I’ve been thinking about zoos this week. Have you been to one recently? If so, what did you think? Ethically, I mean.
Last week, a request from someone had me going through old photos. Like photos from our safari in the Serengeti (Tanzania) in 2012.
My goodness, it was incredible. Look at those cheetahs! They devoured a baby warthog right after I took this photo (simultaneously beautiful and horrifying).
The safari also indulged my aesthetic love of zebra bums…. they’re stunning, don’t you think??
Have you ever been on a safari? If so, did it change how you think about zoos? The contrast of life in the wild Serengeti versus life in a cage felt utterly unbearable afterwards.
Zoos are “wicked problems” (complex problems that seem impossible to solve). Even the good zoos.
Good zoos have long prioritized species conservation over individual liberty—“captivity for conservation,” aka the “Noah’s Ark paradigm” (Keulartz 2015). And their conservation contributions are well established.
But good zoos are changing—they’re building better balance between animal welfare and species conservation. This is called “compassionate conservation” (Gray 2017)—believing that individual animals’ lives matter, that they’re not mere representations of their species (Clay & Visseren-Hamakers 2022).
While zoos are still wicked problems, this is a good change, imo.