What purpose do zoos serve? This a question that will get you a dozen different answers. A regular visitor might tell you they’re there to entertain the kids, a wildlife enthusiast may say that it’s all about conservation or education, and the zoos themselves will probably tell you that they are about all of this and more. In this article, I’ll offer a vegan perspective not just on what zoos are for, but more fundamentally, who they are for.
Zoos as Educational Institutions
Zoo advocates often point to the value of zoos as a form of education, particularly for children. This indeed is one of the few accessible places where most people will ever be able to view live animals, at least where they aren’t being farmed. When we exclude private or roadside zoos, the days of zoos keeping animals in tiny cages with no real information about their species or natural habitat are mostly over, at least in rich nations. Now, most zoos do make a conscious effort to include relevant information about the animals in their exhibits, their natural habitat, and some of the key threats that they face in the wild.
However, if we dig a little deeper, it becomes clear that what little learning is happening is shallow at best, and counter-productive at worst. How much time would you say that the average zoo visitor spends reading the exhibit signs in detail, the pamphlets, or listening to expert speakers? While all of the information contained on an exhibit sign could be easily learned with a quick glance on Wikipedia, this is not the primary kind of education that zoos profess to provide for the public.
Zoos offer something that just reading a Wikipedia article cannot, which is the opportunity to observe animals and learn about them in the process. Even ignoring the question of how much you can learn by watching a caged monkey snooze in the sun for five minutes, there is a more fundamental question to contend with: How much can we learn about wild animals and their habitats by observing their captive-born counterparts in entirely artificial environments, existing in atypical social settings?
The truth is that captive animals just do not behave in the same ways that their wild relatives do. The stereotypical behaviour of animals in captivity is described as “zoochosis“, repetitive stress behaviours that are commonly observed in zoo animals. In captivity, animals can exhibit symptoms consistent with anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is thought to be how animals cope with unstimulating environments, through repetitive behavior that serves no obvious purpose, such as pacing, head-bobbing, and biting their bars. These behaviours also commonly include regurgitation and reingestation, as well as other seemingly pointless behaviours that are rarely observed in wild animals.
Even their sleep is affected, studies on the brown-throated three-toed sloth for example, show that in captivity sloths spend approximately 70% of their time asleep, compared to 40% in the wild. If you look up this animal, you’ll find most sources stating that these sloths sleep 70% of the time, an (incorrect) conclusion based on observing captive sloths in laboratory settings.
Basing our understanding of animal behaviour solely on how captive animals behave in captivity is responsible for many of our errors in thinking about animals, including the widespread misunderstanding of the “alpha male and alpha female” pack structure of wolves. This was based on observations made on 10 wolves kept at the Basel Zoo in Switzerland, and reflects how wolves behave when an entire pack is kept in an area of 10 by 20 meters, not how wild wolves behave in territories that can range from 33 to 6,200 km2 in the wild. This means that zoos are not just bad for education for the general public, but often provide unreliable data for scientists, too.
Not only is their behaviour radically different, their biology often is, too. Good zoos maintain breeding links with other zoos to trade animals, but even with this network in place, the genetic diversity of the zoo population pales in comparison to that of wild animals. A substantial number of zoo populations fail to meet demographic and genetic indicators of sustainable populations, in that the populations are very small or have low genetic diversity. Even their microbiome is radically different, with different antimicrobial resistance gene patterns. We are only just beginning to understand how this could change everything from sexual behaviours to aggression.
Animals may not commonly exist in tiny cages anymore, but no zoo, however well-funded, can adequately replicate an ecologically dense rainforest, the plains of the Serengeti, or the wide oceans. Wild elephants, for example, can range distances of between 10-20 km, with exceptional distances of 90-180 km recorded. No zoo can provide anything even approaching this kind of space, never mind including the other fauna that elephants and other animals frequently interact with for stimulation. That means that no visitor can ever observe and learn from an animal in anything even resembling their natural habitat.
Zoos do educate people, at least to an extent, but that education pales in comparison to what those same visitors could learn if they picked up a book, or just watched a documentary including footage of wild animals, narrated by an expert on their behaviour and habitat. There is no compelling reason why animals need to be kept in captivity, completely divorced from their natural habitat so that humans can learn what little we can by observing an animal who is biologically and psychologically very different from the animals we find in the wild. It is not so far away from observing how humans behave in prisons and then trying to apply those same conclusions to everyone else.
When you take the lion out of the savannah and replace it with a cage, if you take him thousands of miles away from the environment he evolved to hunt in, when you take his pride and his antelope away, is he still the same animal?
Zoos as Conservation Organisations
Conservation is perhaps the most common modern defence for zoos, and there is some truth to it. Some genuinely impactful conservation work has been done by zoos, their success stories including the White-Naped Mangabey captive breeding program, Cheetah conservation in Nambia, and the preservation of the Bellinger River Turtle following the outbreak of a deadly disease – to name only a few.
To begin to see where the problems arise, we can look at another case that zoo advocates often point to – the captive breeding of the Amur Leopard. The species was driven close to extinction by a mixture of poaching and habitat loss, so zoos stepped in to establish and maintain a captive population. 200 Amur Leopards now exist in zoos. Yet almost none of these animals will ever be released into the wild, and it is unlikely that their children will, either.
In 2023, conservationists celebrated the wild release of three Amur leopards at the Ussuri Nature Reserve, after a 50-year absence from the area. Yet this work was done by the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with specialists from the Land of the Leopard Federal State Budgetary Institution, and the Far Eastern Leopards Autonomous Non-Profit Organization. A 2017 review indicated that zoos were involved in only 35% of conservation translocations and contributed captive‐bred individuals for release into the wild in only 20% of cases. The other 80% is done by captive breeding programs, research institutions, and non-profits.
According to Benjamin Beck, former associate director of biological programs at the National Zoo in Washington DC, in the last century, “only 16 of 145 reintroduction programs worldwide ever actually restored any animal populations to the wild. Of those, most were carried out by government agencies, not zoos.”
Even though zoos do far less work in this sphere than dedicated conservation organisations, their work still represents a significant contribution to wildlife conservation. But when we consider how much money passes through zoos in comparison to non-profits and conservation organisations (the US zoo sector alone is worth $3 billion), zoos seem to spend relatively little of their money and land on conserving animals and their habitats, or even housing endangered animals. This is not just an issue with private, rogue zoos. In the UK, just 26.6% of species kept by members of The Consortium of Charitable Zoos are threatened with extinction in the wild, and 52.4% are of least concern. As The Independent Newspaper points out:
Zoos claim one of their main benefits is conservation. However, when studying this in detail it is easy to see this is a myth. For example, in European zoos, 70-75 per cent of animals are not threatened in the wild. Of the approximately 850 mammal species and subspecies held in European zoos, 500 are assessed as of least concern on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list, and only 45 (5 percent) are critically endangered. Of those 45 critically endangered, we estimate as few as three are actually viable when taking into account the issues of hybridisation, disease and genetic diversity.
There are more than 5,700 species of all animal classes held by members of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria alone, which represents only about 8 per cent of all zoos in Europe, but only a little over 200 of these species are in managed breeding programmes. This means that, by their own admission, around 95 percent of animals in European zoos are not important or relevant enough to merit breeding programmes, and almost all have the same issues: hybridisation, low levels of genetic diversity, and disease.
If zoos are primarily about wildlife conservation, why do they put less money into habitat conservation and rewilding than they do advertising? Why aren’t at least the majority of the animals they house at risk of extinction? Why do some of the most common zoo animals include barn owls, veiled chameleons, meerkats, cabybaras, tawny eagles, freshwater crocodiles and American alligators, despite all of them classified as Least Concern in the wild? These animals will never be part of any re-release or captive breeding conservation program, so why should they spend their entire lives deprived of freedom? If most of these animals will never see the outside world and exist solely to be gawked at by paying visitors, who exactly are we conserving them for?
The argument here is not that zoos do not help conserve animals, it is that conservation is not what zoos are really about. Keeping an animal on display to the public in an artificial habitat is antithetical to ever being able to release them in the wild. They are unlikeoy to have adequately honed any of their natural instincts, how to hunt, forage, avoid predators, and will not have fostered a healthy fear of humans. Conservation in captivity is important, but there is no reason why animals need to be on display to the public for that to happen. The real work should be done by conservation non-profits and research organisations, as most of it already is.
The Human Zoo
It would be unfair to dismiss the conservation or education efforts of zoos as meaningless, it is not the case that zoos don’t do anything at all for animals except imprison them for profit. But again, we must ask: Who are zoos for? If zoos provide a poor education for visitors, and the animals housed there are unlikely to ever be released into the wild, who are we doing all of this for? It seems difficult to come to any other conclusion than that zoos primarily exist to serve human interests. Even if zoos were effective at education and conservation, it is humans who are being educated, and humans who these animals are being conserved for.
When we talk about the conservation of wild animals, are we trying to conserve individuals in service to their own interests, or are we conserving species as some sort of abstract collective? What exactly is the point of conserving animals who will never rejoin their wild relatives? Do we believe that it would make any difference to the caged gorillas that their bloodline may one day result in some of their descendants roaming free in the mountains and rainforests once again? Do we think it would alleviate their boredom and depression?
Zoos do indeed contribute towards education and conservation, but it is also true that this is not the reason they exist. If we want to know what the priorities of any organisation are, it is always a good idea to take a look at their budgets. According to Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, zoos spend about 5% of their budget on conservation, compared to other areas like operations and construction. The Born Free Foundation points out:
A quantification of research papers published by the AZA from 1993 to 2013 found that only about “7% were related to biodiversity conservation” (Loh et. al., 2018). For further comparison, Emma Marris writes in her New York Times opinion article “Modern Zoos Are Not Worth the Moral Cost” that in 2018, AZA organizations spent “around $231 million annually on conservation projects” in comparison to “$4.9 billion on operations and construction.” Many environmentalists and conservationists have also expressed doubts about the zoos’ captive breeding programs. While some endangered animals have been reintroduced in the past, success stories do not justify keeping animals in captivity for display and entertainment purposes. “It’s as if [zoos] might be called upon at any moment to release [the animals], like Noah throwing open the doors to the ark into a waiting wild habitat. But that day of release never quite seems to come.” –– Emma Marris, NYTimes.
Like almost all captive animals, animals in zoos largely exist not to educate, not to conserve, but to provide entertainment to paying humans. While we focus on acquiring and trading species between zoos as if they were limited edition collectibles, their habitats continue to be clearcut for timber, for mining, for oil, and most commonly, to provide grazing land for cattle. Zoos have come a long way from their origins as private menageries made up of animals stolen from the wild for display to the rich, but the legacy of those origins has not been washed away.
As much as advocates try to cover zoos with a veneer of respectability by pointing to conservation and education programs, at heart, zoos are and always have been animal entertainment industries. Zoos and the animals they house exist primarily to serve human interests, whether that means conserving animals we find charismatic or beautiful, or learning about how a lion behaves when we transport them from Africa to Essex and put them in a cleverly disguised cage. Zoos do educate, they do conserve, but these purposes are secondary to what zoos have always been about: Entertainment.
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