Learning to look beyond zoos

© Mike Dooley

When you think of zoos, do you remember trips as a child seeing the animals? Do you remember skipping along the zoo’s paths as you took part in a ‘fun’ daytrip with your school or family? Zoos often market themselves as the perfect educational venue, allowing us to learn about wildlife and conservation. But, are they really the best way to learn about wild animals?  

Born Free Youth Ambassador, Hector Bateman

This topic was just one of the many discussed at Born Free’s Beyond Zoos panel discussion event, which I was lucky enough to attend, late last year. Chaired by Born Free Co-Founder, Will Travers OBE, we heard from speakers with immense knowledge and experience in the fields of animal conservation and welfare.

It was moving and inspiring. Broadcaster Chris Packham speaking with sorrow and regret about having visited zoos when he was little, wildlife park-owner Damian Aspinall about his drive to rewild animals from zoos, scientist Dr Winnie Kiiru showing the incredible and influential work in the Mpala Research Centre, Kenya, and conservationist Greta Iori presenting with passion and sensitivity about human and wildlife coexistence.

We were shown uplifting videos and photos showing beautiful and majestic wild animals living as they should be. But we also witnessed poor animals, caged and trapped in zoos in the UK and all over the world. Almost a year on, and the stark contrast between the wild and captivity remains in my mind…

Being a student, education around animals and the ways in which we are taught about them, is important to me. Zoos often state they have an important role to play in education and allow an opportunity for children to learn about wild animals. However, there is little evidence that this is the case.

Research from 2014 showed that some of the children who visited London Zoo, in this case study, showed no positive learning outcomes from their visit (see reference below). Some even had negative learning experiences, such as thinking the animals lived in an environment as presented by the zoo exhibit. Yet zoos use education to justify their very existence.

This is what I feel is especially worrisome. Elephants for example – still confined in 10 zoos across the UK – are sociable and sentient beings, who in the wild live in complex social groups, feeling happiness, pain and stress, much as we do as humans.

Being confined to small enclosures prevents their natural behaviours, leading to physical and emotional damage which can be seen through repetitive and unnatural ‘stereotypic’ behaviours. I don’t feel that seeing an elephant, pacing and swaying in distress in a cold, oppressive enclosure teaches anything of value.

Seeing a film of a matriarch-led herd majestically marching across an African plain, taking in all fauna and flora around them, is far more important to understand the animal in its own natural context. So much can be learnt virtually now; a headset or a screen can take us all over the world, where we can watch creatures living their natural lives.

Whether grazing, hunting, roaming or just being, that is what wild animals need to be doing. Not being contained by humans with no right to do so, for our own enjoyment.

The difference between the environments of animals in zoos, and animals in the wild, is significant and shocking. So, if you do go to the zoo, think about how educational your visit really is. It’s also important to remember, what may be a few hours of fun for you, is a lifetime of pain, suffering and unhappiness for the animals held there.

There has to be a future beyond zoos, for the sake of animals and Earth, there has to be. 

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Reference
Evaluating Children’s Conservation Biology Learning at the Zoo Jensen, 2014