ABSTRACT
To some, zoos are prisons exploiting animals. In reality zoos range from bad to better. I make this distinction: A bad zoo makes animals work for it; a good zoo works for animals. Good zoos do effective conservation work and continually strive to improve exhibits, relevance to conservation, and inspiring public engagement for wildlife. 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. As society grows increasingly estranged from nature and continues driving broad declines of wildlife, wild lands, and natural systems, the goal of zoos and every organization concerned with animal welfare should not be to separate humans from other animals, but to entangle all humans in nonhuman lives. Zoos of the next decades must become the first stage in bringing young people into life-long, engaged caring about animals. They could carry on that mission in their communities, in schools, in wild lands, as well as inside their gates. Without a strong public constituency, wild animals will not withstand continued human proliferation. Zoos and aquariums must innovate toward being a crucial force abetting the continued existence of wildness on Earth. Zoos of the future must become uplifting places of respect, rescue, enhancement, conservation, and public engagement.
It is hard for me to pinpoint the reason I have always been lover of nonhuman animals. But from my earliest memories, I was. I was born in Brooklyn—we lived there until I was 10 years old—and Brooklyn contained essentially no animals. However, my father’s hobby was breeding canaries. So, there were always birds singing around me. Unlike most children with access to wild places, I, in our tenement flat, could from inches away watch small birds getting on and off their eggs and feeding their chicks. And my parents took me to the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium, which of course had animals in captivity. They also took me to the American Museum of Natural History, where the animals—including an entire family of African elephants—had been killed for the purpose and stuffed.
The animals in the zoo at that time lived in essentially jail cells, while the museum had magnificent dioramas, images of realms I could never have imagined. Their depicted landscapes and seascapes and pink polar light lit my mind and showed me that beyond the concrete and buildings of my city confines stretched other worlds. I know that for me, these three institutions helped spark the trajectory of my life. I have done what I can for animals in the wild during a career studying behavioral ecology, while advocating for environmental policy reform and working in conservation of habitats and recovery of depleted and endangered species.
So, I can explain my access to animals that way. What I cannot explain is why I found them endlessly fascinating. I just did. I loved how they looked. I loved watching everything they did. I loved the flutter and strut and cooing of pigeons on concrete sidewalks and the iridescence in their feathers.
Contact with nonhuman animals can make us better humans. That has certainly been true for me. Anything that expands your boundaries does that.
When I was 7 years old, I began raising homing pigeons. In my teens, I had hawks and owls and other companion animals (pets) from the wild. I was in love with anything and anyplace wild. Thus began my journey to a career as an ecologist. While working on a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences, I learned to study birds in the wild. For 10 years after that, mostly while I was in graduate school, I studied birds of prey and especially seabirds. I loved fishing; watching the great sea fishes disappear led me to the next 10 years of my career as a fisheries policy advocate and reformer. During that time, I worked for one of the big conservation groups. Since then, I have mostly been writing, mainly books about the human relationship with the living world. I started my own small not-for-profit group and most recently returned to academia, where I continue to write, speak, and do some teaching.
That introduction is to say that I have never worked either for a zoo or a humane group. I have no direct stake in either of those professions or their ideological orthodoxies—not as an employee, anyway. But because I love animals and some animals are kept in zoos, I have thought about it.
There is a polarity with which I am not entirely comfortable. On the one hand, there are zoos; on the other, there are people who are antizoo. I do not find that helpful. As with most polarities, the dichotomy is false. In reality, there is a range—a range of zoos and a range of concern about animals—within continually changing societal values and environmental realities. I am not categorically for or against zoos. (When I say zoos, I mean zoos and aquariums.)
Many important issues are not black and white, yes or no, for or against. The wrong questions seldom yield the best answers. Some families are terrible families. That does not make us against families; it makes us want to make things better for families. Drunk drivers do not constitute an argument for banning automobiles. Corporate agribusiness’s abuses and excesses help make the case for getting back to small organic farms.
Are zoos prisons where animals suffer and are treated cruelly? Or are they conservation centers that help animals from the wild and educate the public? They are neither and they are both, because zoos vary widely. Some are awful. There are bad zoos and better zoos. I would eliminate the bad zoos and make the best ones better. But I think that is the responsibility of the zoo profession itself.
And in fact, zoos have changed enormously. In the early 1900s, the Bronx Zoo “exhibited” a Congolese man named Ota Benga who was a member of one of the so-called “pygmy” groups. In the early 1960s when my parents used to take me there, that same zoo’s big cat and ape houses looked like county jails with concrete walls, concrete floors, and thick bars. Nowadays, the apes live in social groups appropriate for them with access to large outdoor enclosures and grass. The last time I was at the Bronx Zoo, I watched a tiger crawling through tall grass as she stalked a wild mallard who had landed in her pond. Birds who had been kept in cages now dart through an enormous walk-through aviary. Big improvements. But good enough to justify their existence?
Even at their best, zoos are not reality. They can never be a solution to the current conservation crisis or a long-term future for life on Earth. Wildlife exists in the wild; zoos could never maintain even a tiny fraction of the animal species in the world. The only long-term solution for wild animals is for humans, as we swarm the Earth, to leave them enough wild habitat to exist. The outcome is by no means certain, but there is abundant cause for alarm. The survival of species is perhaps the most acute existential problem in the world. (Nuclear annihilation is a greater threat, but nuclear annihilation seems less than imminent—recent events notwithstanding.) The current, human-driven mass extinction is gathering increasing momentum. Humans and the domestic animals we raise to slaughter now make up an estimated 97% of vertebrates on land; what remains of wild animals makes up the paltry rest. And these numbers are by no means stabilized. A World Wildlife Fund assessment of more than 14,000 populations of nearly 4000 wild species worldwide showed a collective decline of 60% since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. The bright spots that I see—the recoveries and the effective conservation efforts—are heartening and give hope. But they do not alter the overall trend nor do they compensate.
Although only wildness can save the wild, the best zoos can and have made critical contributions to saving a few species who would likely have blinked out entirely. After 60 million bison in the wild had been slaughtered, fewer than two dozen were discovered alive in Yellowstone. Bison who had been captive at the Bronx Zoo provided a crucial boost to the salvation of that species from imminent total extinction. In the 1980s when there were fewer than two dozen California condors, the San Diego Zoo’s captive breeding saved that species from extinction and provided birds for reintroduction. Now the Bronx Zoo is trying to stabilize plummeting populations of elephants in the wild by working to end wildlife trafficking and consumer demand for ivory.
Zoos—good and bad
I should pause to offer my distinction between good and bad zoos. A bad zoo makes animals work for it; a good zoo works for animals. It follows that good zoos are not amusement parks and generally do not feature rides and show biz-style trained-animal extravaganzas. Good zoos do real conservation work involving people who are studying animals in the wild and are doing policy work to protect wild animals in wild places. Good zoos are scientifically oriented and are continuously trying to improve their practices, their exhibits, their relevance to conservation, and their effectiveness in education and inspired public engagement for wildlife.
Good zoos should, through their professional organizations, work to get rid of bad zoos, either by forcing them to improve or forcing them out of business. Bearing in mind that I would like to see an end to bad zoos, the rest of what I am writing is about the better zoos, or what I am calling the “good zoos.”
I also want to mention the two kinds of animals whose captivity is currently most under attack: killer whales (orcas) and elephants. Killer whales are the only creatures whose captivity I have come to categorically oppose. We cannot scale the physical or commercial aspects of captivity to meet their physical, psychological, or social needs. In nature, they spend their entire lives in family groups within clans within communities. The resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest (whose population was devastatingly depleted by the captures of the 1970s) are the only known animals who never leave their mothers whether male or female. Extremely strong bonding keeps family members in constant close contact for decades. Their vocal communication and sonar are highly developed and constantly in use. Their normal travels average about 75 miles a day. Captivity is the exact opposite. These animals live while going round and round in acoustic echo chambers, and captive-born juveniles are taken from their mothers, precipitating great obvious anguish, and they are shipped like cattle wherever commercial considerations dictate.
Some of the same things that make captivity unsuitable for orcas (and perhaps all cetaceans) apply to elephants. I think the difference is that it is possible to maintain adequate social groups, space, and care for elephants. It is true that most zoos do not have the necessary space, money, or climate. But I believe I have seen it done well. It is also true that during thousands of years of captivity, labor, and show business, most elephant keeping routinely used techniques that are psychologically cruel and physically abusive. Contrastingly, the best zoos now offer some of the most humane captivity that elephants have experienced in thousands of years. I have seen elephants kept in a stable social group with enriched and varied activities, several acres of movement with a pond, and positive-only reinforcement and keeper interactions. My impression after several days of being with them was that their lives were decent. And though their lives seemed small and confined compared with the wild elephants with whom I spent a month right after that, the wild elephants were living in fear and danger with ivory traffickers killing an average of one per night during my visit. They left orphans and shot-up survivors, some of whom were doomed to lingering deaths. There is no question that the future of elephants—if we are going to allow them a future—must be as real, free-living creatures. Zoos can never substitute. But it is also possible that on an individually experienced basis, the comfortable routine of the best captivity is not terrible compared with the chronic anxiety and worse that wild elephants now experience.
When we speak of “animals,” we tend to think of the larger mammals. We should remember that animals include everything from sponges to blue whales. Zoos and aquariums are not necessarily miserable places for many kinds of animals to live. And on the other hand, being wild is no picnic. Life in a zoo can be longer, safer, and more comfortable. But zoos are basically dead ends. Captive breeding can occasionally help conservation. But captivity can never be conservation. What Thoreau (Citation1862) so resonantly howled is true: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Humans and other animals
Numerically, human interaction with animals almost entirely includes domesticated animals bred for slaughter. Our treatment of animals has largely brought us the world economy as we know it, because the slaughter of domestic animals has for millennia been a key feature of food systems in modernizing societies. Animal domestication might be the first and most profound point of human detachment from and demonization of the natural world—the beginning of our lost reverence, our routine brutality, our vanished awe. Feeding billions of domestic animals has largely driven the cutting of tropical forests, the clearing of wild lands, and the industrial capture of unimaginable quantities of the ocean’s smallest fishes for conversion to feed for chickens, pigs, and other animals upon whom we feed. Animals on farms are a main driver of the loss of wild places and their animals. Millions of acres in South America that in my childhood grew monkeys and macaws now grow soybeans for pigs and chickens in Europe and the United States. And more and more is demanded to feed humanity’s projected bloat from today’s 7 billion-plus people to tomorrow’s 10 billion. In the late 1800s when the world still had 1 billion people, there was enough genocide, warfare, deforestation, and extinction to make a convincing case that there were already plenty of us. Now we are too much of a good thing. There are twice as many humans today as when I was born. I do not perceive that this doubling has made the world twice as good or twice as peaceful; I do not see that so much more humanity has made the world more humane. Perhaps, I might say, it has made it the opposite.
More to the point, animals are disappearing. One study estimated that 75% of animal species will be gone within three human lifetimes (Barnosky et al., Citation2011). Even if it is only 25% or it will take six human lifetimes, these are unprecedented findings that spark new concerns under the sun.
Given this catastrophe, we must ask ourselves a few questions. Are zoos, aquariums, and humane groups beside the point, or are they crucial? What are the potential roles for any organization focused on animal welfare, animal rights, or conservation in this era when human interactions with nonhuman life are overwhelmingly cruel and lethal and wild animals are in decline? Humans are causing nature to whither, the atmosphere and ocean are destabilized and toxified—yet people are increasingly disconnected, and concern for even human environmental quality and health is in retreat, especially in the United States recently. Are animals simply doomed? Are we?
We have zoos. We have humane groups. We have a Sixth Extinction and factory farms. One could reasonably conclude that zoos and aquariums and the animal-oriented humane, conservation, and environmental groups are all failing. But what is at stake is hardly less than life on Earth. The need to succeed is our common ground.
Image problems: Earned and unearned
“Zoos are cruel; I hate zoos.” Zoos have image issues. They have earned some of them, and they are a bit stuck with others. Zoos suffer by their blurred boundaries with amusement centers and by extension circus menageries. Professional standards such as those of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums have been designed to be pragmatic and inclusive, and so, they are mediocritizing more than they are aspirational. They are easy to criticize. And I sense a reluctance within the zoo profession to criticize their ranks. Standards should be high and membership should be difficult, but if they are and lesser zoos cannot aspire to membership, it would be difficult to see how written standards of the best elite institutions would pull up the lower end of the profession.
And though the better zoos have led the field in innovation, public criticism has often put them in a defensive position. When I was a kid, a very popular TV show called Wild Kingdom featured Marlin Perkins, head of the St. Louis Zoo. Nowadays, no zoo has a publicly recognized thought leader in the field of wildlife ecology or conservation. Without a face and a voice, it is hard to see what zoos stand for.
When I ask people who say they hate zoos when they last visited a zoo, they mainly say it has been decades or simply that they would not. People do not “get” that the bigger, better zoos do conservation. Or they distrust the claims.
The word “zoo” itself is a hot button tangled in impressions of old zoos, bad zoos, circuses, and amusement- and theme-park captive animal collections.
Zoos started as collections of animals for exhibition—menageries—with no conservation concerns and no compelling need to educate visitors. While the better zoos might wish to raise and spend millions on improving exhibits, improving education, and energizing public engagement, many visitors just go to the zoo to see animals, nothing more. They do not visit to be educated or to be activated on conservation. They go to bring their kids or their dates to a safe, nice place where there is lots to see. So, in a weird way, zoos appear caught between the criticism of nonvisitors and the apathy of visitors. Yet they seem to know, even if intuitively, that they must innovate or lose their gate.
Captivity in a cruel world
It is a little too easy to beat up on zoos. They are open to the public, and they care about their image. But as noted, each year people kill billions of animals for food. A tremendous amount of environmental destruction and pollution goes into raising them. And many are made to live more miserably than they are made to die. Meanwhile, the best zoos have the highest standards of animal welfare ever employed. There is incomparably more cruelty in farming than in zoos. So if you want to help animals and you want to reduce suffering, stop eating meat.
Even if you have stopped eating meat, work to conserve wild habitats and to bring people together with nature and animals. Further dividing humans from nonhumans only eliminates society’s thoughts and concerns about animals. Making other animals completely irrelevant to people and outside their experience is the greatest danger to habitats, to species, and to the wellbeing of domestic animals.
People who care most about animals are not helping most animals when they advocate an end to contact and involvement with animals. If people who most care about animals facilitate public isolation from animals, we will still have factory farms, cruelty, and extinction.
Where one stands on zoos reflects who has access to what. It seems to me that most people who hate zoos get to go on safaris, pet whales in lagoons where they give birth, and live with a nice view of the mountains. But not everybody gets to do that. I was a child who did not. To see wild animals, we went to the zoo. The human mind evolved among and with other animals in nature. Animals were always a crucial part of our lives, our food, and our imagined earthly paradises. I do not mean to overstate the case, but in one sense, the big zoos of big cities are little psychological replicas of humanity’s original context. For a few hours, we can again surround ourselves with wild animals and gaze in amazement.
I have heard people say, “A cage is a cage.” But in my experience, not all animals feel that way. We have been given two captive-born parrots. All day, their cage is open. Most of the time, they choose to be on or in the cage or within 10 feet of it. To them, it is home. Our chickens range completely unfenced every day. They are afraid of the street and of the woods, and they choose those boundaries. Every evening, they choose to go into their coop. When I lock them in for the night, they do not feel confined there; they have chosen that security.
Most people work hard for a life of comfortable boredom and limited liberty; they seem to feel the security makes a good tradeoff against freedom. I have seen depressed captive animals. I have also seen wild animals in constant mortal danger from humans: wolves whose families have been shot up, for instance, the lethally terrorized elephants to whom I alluded, and killer whales whose babies all die because we have made their food too scarce and too toxic.
Even in the best times, nature is a merciless sorter. Most wild animals starve in their first year. When I studied seabirds, I saw that they would lay three eggs in case it was a good food year. But in average food years, there was only enough for two chicks; thousands starved. Many songbirds, such as robins, raise 10 to 20 chicks in multiple broods each summer. They swell the flocks of autumn. Most never return. The natural chances of a tuna reaching adulthood are 1 in millions. Even without us, that is the world.
The irony is that it works. In the real wild world, nature does not care about wellbeing. Yet wellbeing happens. Early deaths aside, a free-living tern can live to be 25 years old. An albatross can live 60 years, a tuna can live 30 years, and a whale can survive a century. For millions of years, high mortality and sufficient survival have worked. They brought us the diverse, beautiful, abundant world in which humans eyes first opened.
But to the difficulties we added habitat destruction, overhunting and overfishing, toxics, plastics, climate changes, and ocean acidification. And it no longer works. Except humans and the animals who humans raise for slaughter, essentially every other living thing is at historic population lows and experiencing unprecedented declines.
Zoos and aquariums in context
Zoos often claim that their animals are ambassadors, a claim some humane groups dismiss. But ambassadors represent their culture, their kind, and their needs. So, I think the zoos’ claims ring true; zoo animals are ambassadors. Is that of any value at all? I believe it is, crucially.
Humans do not need animals—especially wild animals. The warning of some conservationists that, “As go the animals, so go we” has not found traction. Part of the reason it has not is that it is not true. (To be fair, many things that are true have not found traction, either.)
It is true that some things that affect wild animals, such as toxics and climate changes, affect humans too. But the vast majority of people live without elephants, apes, or wood warblers. Those of us who think about such creatures every single day are few.
My nightmare is that I wake up and the only creatures in the world are humans. In reality, that is the existence billions of people already inhabit. And it is OK with them. People are psychologically poorer and spiritually weaker in a world devoid of natural beauty and ample space. But few people seem worried about it.
What is the endpoint of our tidal retreat from nature and our estrangement from the living world? We are becoming like my two little captive-bred parrots who are comfortable within 10 feet of their cage because that is the life they have always known. The consequences of our disconnection seem acceptable to most of humanity so far. But they are falling hard on the nonhuman world.
Though we no longer need wild animals, wild animals now need us. But who will speak for what they have not experienced, do not know, do not love? There is real danger that wild animals and wild places will come to seem irrelevant. If that happens, they are lost. For a long time, all that animals needed was for us to leave them alone. Ignoring animals, however, will no longer serve them. They need our active caring, our advocacy, and our help.
Though the public seems more concerned than ever about animal welfare, the fraction who actually vote, buy, or act based on concern about animals remains small. It seems that even those who are most concerned are more disconnected from nature than ever. This combination of concern and disconnection may be why we see disproportionate outpourings of rage about wrongful deaths of individual animals such as Cecil the lion (shot by a trophy hunter) or Marius the young giraffe (killed by a zoo as surplus), while few people have any idea that lions and giraffes have in recent decades declined by about 75%—nor so they know what they might do about it.
Abolishing zoos would not abolish factory farms and cruelty, nor would it slow the obliteration of wild places and the extinction of wild species. It might even abet them, because isolation from animals erodes caring about them.
Do zoos have a role in making things better? Do zoos and aquariums now do all that they can to help guide people toward animals? And if they did and people engaged, what would it look like?
A future for zoos?
Zoos bring us the illusion of proximity to wild animals because they keep wild animals. Can they bring us the reality of wild animals because they keep animals wild?
Given the global context, zoos and aquariums must consider not simply whether they cause suffering—the charge of most critics—but whether they help alleviate suffering in the larger world and whether they are up for the increasingly crucial challenge of being nothing less than a force for existence.
If the better zoos truly work for animals, for their wild habitats and their conservation, and take their education mission seriously, they will cease to be zoos in the archaic menagerie sense of the word. They will become something else, something more like wildlife organizations with a captivity division.
Whatever they are called, the goal of such institutions—as well as the humane groups—should not be to separate humans from other animals but to put everyone face to face with other animals and to entangle every human life in nonhuman lives. The goal should be to close the rift between modernity and nature, heal the alienation, and reverse the disconnection. All groups concerned with animals should work seriously to ensure species survival, viable habitats, and room in the world for biodiversity and evolution. The idea is that all zoos and aquariums should see themselves—as the best already do—as wild animal conservation centers.
Zoos need to better understand not just why people come; they should be more concerned about what visitors do after they leave. They need to better inspire visitors’ active engagement for animals, welfare, and conservation.
Zoos can begin to become wildlife enhancers by melding their mission with wildlife rescue centers. Zoos can be and often are appropriate homes for certain orphaned and injured animals. Other individuals might be kept on public view temporarily while they are being treated and then they are released. I think there is great potential there, because people relate best to individuals and injured or orphaned animals are all individuals with stories. Right now, most animals in most zoos are anonymous. What are their stories? What are their names? As at existing wildlife rescue centers, helping animals in distress is a good way to appeal to children and specifically to involve adolescents in contact and care.
Meanwhile, making kids conservation-supporting citizens should be a major focus, and zoos should all have significant traveling capabilities to visit schools, because many schools cannot visit zoos.
Zoos could also become more and more like retirement sanctuaries where permanent residents get more of a choice about whether and when they are visible to the public.
Zoos have an implied responsibility to care for and not kill their animals; they should manage breeding to avoid “surplus” animals. The natural world runs on the mortality of surplus animals; it is one of the differences between zoos and nature.
Zoos should not be confused with amusement parks. And amusement parks should not have wild animals. The places with animals should be about the animals and for the animals. That is how I distinguish a good zoo from a bad one. It is part of why the public is confused about the difference.
In conclusion
Zoos of the future should be uplifting places of respect, rescue, enhancement, conservation, and engagement. They should be kid-oriented and fun. They should transform into wildlife conservation centers carrying on that mission in their communities, in the schools, and in near and distant wilds, as well as inside their gates.
My challenge and my plea is that zoos become true mission fighters for the existence of free-living animals in natural places and that what are now zoos become the first stage in bringing young people into lifelong engaged caring about animals.
Unless many, many people work for wild animals and wild places, wild animals will not withstand us. Zoos can be part of that. We all must.
References
- Thoreau, H. D. 1862. Walking. The Atlantic Magazine. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/
- Barnosky, A. D. et al. 2011. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471: 51–57.