Zoos bug me. I have been told there is no other way for children and some adults to experience the exotic animals of the world and that zoos do immensely important work saving species through breeding programmes. The problem I have with these arguments is that they overlook the entirely synthetic nature of zoos. You get to see the animals certainly but you don’t get to see the habitat, or feel what it is actually like to live in that habitat. The walk through with temperature control and recorded noises is bizarre and not very revealing.
The breeding programmes only help governments to be lack-lustre in their conservation laws because they know the animal might not go extinct, but if it does so what? There are still plenty of animals around. The world will lose the Polar Bear or a type of Owl, it doesn’t matter. And this is the good zoos, the bad zoos are simply prison camps and nothing more driving animals near insane.
The truth to me is that zoos everywhere are people’s statement of supremacy over certain individual animals that they have shipped around the world to be spectacles for people who don’t want the animals to have a habitat. They exist for people to picnic, to pretend they love nature, to pretend they like animals. And the people who work in them should be sponsored to be working in the countries in which the animals evolved because we are supposed to have minds and long ago stopped building arenas for the enslaved.