Should zoos exist? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service

Hello. It's Hannah Gelbart here. And this is What in the World from the BBC World Service.

Going to the zoo to see a lion or tiger or a giraffe can be awesome for us humans.

But what's it like for the animals? What kind of impact does it have on them?

That is what we're going to be diving into today, as we ask, should zoos exist?

Here to talk us through it is our resident animal expert, William Lee Adams, from the What in the World team. Hey. Hi Hannah.

First of all, can you give me a brief history of zoos? Like, where did the idea come from? Sure.

So I think we need to start with a concept. And that's man's control of nature.

If you look at ancient art from Mesopotamia or modern day Iraq, Greece, China, and even through to the 18th and 19th century portraiture in England and France, you see royals, emperors, rulers killing animals. This is to say I have authority.

If I can kill a bear, then I can protect my people.

But then what if you keep the bear alive. What if you collect them?

That kind of creates a different narrative.

Here you see it as a source of strength, saying, we're wealthy, we have power.

We can exchange these as gifts to other nations.

So in the 13th century, here in England, King Henry the Third, he received a polar bear from the King of Norway.

He received three lions from the Holy Roman Emperor, and later he came into the possession of an African elephant.

All of these were stored at the Tower of London, creating sort of a personal menagerie.

And I need to point out, it's not just male rulers who are doing this.

If you look at Queen Charlotte, she famously had a collection of 18 kangaroos she kept near her cottage at Kew, and her love of animals was so famous that actually, in Bridgerton, the Netflix series, she was portrayed fictionally. And you saw her zebras.

She must have had a big cottage to fit in 20 kangaroos, massive paddocks.

We still see that idea, don't we? Like panda diplomacy, the idea of countries giving other countries animals.

But that's not what I think of when I think of zoos today. I think of kind of animals in cages.

How did that concept evolve into what we have today?

Sure. So a very canned history would be in the late 18th century you had a zoo open in Austria. The public wanted to learn about animals.

Then you had the French Revolution. You had revolutionaries ransacking the palaces of the king, the queen, aristocrats, and taking some of these animals to create a public zoo. This is considered by many, along with the London Zoo, the world's first modern zoo. Now, by 2025 standards, it's not modern. Animals were kept in cages, they were given very little room.

modern. Animals were kept in cages, they were given very little room.

There was very little acknowledgement of their emotions, of their feelings.

They were there as exhibits, as if in a museum, like the skeletal remains of a dinosaur, for people to look at, for human curiosity. Then you have World War Two. People become more aware of animal welfare after seeing so many zoos destroyed, and that was a huge turning point.

It raised awareness about the fact that animals feel, animals suffer and animals endure trauma, and that has led to a full spate of different types of zoos, urban zoos, petting zoos, safari parks where you drive through game reserves, where ecosystems are protected and illegal hunting is not allowed.

How many people visit zoos nowadays? Like how popular are they? So the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, they're based in the United States. They say there are more than 10,000 zoos and they're visited by 700 million people a year.

So if there are eight billion people in the world, that's around one out of every 11, one out of every 12 people on earth visiting a zoo every year.

Now, I should point out that these estimates are very hard to come by.

The fact is, people define zoos in different ways.

You have public zoos, you have urban zoos, you have petting zoos, you have circus like roadside attractions, you have aquariums. Some people don't count aquariums if they're not connected to a formal zoo.

It's very, very grey and difficult to define. But one source I found, the World Population Review.

They say that the United States has the most zoos, 350, followed by Germany interestingly, with around 316, I believe, Europe accounts for about half of all the zoos in the world.

You touched on education. What are some of the other big reasons that people think that zoos should exist? Yes indeed.

Education is the primary reason that zoos give for why they should exist.

The fact is, school children all over the world are often bussed to zoos.

I remember myself going to see lowland gorillas at Zoo Atlanta every single year, and the point of this was to introduce us to conservation. We heard the animal stories. We started to learn why animals are endangered,

to conservation. We heard the animal stories. We started to learn why animals are endangered, and zoos were inspiring young people to respect nature, to love nature.

A second point is that zoos often invest in research programs that help endangered animals.

Now, as we know, pandas are notoriously reluctant to mate. Um, the women have Sorry. The female pandas have a narrow window of fertility.

Sorry. The female pandas have a narrow window of fertility.

They're solitary creatures, and it takes two to tango when it comes to reproduction.

But a lot of money in zoos, it goes to sort of find ways to encourage these animals to mate.

A third reason that zoos give is that they actually contribute funds to breeding programs, which can help reintroduce animals to the wild.

A famous example would be the Arabian oryx.

This is a type of antelope that's native to Saudi Arabia, on the Arabian Peninsula and neighboring countries. It actually went extinct in the wild.

But in the 1970s, because of successful zoo breeding programs, it was reintroduced into the wild.

And the last point we often hear is conservation.

The fact is, many zoos skim some of their profits, or they raise money in other ways to contribute to wildlife conservation abroad, in countries that can't always afford to do it themselves.

What does conservation funding actually look like in practice?

Well, actually, I spoke to someone about that very topic. This is Tonya Lander.

She's a lecturer in biology at the University of Oxford.

I think they do play an important role in conservation, whether they're providing a venue that inspires the next generation of conservationists, or whether they're actually actively supporting researchers in the field, or whether they're maintaining captive populations of endangered species and helping them to hopefully one day be introduced. And there are actually really nice examples

of reintroduction projects that have happened. The most famous, of course, is the California condor, where the San Diego Zoo took the population of only 23 in the wild, and now there are more than 400 in the wild, over the course of the last 40 years of conservation efforts from that zoo.

And then another one is the golden lion tamarin, where they were critically endangered in the wild. Then,

through a joint project between the Smithsonian and Brazilian researchers, they've managed to significantly increase the wild population, but also have helped to push forward the protection of a big area of habitat.

So there is evidence that zoos have helped with conservation, with endangered species, education.

Lots of young schoolchildren go and visit them, and maybe that'll be their first interaction with these kind of animals, even if they're not in the wild.

So that can be a really educational, inspirational experience.

But now we're going to hear some of the arguments against zoos.

First of all, this is Nikita, who is 19 and she's an animal rights activist from India.

So I don't think zoos should exist for several reasons.

The first one being zoos' detrimental impact on both the physical and psychological health of animals. Many studies and research have shown that many animals in zoos and aquariums display abnormal behaviours like head bobbing, pacing, stereotypical behaviors, signs of mental distress.

The second reason, I would say, is that zoos cannot mimic the natural habitat of animals in the wild. The primary example is space. The fourth point.

The third point, I would say, is that zoos are not always conservational tools like believed reports by Born Free, and many other studies show that only ten to 25% of animals, at least in the UK, are in captivity or actually on the IUCN Red list. The rest of them, more than half of them, are actually on the least concerned section.

So the money is not going towards conservation, it's going more towards profit driven schemes. So, Hannah, as you heard from Nikita passions run really high and there are countless arguments against zoos, but I want to isolate the three most common. The first is entertainment. There are a lot of people who do not think animals should be used as forms of entertainment.

They are taken from the wild or indeed bred in captivity to serve humans.

Again, a continuation of this idea of animals as a as a curiosity for human enjoyment.

Sometimes you'll see roadside animal attractions where animals are made to do tricks and pose for photographs. That would not happen in the wild, and people therefore say it is wrong. Indeed, the training of tricks if an elephant is painting with its trunk, that's not natural behaviour.

And it was often taught that through cruel means, such as electrocution.

The second argument I want to cite is profit. As Nikita hinted at, there are questions over how funds that zoos receive are allocated. One large scale study here in the UK found that of the 13 most progressive zoos, they were only using four to 6.7% of their gross income, that's total money before taxes and deductions, on conservation projects.

The third reason, and perhaps the one that upsets people the most, certainly if you look on social media, is animal welfare, the treatment of animals who are often kept in cages that in no way reflect what life they would have in the wild.

For instance, a polar bear which is native to the Arctic.

Should that be kept in the temperate, warm climate of Arizona, where it has to rely on a swimming pool to cool off?

These are the types of questions that concern people.

What are the telltale signs that an animal may be in distress if they're kept in an enclosure?

So zoologists often talk about stereotypic behaviour or zoochosis.

And this is the physical manifestation of psychological stress.

These are behaviours that are habitual, repeated and they don't seem to serve any purpose.

For instance, a bear might do its head like this revolve.

An elephant might stand in place and sway side to side.

You have giraffes biting bars, knowing it's not going to give them any nutrition, any food, but they habitually bite it.

And then you have self-harming behaviour, ripping out your own feathers.

Animals will mutilate themselves. They'll bite their tails repeatedly, they will bite their limbs.

And again, polar bears in a pool, they'll just swim in a circle or an outline shape.

Some zoologists have compared this to sort of PTSD, where you have a traumatic event that leads to trauma later, but it goes further, they say, and it's where the water you swim in, the air you breathe, that becomes your trauma because it's the repeated trauma of just existing in these conditions.

So I want to find out a little bit now about about the future of zoos and whether zoos might exist as we know them in the future?

Sure. Um, it's a tricky one because the term zoo encapsulates so much and there's so much variance and quality between zoos, country to country.

But even within a country or in the United States, even within a particular state.

But I think one thing we can point to is that the most well funded zoos are often the leaders in terms of evolving, and there may be a business motive behind that, for instance, the Singapore Zoo is world famous.

It is held up as one of the best zoos in the world.

It has a sort of a tropical rainforest design, an open air concept, where you create habitats for the animals that are larger than at other zoos.

Um, for instance, they have a Great Rift Valley that mimics the conditions in Ethiopia.

And there you see ibexes, you see baboons, you see special multispecies areas.

There's a forest they have where they have lemurs living alongside butterflies, living alongside sloths as they would in nature.

Um, instead of cages, you have moats.

And these moats sort of reflect natural boundaries you might see in nature.

Or an animal says, whoa, I stop at the water. So it mimics, you know, nature itself.

And people are often put further back, they're on sort of elevated walkways that are out of view.

There's further distance. There's that evolution that's already happening.

Um, but there are many different ways you can think of the future.

And I actually spoke with one animal welfare advocate, this is Delcianna Winders from the Vermont Law and Graduate School.

The reality is that zoos do exist and that we have a massive overpopulation of captive wild animals.

And so the question is really what model should zoos be using and zoos should evolve to move towards a sanctuary setup.

So a situation where they can provide lifetime care in the best possible circumstances for captive wildlife who cannot be released into the wild.

So they will move away from breeding and capturing animals from the wild to instead provide care for those who are already here with us.

And that would include providing the best possible circumstances for so-called surplus animals who even reputable zoos still kill, or perhaps worse, send off to animal dealers with ties to canned hunt facilities.

And this would also be extremely beneficial to the many, many captive wild animals who are held at shoddy, unaccredited roadside facilities and could desperately use the care of a reputable facility.

And Hannah, I just want to pick up on that idea of sanctuaries.

We're seeing more and more of these on social media. It seems that people really respond to them.

I recently went to Thailand and visited an elephant park and here they had vast spaces to roam.

These elephants were rescued from circus attractions. They were rescued from farms. They were rescued from places where they were made to do manual labour.

Often they endured great abuse. Many of them are blind because they were beaten on the head.

Many of them were orphans. Many of them were left in the wild, or they have a disability, such as an ankle that won't recover, or a leg that's twisted.

So these animals, they can't be reintroduced into the wild. They would die, quite frankly.

And so sanctuaries, what they do is they give them the open space and to kind of supplant their operating income, they open the grounds up to tourists and visitors.

And when I was doing my research, which one do I want to go to?

There was a whole spate of websites talking about what is ethical, because you can go to an ethical sanctuary. And I ended up landing on one, which did a few things.

It did not allow photographs with animals up close where you're touching the animal.

It did not allow you to feed the animals.

It did not allow you to bathe with the animals, and animals did not perform tricks because again, they would not do these things in nature.

And so instead you stand on a viewing deck and hundreds of meters away, you see the elephants walking through the water, having their bath without you interrupting them.

This is considered more ethical because you're giving animals who effectively have nowhere they can live safely a home, and then you're letting people in but not interfering with the animal.

And if someone who is listening to this or watching this wants to visit an ethical zoo or an animal sanctuary, is there anything they can do to try and find out? Like to look it up beforehand?

We are so lucky that on the internet there are so many resources these days.

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums, they have a website that talks about ethical zoos, ethical sanctuaries.

Many of those are in the United States and Canada.

However, they are expanding their international section.

Also, I do think that media, traditional travel media, newspapers, magazines, they respond to their consumers and consumers are increasingly demanding ethical places to visit, ethical animal sanctuaries. And that's being reflected in the content.

If you just have a quick search online, you'll find articles that list the pros and cons of various sanctuaries. There is nothing quite like seeing some of the animals that you have seen in real life with your own eyes.

But we're so lucky these days with all the wildlife docs and social media.

So William, thanks so much for coming into the studio. Thanks, Hannah. And thank you for joining us.

Now, I really want to know what you think about zoos, whether you are pro, whether you are anti, whether you have found this episode useful.

Drop us a line in the comments below. We're also on Instagram @bbcwhatintheworld, and we're on WhatsApp so you can send us a voice note. Get involved. This is What in the World from the BBC World Service, I'm Hannah Gelbart and we'll see you next time.