Should zoos be closed?



Bernie Wright says zoos will always be prisons for animals wrenched from their natural habitat for our entertainment .

A ZOO is simply a collection of animals. It makes money by attracting paying visitors. The quality of life for the animals varies from totally inadequate to barely adequate.

Three thousand years ago, when zoos were started in the Middle East, animals were merely objects of curiosity from faraway places.

Trapped from the wild, sometimes with parent animals being killed (young animals being easier to train and manage), many of them died on their long and horrific journeys to other continents and climates. These animals were treated as prized public attractions or captive slaves. They experienced fear, hardship, an alien environment, barren enclosures, and their mental and physical needs were ignored.

In 2008, Dublin Zoo sits on roughly 60 acres. It boasts such habitats as African plains, fringes of the Arctic, rainforests, the Kaziranga forest trail and shops and restaurants. All of this and 600 animals as well, ranging from tigers, elephants, and chimps to red pandas. Even with limited mathematical skills, 100 animals per acre hardly seems like a miraculous natural environment.

To quote the zoo, it invites visitors to "go wild in the heart of the City". It's a pity the animals cannot do the same. Indeed, it is well documented that elephants can roam more than 40 miles in a day in their natural surroundings. (They also mourn their dead and live in family groups.)

Explain this to the Dublin Zoo elephants. Instinctive behaviour is still evident in third- or fourth-generation captive-bred animals.

Most animals on display in zoos are not threatened by extinction, yet captive breeding programmes are one of the most common reasons that zoos use to justify their existence. They endeavour to save species that are faltering in the wild from going extinct.

When asked "how many animals have been reintroduced back into the wild by Dublin Zoo since the 1800s", the answer was "we have none in the records, but possibly a golden lion tamarin was released to a protective area in South America six years ago". Strangely, there are no statistics for released animals.

The focus of zoos is on human entertainment, rather than education. The Alliance for Animal Rights's observations at Dublin Zoo have shown that even if learning material is available, little of it is absorbed by the public and most zoo-goers disregard it. Children, especially, rush from one exhibit to another, pausing only if animals are being fed or performing cute tricks.

With no predators, some animals might live longer in zoos, but at what price? Elephants in captivity display chronic health problems associated with confinement, including arthritis, foot diseases, skin ailments, psychological problems, and reproductive difficulties, with areas far too small to meet their needs for exercise and natural behaviour. Others just go mad. True conservation must conserve animals and their habitat in the wild. Animal species down to their last few surviving members might be taken into captivity, but only as a last resort, and these can live at specialist conservation centres.

Unnaturally housed or insane animals cannot be representative of their species. Good wildlife television programmes today can show normal behaviour of animals in their natural surrounds. Alternatively there are safari or working holidays.

We do not need to confine animals in zoos to learn. Zoos only teach us that it is acceptable to keep animals locked up so long as you can justify it with an excuse - conservation, or research, or for public education, or finance. Or that humans are superior to animals because we can capture and control them and that animals exist for human purposes.

Animals in captivity are institutionalised, and totally dependent on humans. It is morally unacceptable to keep any being in an environment where their natural instincts are continuously frustrated - their enclosure is merely a prison.

Many animals have suffered in Dublin Zoo. A white rhino was shot on zoo grounds, penguins died from toxic paint in their enclosure, sea lions went blind from the chlorine in their pond. Two polar bears went insane, with typical pacing back and forth continuously. A situation with another polar bear cub, "Knut", in Nuremberg zoo, is causing a major debate about the rights of caged animals in Germany.

Although some insist that bears born in zoos have a right to human intervention to save and secure their lives, others, such as the German animal rights activist Frank Albrecht, argue that they become so dependent on man that they end up divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks. Dublin Zoo has traded animals with circuses over the years, too. Zoos are unable by their nature to exist without causing prolonged suffering to animals.

I urge anyone who visits the zoo to really look into an animal's eyes. Do they deserve life imprisonment without ever committing a crime?

Bernie Wright is press officer of the Alliance for Animal Rights (AFAR)

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