The Price of Entertainment at the Cost of Animal’s lives
Ok. Do you think your entertainment is more important than someone else’s life? Nowadays, visiting zoos is considered a completely normal thing to do, especially during holidays and in company of family and friends. Some people get upset when they realize that maybe animals are not happy in cages, but because it seems that zoos have always been around, they don’t see any problem in visiting them, also because their entertainment comes always in first place. Why there isn’t much discussion about the morality of visiting zoos, besides some comments when tragic things happen? Apart from all the zoos with terrible historic of mistreatment, such as one in Indonesia called Surabaya Zoo where a lion was being fed with meat laced with formaldehyde, there are many reasons to stop supporting and going to zoos, which include the danger involved and the fact that it is not fair to the animals. Let’s rethink what we are doing just for our own pleasure, and rethink if it is correct to keep with this doubtful form of entertainment.
Every year, we can often see on the news cases of extreme danger in zoos all around the world. As an example, recently a four years old boy fell into a gorilla’s enclosure in Cincinnati; the boy was saved, but the gorilla got killed. Besides inevitable accidents, zoos are dangerous because animals do not want to be there, and because people do not know how to behave next to wild life. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many cases where animals tried to run away, threatening people and other animal’s lives, and also their own. We wouldn’t see so many cases where people tried to provoke animals, acting with no respect and responsibility even with spread warnings in every zoo. People wouldn’t lose part of their bodies because they were trying to touch ferocious animals just for fun, and they wouldn’t have to face death after falling in animal’s cages because they did not respect the limits where they could stay. Animals clearly don’t want to be caged, and humans shouldn’t be watching such a thing; that’s why zoos are so dangerous. (While we’re at it, here’s a link to 13 other violent zoo incidents…)
Now, try to imagine yourself and some other people living in cages just so another species could come for visiting and having some fun. Would you like to spend your whole life in such a way? I would not guess so. In other words, when you stop to think about animals in zoos and put yourself in their shoes, you will probably realize that you wouldn’t want to be them. It might sound overly sensitive and even stupid to say that zoos are not fair, especially with all the things that are unfair in the world. Most people seem not to care about all the animals that were born, live and die in zoos, but the reality is dreadful when you think about the same treatment to you and your own species.
Some people might say that zoos educate people, making them more sensitive about animals and motivating them on the protection of wildlife, but if this argument were true, the world wouldn’t be the way that it is today. People seem even less aware of how our actions are affecting animal’s lives, and all they are learning with zoos is that is completely normal to use animals as a means of entertainment. The planet is not increasing in any aspect because of zoos, but while we use them just to have some fun for a few days, sometimes only one during our whole lives, animals are being controlled and do not have the right to live their lives as they were supposed to. People are only becoming more assured that they are superior to all the other species, and this idea of superiority is one of the main causes of all the problems that we are creating and facing on the planet earth today.
The zoos just show that humans think they can control everything and that everything exists because of them. Personally, I believe that we are not better than any other species just because we are rational. On the contrary, when you look at the world it is impossible not asking yourself if this rationality is really a good thing, because if it really were, the world would probably be different and better for us and all the other living creatures. It is time to start thinking about a way of allowing animals to have the opportunity to grow up in their natural habitat, so in the future, we won’t have zoos and this terrible period of our history can be left behind with so many others. It is time to stop thinking about animals as lower than people, and start giving them the possibility of being exactly who they are because animals deserve their lives and freedom as much as we deserve ours.