Are Zoos Good or Bad?

Zoos are beneficial to animals in many ways. Zoos conserve wild species, they provide scientists with a place to conduct research to improve the lives of animals, and they take in animals that are living in poor conditions. All of these things show that zoos help animals. On the other hand, though, zoos are an unnatural environment for most of the animals that live in them. Because the animals are living in an environment to which they are not suited, zoos can also be harmful to the animals living there. Zoos have the potential to be both good and bad for animals.

Zoos provide benefits to animals by conducting research and providing facilities that contribute to the conservation of wild animals. For example, Californian condors have been saved by zoos. The Californian condor became seriously endangered because of hunting and the destruction of its habitat. Therefore, zoos took all of the remaining wild condors from the wild and bred them. They have since released some of the condors back into the wild. Without the efforts of the zoos, the species would probably have gone extinct.

In addition, zoos serve as a place for scientists to conduct research. Scientists are able to work with the animals at the zoos, which makes conducting the research easier. Otherwise, they would have to work with completely wild animals in an uncontrolled environment. Through their research at zoos, scientists are able to learn more about the animals and to create new medicines for them. This helps to keep more animals healthy.

Furthermore, zoos take in animals that are in bad conditions. They may rescue animals from traveling circuses or from other places where they have accommodations of low quality. For example, an orphaned snow leopard cub was taken in by the Bronx Zoo when there was no proper facility to care for it in its native Pakistan. The zoo provided the necessary conditions for the leopard to thrive.

Because zoos save endangered species, provide places and animals for scientists to conduct helpful research, and take in animals that would otherwise have no place to go, it is clear that zoos are helpful to animals. They provide benefits both for the animals living in them and for animals still living in the wild. Zoos make many contributions to the wellbeing of animals.

On the other hand, animals are better suited to their natural environments. They have evolved over many thousands of years to be able to survive in their particular habitat. Natural selection has ensured that those best suited for the area survive and reproduce. The animals have adapted to the particular foods, climates, geographical features, and social groups that arise within their environment. In general, animals thrive best in their natural environments.

Keeping exotic animals in unnatural environments, therefore, is often harmful and seen as a form of animal abuse. If animals are taken out of their natural environments, they all of a sudden lose all of the qualities to which they have become adapted. They must rapidly adapt to a new situation for which they have not been evolutionarily equipped. The foods, climate, geography, and social group might all change. The animal might not be able to adapt to the new environment properly, and may become stressed or confused.

Zoo animals are kept in unnatural environments. It can often be difficult to replicate the natural environments of animals. For example, the diet of an aardvark is difficult to recreate in a zoo. In addition, it is difficult to provide sufficient space for elephants, which usually walk 30 miles a day in the wild. It is also a challenge to keep animals sufficiently warm or cool in climates that are drastically different from their own. And often animals have fewer members of their species with which to interact, or perhaps even none at all. It is clear that zoo animals live in environments quite different from their own. Because keeping animals in unnatural environments can be harmful, and zoo animals are kept in unnatural environments, it follows that keeping animals in zoos can harm them. Therefore, zoos are bad for animals because they place them in environments in which they do not belong.

Zoos can do both good and harm to the animals that live there. They help to conserve entire species, but they can be bad for the individual inhabitants. They can remove animals from poor conditions, but the zoo conditions are still not as good as the animals’ natural environment. And zoos provide scientists a place to research, but only by taking the animals out of the environment for which they are best suited. Zoos are both bad and good for animals.