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The most common accusation levelled against zoos is one of cruelty. Is it cruel to keep animals in a zoo?

In the United Kingdom, The RSPCA, guardian of Britain’s conscience in these matters, is ambivalent in its attitude towards zoos. Officially it is neither pro-zoo, nor anti-zoo. Instead it claims to support good zoos and to oppose bad ones. Most zoo visitors are similarly even-minded about the issue. And yet the question is valid nonetheless. Is it possible that we have somehow become inured to the concept of animal captivity, in the same way perhaps as two centuries ago we might have accepted the concept of slavery, or as the Romans accepted the principle of human sacrifice as entertainment? Will future generations look back upon our own as barbaric because of our treatment of zoo animals?

Like so many of the issues that surround zoos, a lot depends upon your assessment of the extremes. Who, for example, would take offence at the sight of a well-fed native pony grazing in an acre field? Few people would see cruelty there. Yet who would not feel sorry for a tiger in a circus trailer, endlessly pacing before the bars. By understanding that there is a spectrum of possible conditions of captivity from national parks to battery pigs, and by appreciating that we all have a threshold beyond which we will point the finger and say ‘that is cruel’ – we can begin to delimit the types of zoos that we can accept. Of course there will be those will condemn even the captive moorland pony, and for them no zoo will ever meet with their satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with this attitude. It is a perfectly rational point of view, and those that hold it are genuine animal lovers with a real concern for animal welfare.

But most zoo keepers are genuine animal lovers too. They believe that animals in their charge are contented and as ‘happy’ as their wild relations. Certainly zoo animals do tend to live longer lives, to feed better, and to suffer from fewer parasites or diseases. They live without the fear of predation; they live without famine. And the freedom, that they also live without, is seen by people like Gerald Durrell as a purely human construct, largely irrelevant to the day to day lives of animals.

So how should we determine whether a zoo enclosure is cruel or not? Zoologists can try to assess how similar the behaviour of a captive animal is to a wild animal of the same species – but it does not necessarily follow that, for example, a wolf that sleeps all day in a zoo cage is less happy than a hungry wild wolf whose time is spent searching for food. Similarly it may be unreasonable to assume that animals are happiest in an environment that mimics their own wild habitat. John Knowles of Marwell Zoo theorises that animals like the scimitar-horned oryx, which normally pick out a meagre existence in the semi-desert scrubland of the Sahara, do so not because they choose or enjoy this harsh environment, but because they have been forced to the fringes by species better equipped to out-compete them elsewhere. According to this theory the scimitar-homed oryx should be in heaven among the lush meadows of Hampshire – as indeed they seem to be. The lions at zoos like Chester in the North of England are offered the option every winter day of centrally heated accommodation, or the chill winds of Cheshire. They virtually always choose to brave the elements, even preferring ice and snow to the warmth indoors a reminder perhaps that altlf6ugh we think of lions as tropical animals, they once roamed throughout Europe, and their current range is directly due to human intervention.

For the visitor, trying to assess cruelty is made all the more difficult because we do not always know, and cannot always see, what becomes of the animals at night when all the people have gone home. Very often this is when the real process of confinement takes place. Many zoo enclosures are designed primarily for daytime occupation, with the primary design requirement of the sleeping quarters being to separate animals and keep them from physical harfn until the keepers return in the morning.