[yorkietalkjilly]

Oh, I just couldn't disagree more with you, girl. You know I adore you but boy, my soul dies a little when I see a beautiful wild Lion or anything wild in a zoo - it just kills my soul. Zoos are not the answer and keeping a noble wild animal confined 24/7, with little life enrichment and no way to live up to his genetic programming, his innermost instincts, as humans trek by, stop for 5 minutes and go, isn't in anyway charitable for the poor wild animal.

Whatever natural instincts the wild zoo animal has are totally stymied by his artificial lifestyle. Making a wild animal, whose nature is to run, swim, fly for miles and miles, forage and hunt/kill, fight for his rights, breed at will, stay confined to a set boundary, a given space, is so fiercely alien to his nature that he'd be better off dead and seems the same as sentencing a human being to life in prison - the ultimate death penalty - the day-to-day relentlessly limited boundaries of someone else's choosing - for a whole lifetime. We all would rather be dead than live like that. You know the old phrase "Give me Liberty or give me death". What good is living if there is no ability to go our own way, no freedom of choice, no true joie de vivre from living this life?

These poor wild, confined zoo creatures have no life - no life-enriching activities, can't do any of the things they were bred to do and their spirit yearns for. Wild instincts just go unfulfilled. The wild things just while away their days at the whim of mankind, often pacing, standing in place for hours or rocking in utter boredom, too despondent to even breed.

We'd be better off using all the billions spent at and on zoos and aquariums helping the world's countries buy up the land for their own wild creatures to use to live their natural lives, run/roam, forage, hunt/kill, fight for rights and breed in the wild rather than trying to artificially replicate something that never can be truly replicated - keeping a wild animal mentally and physically fulfilled and contented in a confined space of at best a few acres and at worst, a few feet, with iron bars to look through.

From what I read, very few zoos themselves actually breed to release wild animals back into the wild but to sell to other zoos and circuses around the world - and those breeding programs are mostly only for the popular animals - while the rest go extinct. As for veterinary research, most of it in zoos is for success in breeding in confinement as I understand, and veterinary sciences are not really needed in the wild, for nature has its own answers and the malformed, seriously ill and injured, get to die, rather than live in a miserably weakened or confined condition.

I just can't see how wildlife benefits at all from merely existing in a human-created confined space, prevented from doing most of the wild things its body and spirit were born to live for.