Zoos are prisons

36.

Some animals are imprisoned on farms and executed when the farmer is ready. Food is produced and omnivores pay good money for it. Other animals are not being fattened to be eaten or reared to produce food, they are reared and captured for the sole purpose of entertaining us.

Some years ago I summoned up my courage and visited our local zoo here in Sydney, Taronga Park Zoo. I paid good money to get in, which grieved me. But I had to see for myself what they were doing to animals there. It turned out to be a  harrowing experience. I hear people say that the animals are better off in the zoo than being hunted in the wild. I say they are better off dead.

Those of us who don’t eat animals or wear them or gawp at them in cages for entertainment are ever more incredulous as the years go on, that zoos are still legal. We are amazed that our fellows, family, friends, sensitive, well educated (and supposedly kind and otherwise caring) individuals refuse to listen to what we have to say about animal cruelty. Here in zoos is a perfect example of Society’s sanctioned animal cruelty. Parents and teachers alike bring children to these places and do so in order to desensitize them; to kids, a visit to one of these animal incarceration centres becomes just an exciting day out. The kids may be too young when they first go to a zoo, to be revolted by what they see - especially when the adults around them are telling them that zoos are good places ... and tell them that zoos help to preserve species, that zoos treat the animals well and that the animals are safe from predators, etc. Ah yes, safe from all except the money grubbing humans, who turn a nice profit from ticket sales to visitors.

At zoos around the world, like this one, for these once free animals, each day brings deadly boredom in barren surroundings. All you see is concrete and iron bars and thick (but very clean) glassed-in enclosures. The animals are in prison here for life, in entirely sterile surroundings. There’s a mock mountain for the goats, a concrete tank for the seals, a high walled enclosure for the lions, and standard iron-barred cages everywhere; it’s odd that they call it a zoological garden. What little greenery there is tends to be separated from the inmates by electric fences, otherwise I suppose the wicked animals might eat it.

Go to your local zoo, pay for a ticket, take a note book, write down what you see and then write to your local paper and explain why you are sickened by seeing all these banged up animals. Just don’t ever take the kids or let their teachers take them. Ask children what they think it would be like to be shut in, if they were freedom-loving beings.