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I have a confession to make. When it comes to zoos, I am a hypocrite.
Surely, with our modern understanding of animal rights and sentience, zoos are an anachronism that people will one day look upon in the same way we now see traditions like bear baiting.
Then, an older relative wanted to take them on a day out to a different zoo. I wasn’t being asked to get involved, so was it really fair to stand in their way?
Could we just avoid looking at the animal cages? Not a hope. The animals and the rides are intermingled, and one of rides even passes over the tiger enclosure. Poor tigers!
A wild orangutan’s home range is up to 15 square miles (Photo: Anup Shah/Getty Images/Stone RF)
This week I have been thinking more about the conflict between animal rights and the potential benefits for humans of getting close to animals, after a presentation of an upgrade to the orangutan enclosure at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire.
The speakers were aware of the negative sentiments about their industry and stressed Twycross’s conservation work – the chief defence of zoos – as well as its educational activities and how it improves people’s mental health by helping them connect with nature.
Zoos help conservation in several ways: by maintaining small breeding populations of endangered species, public education and scientific research, said Dr Rebecca Biddle, the zoo’s chief conservation officer.
But I would question if zoos can do much to help. For one thing, just a quarter of the species kept in them are, in fact, endangered, according to Chris Lewis of the Born Free Foundation, a UK charity that campaigns against zoos.
I’m sure some zoos do better than others – and zoo welfare standards have improved over time. Safari parks, where animals have much more space to roam around, seem less objectionable – although are notorious for resulting in disappointed children when the animals are just dots on the horizon.
Born Free and other groups are currently campaigning against zoos and aquaria that keep gentoo penguins – classed as in the lowest possible conservation threat status. This includes Sea Life London, which Born Free says keeps 15 gentoos in an underground enclosure with no natural light or fresh air.
Let’s now consider the conservation argument for zoos, in terms of the animals they keep that are actually endangered.
In the case of Bornean orangutans, for instance, their forests are being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations.
Tigers learn to hunt from their mother, so ones bred in captivity cannot be released (Photo: Aditya Singh/Getty)
To be fair, zoos often make donations to such habitat preservation work in the animals’ home countries. Twycross, for instance, funds a charity called the Borneo Nature Foundation, which educates Indonesians and supports alternative livelihoods to palm oil farming.
I don’t want to pick on Twycross Zoo in particular, because I’m sure it’s no worse than any other zoo. In fact, it seems to be better than average, because, of the species that it houses, 54 per cent are threatened with extinction, and it aims to raise this to 60 per cent by 2030.
Releasing animals back into the wild
Another common defence of zoos is that they can sometimes release animals bred in captivity back into the wild, to boost numbers.
It is also incredibly resource and labour-intensive. Again, the money going to zoos might be better spent trying to fix the chief problem of habitat loss. Plus, if we don’t fix habitat loss, then the released animals may still be in danger.
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If orangutans really are wiped out in Borneo, I can’t shake the notion that it would be better for us to keep a few hundred individuals alive in zoos in Europe and elsewhere, with the hope they could survive until a different time, when we could somehow overcome the obstacles to their species living wild again.
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