meet the animals needs would require artificial heating
or cooling; the humidity may need to be increased or decreased; plants
and ecosystems the animals depend on would also have to be simulated.
Most zoos fail badly in attempts to create these conditions, leaving artic
animals with only painted scenes of the tundra they have been snatched
from and dessert creatures sheltering from British winter snow.
The animals in zoos are so stressed and removed from their natural situations that they act oddly. Many become reclusive, attempting to hide from the preying eyes of the public in their tiny enclosures. Others exhibit stereotypic behaviours, such as over excessively grooming themselves or pacing restlessly up against the bars of their cages. Some become aggressive and others will self-harm. Some zoos put on performances using their animals, similar to the ways in which circuses do. The animals are required to perform degrading tricks which when repeated twice daily can damage their sensitive bodies.
Population control, in both the form of increasing the number of animals on display and providing cute babies to draw in the public and reducing numbers to prevent over crowding compromises animal welfare. Artificial insemination maybe used, or inadequate pairing based on the zoos preferences not the animals may result in fighting between animals. Often the stressful situations into which baby animals are born causes mothers to abandon or even kill their own offspring as the situation is unfavorable to their surroundings.
Case Study
The
recent high profile case of the polar bear Knut highlights the issues.
Knut and his brother were born to an ex-circus polar bear. The babies
were abandoned by their mother in a German zoo and she may have killed
them if the zoo keepers had not intervened. The second cub died after
four days with an infection. Knut was the first polar bear in the zoo
to survive beyond infancy in over 30 years; he had to be raised by human
handlers. As the bear has grown less cuddly the numbers of visitors coming
to see him have decreased. As he is used to large amounts of human attention
he becomes upset when he doesn’t have an audience to play to. It
is likely that the zoo will try and use him to father other bears in order
to once again attract the large crowds which he did in his first months.
The situation with this polar bear shows how zoos want young animals to attract the crowds, yet the mothers abandon their young because the environment isn’t what they need to thrive. It also shows how being in zoos negatively affects animals emotional wellbeing as they become dependent on humans for everything. It also highlights the links between zoos and circuses.
Often when there is an abundance of a species the zoo will sell on ‘excess’ animals to circuses or for meat. There has recently been controversy about the zoo which Knut is in, as there have been allegations that the zoo has sold a pygmy hippopotamus and a family of Asiatic black bears for slaughter in two separate deals conducted in the early 1990s. During the foot and mouth crisis, zoos were found to be feeding some of their exhibits to the animals which pull greater crowds, showing how much zoo managers really care for their charges.
Often zoos keep just one or two examples of a species to show visitors. These animals are often species which live in large herds and can only function properly in such an environment. Other zoos, or even enclosures in the same zoos, house far too many of one species in a small space, resulting in aggression and bullying of weaker animals, sometimes resulting in their death.
Zoos
try to argue against their critics by saying that they work on conservation
projects to improve the habitats for animals in the wild. They are legally
obligated to engage in conservation work, the scale of which depends on
the size of the zoo. Some small animal collections are required to merely
maintain hedges and ponds on their site to satisfy their legal obligations.
Other larger zoos may engage in breeding programmes or donate money to
groups protecting wild areas. While some zoos do breed endangered animals,
there is rarely any system for returning these animals to the wild. Those
which do have had to have reintroduction schemes halted indefinitely when
they find the animals are not able to fend for themselves. There have
been cases where just before animals were to be released they were found
to be harboring diseases which could have wiped out the remains of the
wild population. The answer to saving wild species is not to keep a small
number forever imprisoned in zoos, or to try and breed animals in captivity,
but to protect their habitat from damage, prevent poaching and stop wild
animals being caught and put into zoos, as sadly is still on going. Captive
Animal Protection Society (CAPS), found that 79% of all animals in British
aquaria, marine zoos, are wild caught! It has been estimated that it costs
50 times more to keep an elephant in a breeding program in a zoo than
it would to protect the habitat needed to sustain the animal in the wild.
Pretending that money paid to zoos helps animals is a farce.
Another common zoo argument is that zoos educate members of the public who would never otherwise see these animals, and that this education can lead to future protection of the species. Sadly the animals which are seen in zoos are bored, humiliated, enclosed prisoners who can teach us nothing about their wild cousins who have to rely on their own intelligence and resources to survive in the wild. This argument is no longer valid, now that we have TV documentaries and websites which inform us about how animals exist naturally in other places. We would be better off taking our children into the countryside around us and showing them the last wild species here and teaching them about British habitat protection and respect for life.
If you really care about animals please don’t visit zoos. Paying to see these animals simply funds the abuse of more animals.
For more information please see www.captiveanimals.org