Zoos are prisons

1724: 

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 this sort of education?

Not long ago, I visited Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo. I had to see what was going on there for myself. 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 find it difficult to understand how it is that zoos are still legal. Here in the zoo is 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. "Zoos help to preserve species" (very few!), and "Zoos treat the animals well" (??), and "Zoos keep the animals safe from predators". All to justify profit from sales of entry tickets.

At zoos 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 glassed-in enclosures. The animals are imprisoned for life, in entirely sterile surroundings. There’s a mock mountain for the goats, a concrete tank for the seals, a few shrubs to give a savanna effect for the lions. It’s odd they call these places zoological gardens. What little greenery there is tends to be separated from the inmates by electric fences, otherwise I suppose the wicked animals might eat the plants.

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. When the kids grow up and learn the truth about these places, if you don't want to be accused of child abuse, just don’t take them there when they're children. And don’t let their teachers take them. Ask your freedom-loving children how they'd feel being locked up all day, every day.