Zoos: Yay or Nay?

by Teo

Zoos are a cool and fun place,... right? Well they're cool for you, but not for the animals that are trapped in cages for you to stare at.

What if you were one of those animals... like a lion. You're resting on your favorite rock, when all of the sudden some strange people come and snatch you up. They shoot you with darts that make you tired, and then drape you in a net. Your home is now out of your reach, your family is out of your reach. Everything you've ever known is out of your reach.

You get dropped into dirty, small mockery of your old home. What's this? There's a way out, you run towards it, but it's actually a wall of strange almost invisible material. You hear strange animal-like noises that you've never heard before. People come and look at you from outside your cage, tapping on the barrier that separates you from them, everything is loud, new, small, scary, and strange.

Every once in a while someone comes in and drops some meat on the floor for you to eat, sometimes they shoot you with more darts to make you drowsy, and then poke you with needles. No matter what you do, you know that this is your life now.

And sure, animals act out, and occasionally try to kill people, but that's only because to them, we look like the people who stripped their whole life away. And sure, scientists get to study the animals behaviors up close and personal, but those studies are wrong. Because wouldn't you act weird if you went through all that?

Another argument people have is that zoos help save animals, but do they really? Is forcing an animal that has no idea that anything is wrong, and is living a happy life, into a cage that reeks of misery, and fear, saving its life?

White rhinos are almost extinct because of poaching. What's this, you think we could have saved them if we put them in zoos? Well animals in zoos actually die sooner than animals in the wild, due to stress, and depression. And who caused white rhinos to start going extinct? Poachers. So many animals would still be alive if it wasn't for human interference. The dodo, extinct in 1690 because we destroyed their habitats, hunted too many of them, and yes partly due to competition from other animals.

And if you're thinking that us humans have changed since 1690, we have. But not in our treatment of animals. The silicon wolf was driven to extinction by humans in 1924 due to its appetite for farmers' livestock. I mean what's the big deal with the dog eating them, we were going to eat them anyways. Still not recent enough? The Pinta giant tortoise was hunted by mariners from the nineteenth century, then fishers from the twentieth century fished for them, and then goats that were brought to the tortoises natural habitat by humans destroyed the tortoises habitats, they went extinct in 2012.

OK I'm getting off track, we should just leave the natural order alone. Not "save" animals from hunters and diseases by capturing them. So no, zoos should definitely not exist.