We’ve yet to fully sort out our feelings about zoos. On the one hand, we obviously love us some exotic animals, especially those who occasionally turn on Man. (Yes, we’re macabre like that.) But the concept of captivity makes us more than a wee bit uncomfortable; we’ll never forget our last trip to the Bronx Zoo, when we glimpsed deep sadness in the eyes of a silverback gorilla—a gorilla whose young offspring, by contrast, had not yet become resigned to their fate.
But since there’s no scientific way to measure the happiness of zoo animals, those who wish to debate the topic must settle instead for looking at mortality figures. Anti-zooists, for example, have recently been pointing to this recent study on elephant survivorship:
We analyzed data from over 4500 elephants to show that animals in European zoos have about half the median life span of conspecifics in protected populations in range countries. This discrepancy is clearest in Asian elephants; unlike African elephants in zoos, this species’ infant mortality is very high (for example, twice that seen in Burmese timber camps), and its adult survivorship in zoos has not improved significantly in recent years…We suggest stress and/or obesity as likely causes of zoo elephants’ compromised survivorship.
But many zoo operators counter those claims, with Malaysia’s principal zoo estimating its animal mortality rate at a measly four percent. That’s a bit higher than the nation’s infant mortality rate, but still a fair bit better than what’s typical in America’s finest zoos—not to mention many wild habitats, where predation and disease take a sizeable toll.
Is it possible that the morality of zoos depends somewhat on the species in captivity? Could a zoo environment be deemed immoral for elephants, but moral for hippos based on their wildly differing survivorship rates? It’s a question worth asking, at least until we figure out a more reliable way to gauge what the animals think of living in manmade environments.