Zoos:

It is a brave person who speaks out against the evils of animal cruelty and exploitation, and I am not referring to things like puppy mills or industrial meat production where animals spend their entire lives with barely enough room to walk. I am talking about those courageous souls who have spent countless hours being educated on google and twitter by groups like PETA on how to fight against the real oppressors: Zoos. This is not just private zoos with limited regulation and oversight but the disgusting, capitalist machines that are public zoos that exploit nonhumans for entertainment. The utter speciesism of it is sickening.

Some zoos are clearly and obviously evil. It is easy to find videos of zoos in China and India where the animals are emaciated and close to starving. They are often in travelling circus style enclosures and are subject to mental agony from both direct cruelty and pain of waiting mindlessly for visitors to pass them by. These are not even our greatest enemy. No, our greatest enemy is those zoos who parade around in a veneer of conservation and loving animals.

The BBC recently posted a video of a young hippo named Fiona from the Cincinnati zoo. It seemed harmless enough, even cute. It was a video of her holding her mouth open to the rain, how sweet. Until one turns to the comments and learns the wicked truth from the enlightened internet scholars. One poster wrote that most people may not know it, but hippos only do that when they want to die. Fiona was trying to drown herself! It gets even worse when you learn that she has been suicidal since birth, opening her mouth to the hose her trainers cruelly played with her with and biting at the water. She was clearly trying to fight off this evil attack. Other commenters revealed similarly chilling facts. She was only opening her mouth to the rain because she was bored in her enclosure. She was clearly delusional and half mad from her captivity and only had the rain to look forward to. She should be free.

In fact, if this poor hippo’s mother had been free, she probably would not have given birth three months too early. Obviously the stress of her captivity was too much for her. She may even have been trying to give birth early to kill her offspring and save it from the horrors of life in a filtered tank where zookeepers routinely come up with new ways to mess with your mind. This foul enrichment is a mainstay of all of these so called respectable zoos. Even if this premature birth were natural, a wild hippo would certainly have access to its native medicines and natural traditions that could have saved the poor dear. The river would have stayed shallow enough to support her weakness and the crocodiles and other predators would have gone for more respectable prey.

But, all is not lost for our crusade against these evil zoos. The covid19 pandemic has taught people the difficulties of life locked up. All animals have the same social and entertainment needs, so now that humans know what it’s like to not be able to go to concerts or movie theaters, they will see why all animals should be released from zoos. The problem will not be fixed until the leopards can go hang out with their friends, the sloths can go to organized sports events, and the manatees can get appointments at salons. How many zoos put shrews and beta fish in environments all by themselves? It’s despicable.

They claim to have experts and biologists working to supply animals with entertainment, medicine, proper enclosures, and adequate nutrition, but this is just a part of their deception. No amount of toys and challenges could ever amount to the mental stimuli of being hunted by a predator or chasing after dangerous prey.

Clearly, this “help” is just sadistic people torturing poor defenseless animals who must spend the rest of their time bored by their perpetual quarantine. They are stressed and lonely, unable to play the games and go on the outings they would in their natural habitats. If these activities were truly enriching, then they would involve social interaction with others of their species. Think, these creatures are not even given access to social media, a must in modern life. How are they to keep up with their friends or favorite celebrities? Even if they are granted freedom, they will be so out of touch with what is new and modern, that they may not be able to assimilate into wild society. The embarrassment may even convince them that they are better off imprisoned by humans instead of living in the desolate wilderness where they belong.

Would you rather live in a facility where you are waited on hand and foot like some kind of prisoner or would you want to live free in a place so unpredictable and crazy that you don’t even know where your next meal will come from? That is the type of spontaneity and in the moment living that we all strive for. Why do we take it away from our nonhuman brothers and sisters? It is a sorry thing to admit, but it must be because we are jealous of them. We see the beauty of their skins and feathers and feel the need to rend them from animals’ flesh to make ourselves more attractive. We are jealous of the delicacies created by the poor bee women and appropriate their food for our own commodity based system of waste instead of letting them practice their traditions in peace. We are jealous of the utter simplicity and primitivism of animal life and so seek to capture it and put it in a bottle. That is the true reason for the existence of zoos.

There is no need for this mass incarceration of animals, and there has never been. Any calls of conservation are clearly a ploy. When was the last time zoos actually helped preserve a species? If you leave out the California condor, golden lion tamarin, Arabian oryx, taki, Galapagos giant tortoise, Mauritius kestrel, Sumatran rhino, Malayan tiger, corroboree frog, bongo, regent honeyeater, Panamanian golden frog, bellinger river snapping turtle, Amur leopard, giant panda, Mexican wolf, black footed ferret, red wolf, freshwater mussel, Karner blue butterfly, American burying beetle, Bactrian camel, mud puppy, Hawaiian monk seal, and Pere David’s deer, I bet you can’t name any.

And those cases are just the equivalent of a celebrity haunted by a scandal doing charity work or a politician making campaign promises. It is just to distract the weak minded populace from the nefarious actions that dominate zoo activity. They don’t really mean anything. In fact, those animals could probably have saved themselves if we humans hadn’t rounded them up into concentration camps. They are smart, intelligent creatures who could easily have come up with their own solutions. Those monkeys could have planted whole groves of trees in the right places for habitat restoration and protected them from any loggers. The seals could have petitioned the governments to reclaim their native land and clean up all of the pollution from the ocean. The oryx would certainly have developed kevlar or concrete shelters to defend themselves from gun fire and poaching.

This imprisonment also has suspicious ties to the animal trafficking industry. It is beyond my suspension of disbelief when zoos honestly think we believe them when they say the government gives them trafficked animals that are caught in transit. Please, this is just to cover up drop offs gone wrong. Yet some people are still convinced of the good of zoos from hanging around the echo chambers of humanity where they are convinced animals exist only for their benefit. Saying that zoos support the protection of endangered animals while ignoring all of the animals that die in zoos is gaslighting and makes those people complicit in this system of abuse.

All those endangered animals in one place could only mean one thing. Zoos are trading them around What happens to the bodies of these rare animals when they die, hmm? I have never heard of zoos cremating or burying their animals after they succumb to their imprisonment, so what do they do with all those claws, scales, and bones? What happens to all that meat? There are threads throughout reddit and Twitter implicating that freedom is not all these zoos take from their captives. Countless amateur biologists and animal documentary watchers can confirm this and have voiced suspicion of a puppy mill style production line where endangered animals are forced to breed for nefarious purposes.

The so-called scientists and zoo keepers, read torturers and prison guards, working with these animals clearly have other incentives for wanting these animals to reproduce within the confines of their closely monitored cells. Think about it, these people wait day in and day out for footage of animal intimacy, and they film it. This is beyond exploitative. This is animal sex trafficking. These people, and I use that term loosely, are, in a horrific act of fetishism for the exotic, are forcing defenseless creatures into the porn industry. They parade their deviant lusts as repopulating the species, but these gross violations of rights are one thing: bestiality. They may claim that they are doing it for research and medical purposes, but animals do not need obstetricians. Giving birth is a natural part of their life cycles and not dangerous at all, for mother or children. It is saddening and sobering to realize how much access to these animals these depraved individuals have. I suspect it is even worse than we have evidence of and they may even be forcing their prisoners into acts of prostitution when the cameras are off. That is the reality of every animal in a zoo today. They are objectified, turned into sexual commodities, and subject to regular acts of extreme violence.

Needless to say, these atrocities must stop, but even if they weren’t the norm, zoos would still be a horrible, unjustifiable evil because they go against nature. They put them in places that are completely unnatural when what is natural is better, and while animals may have the same social and emotional needs as humans and can be our friends, they cannot be happy in enclosures maintained and furnished by humans because that is not what happens in nature. In nature, animals do not spend hours on end in one place. They do not go for easy meals. Animals in nature do not get depressed or sick or crippled. They are happy and healthy and free. Who has seen a wild zebra with a broken leg or a wild dolphin that has given up on life? Their natural abilities and native healthcare prevent those things from happening; otherwise they would get eaten or die from some sort of natural disaster. In nature, animals spend their days much as we do, playing and receiving constant stimulation without a moment’s boredom.

This is another part of why the so-called good zoos are so horrible. Bad zoos give their animals nothing to keep their minds stimulated or to exercise, but duplicitous zoos pretend that a few interesting moments to spice up an otherwise boring day are enough for mental health. They pretend that having room to run around in can compare to going on trips hundreds of miles long in providing sufficient exercise. That has never been enough for humans, so it can’t be enough for animals. All people, human, dog, cat, reptile, bird, amphibian or invertebrate, have the same needs and expectations from life.

Please, join us today in our campaign to stop the horrors of animal imprisonment at the hands of public zoos. Until they fall, the poachers, habitat destruction, wet markets, pollution, and unregulated wildlife entertainment can wait. As long as the myth exists that animals can exist anywhere but in their original environments and still live happy and meaningful lives, those fights are meaningless. They just fuel the justification for the mistreatment of animals and systemic speciesism that plague the world today. We must free animals like Fiona before they succumb to the misery of their existence. Listen to us; don’t be fooled by the arguments of sellouts no matter their alleged expertise. Help us to end zoos once and for all.