Across the world, zoos have been built in order to protect, preserve, and educate. However, attention has been brought to the general public about whether or not zoos are accomplishing these goals. Organizations ranging from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, to the American Humane have been at a tug-of-war debating not only the morality, but also the success of zoos. These people and organizations who claim that zoos deserve to be shut down have not considered all the evidence beyond a ‘breaking news’ segment on television. In accordance with sources ranging from professional scientists who have studied the effects zoos have on these animals, to people who have direct affiliation to zoos themselves, zoos across the globe are making efforts to ensure that the animals’ well-being on the individual scale and the species scale is as high as possible. The efforts of these zoos are far from lacking, but this will only appear so once everyone learns of how zoo staff mimic mothers to raise young, or how despite what media outlets claim, zoos are saving populations from extinction.  

The first problem at hand is addressing whether zoos are actually making an effort to protect and provide for the needs of these animals in the first place. However, what makes a zoo, an accredited zoo? According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the AZA, zoos seeking accreditation, and thus, funding and official recognition, must comply to hundreds of standards. In particular, section 1.5 covers the animal welfare and well-being. This section of the accreditation standards portable document format (PDF) require that all the animals have a balance between “aesthetic and educational considerations,” enclosures must be safe for animals, the animals must be kept in “appropriate groupings” in order to address their social/welfare needs, there must be several different living conditions (such as shady areas, water-based areas like small streams, et cetera) for the animals to choose from, any kind of presentation that involves the direct use of the animal (such as a presentation involving sea lions putting on a show in the water) must have “an educational/conservation message” as an “integral component,” and “If ambassador animals are used, a written policy on the use of live animals in programs must be followed and incorporate the elements contained in AZA’s ‘Recommendations For Developing an Institutional Ambassador Animal Policy.’” While these policies might be considered a mouthful, the general theme of the well-being section shows that the well-being of the animals is actually required to be met by set and approved standards in order for any zoo or aquarium to become a member of the AZA. This means that any zoo that is recognized by the AZA for meeting their hundreds of policies and standards and have been accepted into the AZA, provides a positive answer to the first question as to whether zoos are making efforts to ensure the well-being of these animals are met.

While AZA accreditation is a great measure of a zoos’ capability to take care of animals, there are a whole range of additional indicators. One cannot simply see a stamp of approval from AZA and instantly assume that the particular zoo is doing its job. While having this accreditation is a good sign, less than ten percent of all zoos in the united states that are licensed by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) are accredited by the AZA (Lamont). This means that one cannot simply base whether or not a zoo is a good one by simply looking for accreditation. It is important to look at whether the zoos are working to assist these animals on the before mentioned individual and species level besides meeting an organization’s standards or not. This matter, however, has already been looked at by professional zoologists, scientists working in the biological field, and people working for magazine publishers ranging from The New York Times, to The Atlantic. 

The place where zoos accelerate the most in improving the lives of these animals is on the individual level. There is a significant amount of documentation about zoos working past the accreditation requirements and focusing on making sure that the animals that they have in their care are as far away from the possibility of developing depression, anxiety, and/or phobias as possible. A recent publication (January 18, 2017) in The New York Times begins by addressing that a gorilla, named Colo, reached the age of 60, almost 20 years over the average life span of the typical wild gorilla (Klein)! The article stresses in the first paragraph that the reason she was able to live so long “is because of the care she received [in the Columbus Zoo]” (Klein). One of the many ways the Columbus Zoo was able to achieve such an accomplishment is via their surrogacy program they have implemented for the gorillas. The Columbus zoo has two article-mentioned methods as part of their surrogacy program, and both work together to find ways to benefit all different gorillas. The article explains that baby gorillas who are without a mother are assisted by humans who have spent lives studying the behavior of mother gorillas. The overall goal of this method is to produce “foster mothers” who, by watching humans cough when they do something bad, or carrying young on their backs, can care for future gorilla offspring that needed a mother like they did (Klein). 

At the same time as mimicking mothers, there’s the opposite end of the spectrum where zoologists need to ensure that the babies don’t become too reliant on humans. It is not uncommon knowledge that zoo animals that become too reliant on humans do not fare very well upon being released in to wild. Problems such as the newly wild animals searching for their human friends instead of placing themselves in a community of common species, or animals not knowing how to defend themselves and getting killed by other animals have been reported ever since zoos began to release animals into the wild. To ensure that this problem is addressed, some cases of baby gorillas will have minimal human contact, while still maintaining the human care needed for survival. The zoologists will train the baby gorillas to get the feeding bottles themselves, instead of constantly relying on having the zoologist feed the gorilla directly. The list of things that just the Columbus Zoo is doing continues further, and definitely does not stop at gorillas or the Columbus Zoo. 

According to Time Magazine, zoos are working to fight against the oncoming threats of Earth’s current mass extinction by attempting to help these animals’ species live on (Ganzert). Taking a look at the Phoenix Zoo, this article looks at how the zoo has developed breeding programs in order to not simply assist, but save an entire species. In 1972, the wild Arabian Oryx was hunted virtually to extinction, with the individuals in captivity at zoos being the only ones left (Ganzert). This is one of many species that me may or may not have heard of before that has been nearly or completely wiped out by humans. However, with special breeding and reintroduction programs, a lot of these species, such as the Arabian Oryx, is able to make a small comeback and have upwards of around a 1000 bring reintroduced back into the wild. As stated previously, there is always a problem with the reintroduction of zoo-bread animals being released back into the wild, however, weighing the options of having a species die out by not interfering at all, or having a species struggle a little to get used to the wild life again after reintroduction, the option that involves keeping the species alive should always be of top priority. However, if the goal of keeping these animals alive and well is on a zoo’s top priority list, why are animals still finding themselves extinct or not being benefitted at all by zoos? an article written by William Conway states the problem may lie in zoos not focusing their efforts in the conservation of the larger, wild habitats. According to the article “Zoos seldom participate in species or habitat restoration” (Conway). This is problematic because one must understand that zoos can breed thousands of a particular species in zoos, but if their habitat is in ruins, which is a common cause of a particular species failing in the first place, zoos get virtually nowhere in helping these animals. This article, however, does not go without suggesting a solution to this problem. Because the human race is constantly expanding, and thus taking more space on this small earth, the article suggests that a solution might be to change how zoos work completely. The article states “Most important, we will have to work to sustain smaller than usually viable wildlife populations in reserves and parks; living with us, as a part of human-dominated landscapes… thus the 2lst-century zoo must be redesigned as a buffer against biotic impoverishment…” (Conway). Overall, what this article suggests is that zoos be altered to account for the fact that most wild areas are now under human influence, so zoos should be altered to take this into account and provide a large area in human dominated areas that are designated as conservation parks so that animals will have a “wild” despite human influence.

On top of keeping species alive on the individual level and species level, it’s important to remember that zoo have a job beyond the animals that they must balance. At the end of the day, zoos are still a business and need to make some form of income in order to fund the animals, the care, staff, et cetera. One way zoos can attract massive amounts of visitors is by advertising as an educational experience, especially since the AZA requires some form of educational output. However, one must question whether or not zoos are putting in an adequate effort into ensuring that visitors, whether they be on a casual day trip to a local zoo, or a load of children on a school field trip, are getting an educational experience that they see worth wild. A survey conducted by Warwick Frost and his team was published in his book in 2011 and contains a whole chart of peoples’ ratings on not only whether or not they agree or disagree on certain aspects of their zoo experience, such as how educational it was, but also important they feel certain aspects of a zoo are. All ratings are ranging from 1 (being not important at all/strongly disagree) to 5 (bring very important/strongly agree). According to the public, the most important matter when it comes to going to the zoo is “having a fun day out” with “see lots of different animals” coming in close second, with mean scores of two different zoo being 4.58 and 4.48 respectively. Overall, according to the general public, Entertainment is of most importance (mean score: 4.236), then education (mean score: 3.895), and finally conservation (mean score: 3.64). However, when looking at the scores for the three categories again, but this time ratings mean whether or not visitors agree they got this experience or not, education actually ranks highest (mean score: 4.5425), then conservation (mean score: 4.515), and finally entertainment (mean score: 4.51). Despite visitors placing education in terms of importance significantly further down compared to entertainment, it is actually the education that proves to be the most effective aspect of a visitors’ zoo visit. Perhaps this is why a zoo’s education ability might come under attack; the public might not recognize education to be incredibly important, so when they find the education aspect of a zoo visit to rank higher than the entertainment aspect, the numbers or feeling might not mean as much to the same public compared to how they feel about how entertainment scored. 

Despite this information, it is necessary that one remembers who zoos are normally visited by: younger children. The book never gave any indication of the age of the visitors surveyed, which if the survey consists of a bunch of eight-year-olds, the data might be more problematic than intended.  According to an article published in The Atlantic, a study by Eric Jensen on children before and after zoo visits showed that only about one thousand of the three thousand children surveyed learned something factual (Jensen). This is problematic not only in itself, but of those thousand children, around fifteen percent of them thought they learned something factual, but in reality, they scrambled information and now believe something false. What does this make of the information the book presented in its chart of ratings? As the same Atlantic article writes, perhaps the definition or scope of education need to be changed. It is hard to measure how much someone learned by one specific zoo visit if all one measures is whether someone can, for example, correctly explain the eating habits of a bear correctly. Perhaps the scope of education should be broadened to cover everyone and any form of learning, not just kids learning “textbook” information. The article claims that learning should not be simply measured by whether someone can answer a question, but should also include people learning that they want to get a job as a zoologist (Phippen). The question of whether or not zoos meet the educational standards presented to them should include common visitors and professionals. Animals in zoos are constantly being used by researchers around the world so that they can study these animals without having to go in the harsh wild. If this scope/definition of educational is kept in mind, the educational ability of zoos is astounding.

Despite everything a zoo does to protect its animals, no zoo is without flaws, some flaws being tragic.  According to a video produced by PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, elephants are one of the most struggling animals in captivity. According to the video, and several different articles to back the video up, elephants that are in captivity have a significantly shorter life span compared to their wild counterparts (PETA). To further address how zoos negatively effects animals, Julia Wilde published a video addressing how several mistakes of zoo keepers lead to an entire exhibit of manta rays dying, which also resulted in the enclosure being shut down completely. The reason regarding the death of the elephants and the manta rays can purely be based off humans. However this information gets worse, as the video created by Julia Wilde also addressed how animals who are fed zoo food, particularly lions and cheetahs, have a problem with how they are fed. With food being directly brought out to the animals, the animals lose a “hassle factor” which the animals need to help dental features (Wilde). Despite this information, not all is loss, as Wilde continues where PETA left off in their video. PETA never gave all the information regarding the short life span of elephants. PETA claims that virtually all elephants have this shorter life span, with elephants that live longer being a near miracle. However, Wilde addresses that more accredited zoos are able to not just raise elephants with a normal life span, they are able to extend it (Wilde).

Assessing the positivity of a zoos intervention with individual animals and their respective species can be difficult if one is ill-informed. There is a whole world of information that must be examined before one can determine whether zoos deserve the privilege to call themselves a preserve. While it is impossible to meet every standard of every animal while maintaining the balance of education, conservation, and entertainment, zoos around the globe are attempting, and succeeding in making this effort. According to the well-known Bill Nye, his life was “enriched” by visiting a zoo. He explains that “humane enclosures where the animals don’t have to face predators, don’t have to have their offspring literally eaten by lions and dogs, that’s not bad. But causing them hardship and shooting this guy [Harambe, the gorilla of the Cincinnati zoo that was shot and killed in 2016 after a kid fell into his enclosure] this is really… troubling” (Nye). If scientists, zoologists, and the common people, can find a way to make a balance of the enrich ability, the conservation, the education, and the entertainment Nye points to, and an animal’s well-being in a zoo, the positives of keeping zoos open and funded would go without question. People would be able to life alongside zoo animals for years to come, and future generations composed of our children, and grandchildren will get the chance to see animals that without zoo, would be impossible.
