Inhumanity Of Zoos Essay

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Would you want to be taken from your home and be locked away for the amusement of others? No one does, but this happens to wild animals everywhere. They’re taken from their homes and placed into zoos to be studied and researched. Animals shouldn’t be studied in zoos, instead they should be studied in their natural habitats because it is where they belong and they shouldn’t have been taken. So, are zoos really saving endangered species? Or are the animals simply there for our amusement? In this essay, I altercate the inhumanity of zoos.
Zoos have existed since 1250 B.C., when ancient Egyptian writings described birds, lions, and giraffes inside of compound like structures (Fravel). Modern day zoos are mainly used to entertain, and there are species going extinct and habitats being destroyed because of the animals we take from the wild and put in zoos. There are over 10,000 zoos worldwide today, and around 2,500 in the United States alone. Zoos claim that they do good and are for research, but critics still question them. All of the 2,500 zoos in the US today only 212 are under the strict rules of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (Fravel). There are many zoos today. …show more content…

No, they don’t even live to their full age expectancy. They die prematurely. “African elephants in the wild live more than three times as long as those kept in zoos. Asian elephants working in timber camps live longer than those born in zoos. (Lin) 40% of lion cubs die before one month of age. In the wild, only 30% of cubs are thought to die before they are six months old and at least a third of those deaths are due to factors which are absent in zoos, like predation.”

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