Revisiting the Shame of the Naked Cage
Zoos are an enduring cruel practice well past their expiration date
In November 8, 1968, LIFE magazine published a full spread on the ethics of zoos. It’s an honest and self-reflective piece, and one that still resonates today.
The article’s opener reads:
“…Even in the best intentioned zoos, animals are deprived of almost everything they need for normal behavior. The enormous and profitable traffic in wildlife — for food, sport, skins, zoos, scientific research and even pets — decimates whole species and threatens to wipe out those rare specimens from which man derives such benefit and delight.”
At first glance, we might assume that public opinion and policies are shifting surrounding animal captivity, but in the 50+ years since the article was published, little has changed.
Today, some two-thirds of Americans (64%) support keeping animals in captivity, but interestingly, only 39% of Canadians share this view. While we don’t know the sheer number of zoos or facilities that enslave wild animals worldwide, we do know that the zoo and aquarium industry employee count continues to increase considerably. In 2021, there were some 23,000 thousand employed, and that number jumped to 26,700 thousand in 2022.
On top of this, the live import industry continues apace. In 1967, it was reported that the U.S. alone imported more than 28 million live animals, most of which were sent to zoos, aquariums, carnivals, and pet shops.
Today, the situation is more dire.
Some 200 million live animals are imported to the U.S. annually, and if they’re fortunate enough to survive the long journey in cramped, overcrowded shipping crates and tiny enclosures, they will be fated to a lifetime of suffering, whether it be in a lab, research facility, zoo, roadside attraction, or even as a diplomatic gift to a world leader. Note, the act of gifting animals has been a long-standing practice used by countries as a token of goodwill. For example, since 2018, the Nepali government gifted two pairs of endangered one-horned rhinos to China. The rhinos were in their early stages of life when they were cruelly separated from their mothers in the jungle and flown to a zoo in China to be enslaved and used as entertainment.
These trends tell us that we have a long way to go in terms of educating people about the harms of keeping animals in captivity. There aren’t many legal repercussions for exploiting wild animals, either. Laws and regulation protecting wildlife remain woefully insufficient, and in many cases, non-existent, all around the world.
Menageries, the practice of enslaving exotic animals, have been around for thousands of years. As far back as 2000 BCE, lions and other wild animals were kept in cages. Ancient Romans had chariot races, circuses, dogfighting, cockfighting, and bullfighting. Many of these cruel activities still persist to this day, while others are more frowned upon, like dogfighting, because of the arbitrary rules we’ve set for how we treat some animals vs. others (this is also known as speciesism).
It is well-documented that animals held in captivity are often stressed, anxious, and chronically depressed. Some animals will develop sexual obsessive disorders and others diseases, like heart disease and cancer—illnesses that are much rarer in their natural habitat.
In the aforementioned LIFE article, zoologist Desmond Morris explains how ‘opportunist’ animals like polar bears, lions, tigers and cheetahs — the most popular attractions — happen to also be the most prone to developing psychological and/or psychological dysfunction in captivity,
He describes opportunists as:
“[animals that are] forever investigating, always on the move.
Typical opportunists are the dogs and wolves, the racoons and coatis, the martens and mongooses, the monkeys and apes and, of course, man. The opportunists are precisely the animals that find the sterile, restricted life of the zoo so frustrating and so damaging. The nervous system of the opportunist seems to abhor inactivity. And inactivity is just what the zoo cage has to offer.
The irony of the situation is obvious. The opportunist is the animal we all want to see in the zoo and we want to see being opportunistic. Yet we perversely make it as difficult as possible for him by restricting his environment in almost every conceivable way.
We rigidify it, limit it, standardize it, and sterilize it. Then we laugh at the improvisations of the frustrated, inquisitive animals it houses.
This aligns with what Animal Justice, a Canadian animal law advocacy organization, found in one of the largest investigations of zoos ever conducted in Canada. Investigators visited nearly every zoo in Ontario and found “widespread suffering, injuries, death, and troubling to public safety.”
They found that ‘opportunist’ animals, such as tigers, cougars, bears, and wolves were severely suffering in their tiny enclosures. They were restless and constantly pacing back and forth, visibly distressed. They also found that animals were kept in unnatural social groupings, such as bears, who are naturally solitary, held in a bear pit with other bears, while monkeys, who are naturally social, were held in solitary cages alone.
These dismal conditions were also witnessed at one of the more ‘respected’ zoos—the Toronto Zoo—which prides itself on its conservation efforts.
The sad fact is zoos necessarily require wild animals to be cruelly removed from their natural habitat and forced to live out their lives in enclosed, artificial environments where they’re restricted from their natural behaviours. They’re not able to play, forage, run, bathe, nest, feed, or stalk. Enclosures are built in such a way that animals have few places to hide, both from each other and from people. There is no moment of refuge for the animal to escape from the watchful eyes of visitors, the unnatural, fluorescent lights, and the obnoxious human noises that fill the cold, barren enclosures.
Since the 1970s, shortly after this LIFE article was published, zoos have been rebranded as an important conservation tool , which is more palatable to sustain in today’s ‘civil’ society.
But the conservation angle is nothing more than a marketing ploy used by zoos and similar industries to evade scrutiny and continue profiting off of the enslavement of animals.
Most of the world’s zoos do not actually keep threatened or endangered animals. For example, in European zoos the majority of animals in captivity are not threatened in the wild. Of those that are endangered and are bred in the zoo, very few threatened species in captivity have actually improved their numbers in any meaningful way.
Many zoo conservation programs actually threaten the risk of wild animals more. Animal Justice found that the African Lion Safari’s elephant breeding program hasn’t reintroduced a single elephant back to the wild—the program; however, does serve as a hub for elephant trafficking, which is a horrifying reality for many of these programs.
Not only that, many zoos breed endangered animals in-house where they then raise the endangered animals in captivity, and keep them in captivity for the rest of their lives. Some zoos also sell off ‘extra’ animals to research facilities, schools, labs, and other institutions to be further exploited. This is not an exception, but common practice.
Many zoos have wildlife conservation programs, but there is simply no justification in enslaving some animals to save a few others when you could easily cut out the actual practice of enslavement and exclusively focus on conservation. If the public were to care about conservation efforts, they would directly support legitimate conservation groups that don’t sell animals for human entertainment instead of using ticket sales towards alleged conservation efforts. There are other ways to educate and ‘see’ animals: Watch wildlife documentaries, read books—there are even wildlife cams where you can watch animals in their natural habitats.
Legitimate conservation organizations do not include the practice of enslaving animals for human entertainment, nor do they put profit ahead of the animal’s needs. When it comes to zoos, profit comes first, not the animal’s well-being.
The myth of the ‘conservationist’ zoo persists nonetheless, despite growing evidence that disprove the efficacy of such conservation efforts. Quite simply, there is no such thing as an ethical zoo; this is nothing more than an oxymoron.
We’re so fundamentally disconnected from the natural world that we forget animals live for themselves, not us. Animals have intrinsic value independent of how we utilize or see them.
Like humans, wild animals deserve to live their lives in freedom, not enslaved by entitled humans for the sole purpose of entertainment.
Even if caretakers provide the absolute best standard in care, a zoo can never replicate a wild animal’s natural habitat. There is no amount of care or enrichment you can provide that will provide the most optimal environment for the animal. Nothing can replace the wild.
The caged animal is treated as nothing more than an object, constantly being watched over by mindless humans clucking and clapping and taunting. The real inferior species is not the caged animal, but the human on the other side pulling the strings. If there is nothing else you can do for animals, the bare minimum you can do is stop going to zoos (even if your kid really, really wants to see the cute animals)—this includes roadside zoos, petting zoos, and other animal-focused activities, like rodeos and carnivals, that senselessly exploit animals.
Loving to death comes to mind here for people and zoos! What's your take on middle of the road options, zoo like sanctuaries and such? A couple examples that I have in mind are bird sanctuaries where injured wild birds are brought to recover, or stay for the rest of their life if their injury is severe (i.e permanently damaged wing). The one I know of is like a zoo, in that people can and do come to look at the birds (eagles, owls) etc, but all the birds are rescue animals.
The other that I know of but have never visited is a bear research facility, popular with visitors, so also kind of like a zoo, but all the bears are trouble bears from parks, aggressive bears, bears that were breaking into cabins, bears that would otherwise be shot are brought there instead. I heard they do things like test if bear proof containers are really bear proof or not and study hibernation. These seem like potentially fruitful examples of compromises on the zoo question.
We need fewer zoos (actually let's get rid of them altogether) and more efforts at animal protection such as this in my home province, and as seen on TV:
https://www.wildlifeshelter.com/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6976974/
Sometimes it's not possible to return an orphaned bear to nature. In that case every effort should be made to ensure the bear has adequate shelter, provisions and above all, love from those tasked with its protection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D5lo3P-COQ