Imagine if you woke up and your house was a millionth the size that it should be, it would be cramped, right? Unfortunately, this is the case with polar bears that live in zoo captivity. Though not as bad as this example, many animals that live inside zoo walls live in a similar way. Poor zoo conditions are not the only problem with zoos though, there’s the behavioural issue that many animals develop known as “Zoochosis” by experts, as well as the ongoing facade that zoos contribute to conservation. From bar biting bears to euthanised elephants, are zoos truly good for conservation?
Perhaps one of the most horrifying aspects of zoos is their pathetic attempts to recreate the natural habitats of their animals. Problems with enclosures have one of the widest ranges in terms of unhealthy effects of animals, some of which can be severe. These could be anything from large majorities of animals being overweight to high rates of premature death in not only adults but also infants. A known statistic of this is that roughly 40% of lion cubs die before one year of age, whereas only 30% die in the wild this is contradictory because that statistic includes variables not found in zoos such as predation. As well as this, 75% of elephants are overweight in zoos, and only 16% could walk normally. However this is not the end of problems relating to animal health, there have been numerous cases where animals in zoo captivity have been ignored and or denied when in need of medical attention or even times where their enclosure was so flimsy that they were able to escape. In 2005 at the Saint Louis zoo, two polar bears died. One after ingestion of an unknown object, and the other died of an infection after having two dead fetuses in her uterus. At the San Francisco Zoo in 2007 a Siberian tiger managed to escape her enclosure and was shot to death after killing a person and injuring two others. Finally one of the more common offenders; The Virginia Zoo has had a high record of dead animals. 10 prairie dogs died after a tunnel collapse, a rhino drowned in her own moat and most recently in 2019 a juvenile orangutan died of infection. However there is one final issue caused by zoo enclosures, and it is one of the most notorious problems with zoos as a whole. It is known as “Zoochosis”.
Zoochosis is a behavioural phenomenon that is usually known to affect zoo animals kept in captivity. Signs of this usually involve constant or repetitive behaviour such as pacing/circling, self mutilation, random biting/neck twisting and finally coprophagia (Consumption of own feces.) The main reason that animals are known to do this is because they use these methods as a coping mechanism. Zoochosis can be caused by more than a shoddy habitat though. Disturbance of close bonds between animals can also have an impact. This is even more severe in social animals such as gorillas and elephants. Zoos usually break these bonds unintentionally for purposes such as breeding and or business. There are numerous examples of animals suffering from zoochosis or extreme stress such as Gus the polar bear. In the 1990s a polar bear from the Central Park zoo was seen to be swimming figure eights in his personal pool, for sometimes upwards of twelve hours a day. Gus had also been seen stalking small children which further terrified guests. Another victim is the poor gorilla known as Tom. Tom was removed from his family because of the fact he was a good genetic match for a gorilla at another zoo. Sadly, he was abused by the other gorillas at the zoo and as a result lost a whole third of his body weight and was seen sobbing and crying upon reuniting with his former zookeepers. This begs the question, is there a way to cure zoochosis? The most effective method that has been discovered is to release the animal back into its natural habitat, but there is a second method that zoos have discovered. This comes in the form of enrichment. This means that zoos attempt to give animals a far more distracting and thought out enclosure as well as toys or puzzles. More detailed environments take longer to explore and they are given food that takes longer to eat. These methods have only been found to reduce zoochosis by roughly fifty percent though.
The main reason that so many people are fine with the unethical concept of zoos is due to the idea of conservation. Though, do zoos really have an impact on the long term of wildlife conservation? The answer is mostly no and in some cases they may actually be harming conservation efforts. A study mentioned in the journal “PLOS ONE” states that only 18% of animals in the collections of zoos are endangered and of the roughly 4,000 animals in captivity, only 691 of them have the status of endangered. Another major problem with endangered animals being kept in captivity is that they are almost never released into the wild and even if they are, they have been denied the ability to learn crucial survival skills. On top of this, animals in zoos can catch diseases that wouldn’t appear in their native habitat causing them to accidentally spread diseases to their wildlife counterparts if released. Zoos stray further from the concept of conservation due to “Management Euthanasia”. Management euthanasia is the act of a zoo putting down a healthy animal, this could be done for many different reasons such as genetic issues or overcrowding an estimated 3000-5000 animals are victims of this each year. One such victim is the giraffe known as Marius. Marius was a giraffe whose genes were overrepresented in the general population which meant he was unstable for breeding and as a result he was euthanised, after this he was then dissected in a public educational class and then fed to the zoo’s lions.
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