Zoos aren’t festive places
By Jennifer O’Connor
Tribune News Service
Every year at this time, zoos put up festive light displays and encourage visitors to donate special treats for the captive animals. But these “gifts” presented to animals in zoos are poignant reminders that captivity restricts animals to whatever enrichment their captors provide. The greatest gift would be the one they’ll never receive: life outside a cage.
Christmas is just another day for animals in zoos, a day no different from all those before it or all those to come. Gift-wrapped food doesn’t fool imprisoned animals into thinking they’re on an African savannah or in the Borneo rain forest. Genetic drives don’t somehow disappear just because an animal isn’t where he or she is supposed to be. Animals want and deserve to live their lives as nature intended.
The occasional basket of fruit cannot make up for the loss of liberty to move around freely, to claim and control territory or to seek out pleasures and pursuits. Animals in zoos see the same chain-link fence or cement-block walls every day of their lives. Their routines are as mind-numbingly mundane as that of widget assembly-line workers. But at least those workers can leave at the end of the day. Animals in zoos live behind bars until the day they die.
Zoos advertise holiday events as a way for people to connect with animals. But there’s no empirical evidence to support this industry marketing pitch. In fact, multiple studies have concluded that visitors leave zoos with little more than souvenirs and sunburn.
An article in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums magazine Connect detailed a study that found that most visitors to zoos did not retain much new information. When asked what they had learned at an exhibit, most visitors said they had learned “nothing.”
Another article noted that “learning is not a popular reason for people to visit zoos and aquariums. Everyone would like it to be true, but the specifics and logic of how casual visits to zoos really function in the conservation movement (remain) unproven.”
No educational value
Over a period of five summers, a National Zoo curator and his staff monitored and timed hundreds of visitors and found that “people (were) treating the exhibits like wallpaper” and concluded that “officials should stop kidding themselves about the tremendous educational value of showing an animal behind a glass wall.”
Let’s state it plainly: Parents take their children to zoos to keep them occupied and entertained — not to educate them. While there’s little doubt that most children have a genuine affinity for animals, there’s also little doubt that most don’t leave the zoo with a newfound mission to save endangered Tibetan antelopes. It’s almost impossible for young children to make the leap from seeing bored, depressed animals in cages to understanding who those animals really are, much less whether or not they’re in trouble.
Zoo officials should drop the gimmicks that hold no benefit for animals and instead shift their focus to transforming their facilities into genuine refuges for animals in need of rescue and rehabilitation. That’s a gift that every recipient would welcome.
Jennifer O’Connor is a senior writer with the PETA Foundation. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.