What’s not to love about the zoo when you’re a kid?
You get to see all kinds of animals from polar bears to giraffes.
You can stand eye-to-eye with a chimpanzee,
watch exotic birds preen and perform.
You can watch penguins waddle on land and fly underwater,
and see lions, tigers and bears!
As a parent, there’s a lot to love too. Plenty of fun for the kids, and,
more importantly, education. They can learn about the natural habitat and
behaviors of animals from all over the world and the value of conservation.
But are these really the lessons that zoos are conveying?
Or is there a stronger message being imparted?
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget.
The ethics of zoos is a polarizing and complicated topic, even amongst vegans.
The arguments usually brought forth by those in favor of zoos are fourfold:
that they provide amusement,
valuable education,
vital research,
and laudable conservation and rehabilitation.
I’m going to approach this issue from several angles in separate videos.
Today we’re going to focus on the education zoos provide for our children.
Many people have memories of visiting the zoo as a child.
Personally, my first conscious memory of a zoo was in Jacksonville, Florida
on an oppressively hot and humid Summer’s day.
At that time the Jacksonville Zoo consisted of not much more than
concrete slabs encased in bars with lethargic, panting animals
languishing in the Florida heat.
I remember thinking that this was supposed to be fun--
that the zoo was supposed to be a good place for the animals.
I struggled to reconcile the story I’d been told with the reality before me.
Of course many zoos, including the one in Jacksonville
have vastly improved their enclosures.
But how much have these surface beautifications
impacted the animals’ quality of life?
Or the message conveyed to the visiting children?
When polled by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the National zoo accreditation
organization in the United States, 94% of people believe that zoos teach
their children about how to protect animals and the habitats they depend on.
Dale Jamieson, Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at
New York University raises an important nuanced point:
And there in lies the issue of zoo based education.
All of these educational goals can easily be met, and far more successfully,
without caging living beings for profit.
Let’s look at some of the mains educational draws touted by zoos:
learning about animals’ natural habitat,
their natural behaviors,
and the value of conservation and animal stewardship.
Lesson Number One: Natural Habitats.
No matter how accurately zoos attempt to recreate habitats,
they will never be natural.
While some zoos attempt to grant their animals as much space as possible,
they can never recreate the natural expanse of territory found in the wild.
Zoo animals spend day after day, year after year in the same enclosure.
Birds can only fly so far,
giraffes can only walk so many paces,
elephants can only travel from one wall to the other,
and monkeys can only climb so high.
Many species are used to traveling miles every day in nature.
So what are these clearly unnatural, human-imposed
limitations really teaching kids about nature?
That it can be recreated at will? That an enclosure that’s a fraction of the size
of an animal’s natural territory can suffice as long as it looks real enough to humans?
How does that exactly convey the importance of habitat preservation?
Lesson Number Two: Animal Behavior.
This is perhaps the greatest failing of zoo education.
There is nothing more unnatural than the behavior of wild animals in
human-made enclosures. However, as many people have only seen wild
animals in zoo environments, they may mistake stress behaviors for natural.
Zoo animals can develop any number of neurotic behaviors from the stress of captivity.
These are scientifically referred to as “Abnormal Repetitive Behavior,” or ARB.
In 1992, Bill Travers, co-founder of the Born Free Foundation, coined the term
“Zoochosis” to describe these obsessive, repetitive behaviors, and described
zoo animals behaving abnormally as ‘zoochotic’.
The following year the Zoo Check Charitable Trust produced “The Zoochotic Report,”
taken over three years at over 100 zoos in Europe,
though the neurotic behaviors captured in these videos
are not confined to animals in European zoos.
They include pacing and circling,
tongue playing and bar-biting,
neck twisting,
head bobbing, weaving, and swaying,
rocking,
over-grooming and self-mutilation,
vomiting and regurgitating,
coprophilia and coprophagia,
meaning the playing with and eating of excrement in
species that do not naturally exhibit this behavior,
apathy or non-reaction to stimuli,
abnormal mother-infant relationships, which can result in the injury and death of babies,
prolonged infantile behavior, wherein animals do not mature properly,
and abnormal aggressive behavior.
These are not natural animal behaviors because these animals are not in nature.
These are psychologically stressed beings exhibiting neurotic and even psychotic behavior.
At their best, zoos misinform children about animal’s natural
behaviors by conflating them with neuroses.
At their worst, they teach children that keeping animals in conditions which
result in such destructive behaviors is an acceptable form of entertainment,
and even in the animals’ best interest.
Lesson Number Three: Conservation and Animal Stewardship.
One of the strongest defenses of zoos is their contributions to conservation,
which I’ll be doing an in-depth video on.
In brief, conservation efforts, just like habitat and behavior education,
do not have to involve captive animals on display.
Conservation efforts are far more effectively handled by specialized wildlife breeding
and rehabilitation programs far away from the prying eyes of the public.
A 2013 study found that zoos lack the infrastructure and resources to carry
out successful conservation efforts and that their approaches are too randomized.
As far as what children learn from zoo conservation programs?
Most likely as much as they do, and any adults do, from all of the
neglected informational plaques displayed around zoos.
Neglected by most, that is.
I read every one.
(
If we want to teach our children the value of caring for and preserving the lives of
animals, zoos are not the ideal classrooms they purport to be.
Especially considering they pull animals from their natural habitat and overbreed
them, then deal with the resulting “surplus” in any number of disturbing ways including
selling them for game hunting or killing them to feed to their other animals.
Perhaps the most neglected flaw of portraying zoos as conveyers of the
value of animal life, is the fact that they serve dead animals at
every café and refreshment stand.
Telling a child the value of protecting and preserving animals
in one breath and serving them a carcass on a bun in the next is
a bit of a mixed message, wouldn’t you say?
As educational destinations, zoos fail miserably on all three counts.
In her book Raising Kids Who Love Animals, Child Psychiatrist
Dr. Sujatha Ramakrishna states that,
This doesn’t mean kids have to miss out on engaging animal education.
Children learn far more about an animal’s natural habitat, behavior, and value by
watching documentaries of their actual behaviors filmed in their actual habitat.
Planet Earth, for example, is a stunning documentary series from the BBC
comprised of eleven episodes, each of which features a global
overview of a different biome or habitat on Earth.
A great way for kids to get to connect to animals in real life is by visiting animal
sanctuaries, where rescued and rehabilitated animals
are allowed to live in peaceful settings.
I’ve included a links to lists of international sanctuaries
on the blog post for this video, where you can also find citations and further resources.
Other zoo alternative activities include visiting local parks,
hiking trials, and basically, just going outside.
We tend to undervalue the beauty and life in our own backyards.
Kids can volunteer at local animal shelters, or even babysit
neighbor’s pets to learn the importance of caring for and protecting animals.
All of the lessons zoos are meant to teach our children are far more effectively
taught elsewhere, and without the cost to the animals themselves.
I hope this video has been helpful. This is just the first peak into this complex topic,
so stay tuned for more zoo-based videos to come.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this aspect of the zoo issue.
What do you think zoos are teaching our children?
Did you go to the zoo as a kid?
Have you taken your own children?
Let me know in the comments!
If you liked this video, give it a big thumbs up and share it
around to show what zoos are really teaching kids.
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Now go live vegan,
get educated elsewhere,
and I’ll see you soon.
Narrator: But what of the children? What do they need to know?
Well, as always, they need to know the truth.
They need to know that these animals are suffering,
are sick, and that they're not the objects of fun,
which is so often how they're presented in zoos.
The laughter that they're directing at these animals could as well be directed
at disturbed people living in a psychiatric ward or prisoners
who've been exposed to very many days and weeks and years of
solitary confinement or torture.