Most zoo keepers have a deep and lifelong love for animals and really enjoy providing for their day-to-day care.
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Zoos Are Largely UnethicalMost animals are taught to perform tricks and go against the grain of nature purely for human entertainment. Zoos often do more harm than good, creating unnatural environments that look realistic enough to make any potential return to the wild all but impossible.
Do zoos help or harm animals? While some suggest that zoos exploit captive animals and that wild animals should be wild, these facilities also present wildlife conservation attempts and learning opportunities as well. Zoos may introduce trauma to animals, but they are also taken care of in zoos.
Despite the common claim that petting zoos are educational for children because they are exposed to animals that they wouldn't come in contact with otherwise, children are learning that it is acceptable to treat animals inhumanely for their own entertainment.
On average, captive animals (especially mammals) live longer than wild animals. This may be due to the fact that zoos provide refuge against diseases, competition with others of the same species and predators.
As part of the zoo's safety policy, zookeepers are never in the same enclosure with a carnivore unless the animal is sedated and that can make check-ups a little difficult.
Some animals in zoos are kept in enclosures far too small for them, while others are forced to perform degrading tricks. Even in the best zoos, under the best conditions, a lifetime of captivity is no life at all for wild animals.
Ethical zoos also provide resources to protect threatened and endangered species such as anti-poaching rangers. Perhaps the zoo that contributes the most to conservation field programs is the Bronx Zoo run by the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Babies are great crowd-pleasers, but when the babies grow up, they don't attract the same number of people, so zoos often sell them off in order to make room for younger animals. The unwanted adult animals are sometimes sold to “game” farms where hunters pay to kill them; some are killed for their meat and/or hides.
Many zoos have improved enormously; the better ones being crucial in saving species that would have otherwise gone extinct. Nonetheless, for some people the mere word zoo carries impressions of old zoos, bad zoos, circuses, and theme-park shows that many find distasteful. Good zoos know they must innovate forward.
Should vegans visit zoos? For many vegans it goes without saying that zoos represent the use of animals for entertainment, and as such they're not a place that vegans would visit or be in favour of. For others, the rescue and conservation efforts of some zoos makes the issue a little less black and white.
Animal abuse is widespread in 75% of zoo and aquarium facilities. 96% of elephants in entertainment facilities are treated poorly. Polar bears have a million times less space in zoos. Only 18% of captive animals are endangered.