Zoos are prisons

718: 

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 and to some extent educate us. But what price education?

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 fellow family and friends, who are supposedly sensitive, well educated kind and caring, refuse to listen to what we have to say about animal cruelty.

Here in the zoo there’s a perfect example of Society sanctioning animal cruelty. The animals imprisoned in these places have no hope of any kind of natural life. They are merely exhibits. Parents and teachers bring children to these places and in doing so effectively desensitize them. To kids, a visit to the zoo (let’s call them animal incarceration centres) becomes just an exciting day out. Small children are likely 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, and that zoos treat the animals well, and that the animals are safe from predators, etc. Ah yes, safe from all predation except for the money grubbing humans, who turn a nice profit from sales of entry tickets.

For these once-free animals, at zoos like this one in Sydney, each day brings deadly boredom in barren surroundings. As you walk around, 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 iron-barred cages everywhere you look.

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. But if you want to avoid being accused of child abuse, when the kids grow up and learn the truth about these places, just don’t take them there. And don’t let their teachers take them. Ask children what they think it would be like to be shut in all day, every day. Ask them what that would feel like if they were freedom-loving beings.