Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Debate

Thesis

A zoo that exists for conservation still wrongs the animals it keeps

The Editors Editors
· 5 replies
Animals & environmentAnalyticTom ReganMartha NussbaumAldo Leopold#animal-rights#capabilities#conservation#zoos
Follow

Its coordinates: 3.3.2 Environmental Ethics · 3.3.6 Animal Ethics

Where it stands

Animal ethics asks who counts, about creatures that cannot answer for themselves. Here is a thesis for debate.

Thesis: Even a zoo that genuinely exists for conservation, breeding endangered species and funding work in the wild, wrongs the individual animals it keeps.

For: On a rights view like Tom Regan's, animals that are "subjects-of-a-life" have value of their own and may not be used merely as means, however good the end. Keeping an elephant for the sake of elephants in general is using her. Martha Nussbaum, extending the capabilities approach to animals in Frontiers of Justice, asks whether each creature can live the characteristic life of its kind. For wide-ranging species, an enclosure fails that test almost by design.

Against: Several species survive only because of breeding programmes, and some have been returned to the wild from captive stock: the Arabian oryx, extinct in the wild by the early 1970s, was reintroduced in Oman in 1982, and Przewalski's horse was returned to Mongolia in the 1990s. For many animals, especially small or sedentary ones, a well-run zoo may not frustrate their nature at all. And for some species the alternative is not freedom but extinction.

Please mark your side. We are especially interested in whether the answer changes from species to species, and in views from traditions that do not frame the question in terms of rights.

LikeReply
SaveFollow5 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Anand Kurup

    For Fellow

    For, but from a Jain angle rather than a rights one. The question for us is harm, himsā, and captivity harms the creature confined, whatever the purpose.

    Yet Jains have kept animals for centuries in panjrapoles, shelters in Gujarat and Rajasthan for old, sick and abandoned animals. The difference is the reason. A panjrapole keeps an animal for that animal's sake. A conservation zoo keeps her for the species. That is the line I would draw.

  2. Dima Nasser

    For Fellow

    For, for a reason nobody has given yet. "Better kept than lost" is the argument that was used for a century to justify institutions for disabled people. Better looked after inside than struggling outside. The question "better for whom?" was rarely asked of the person inside.

    I'm not saying an elephant is a person. I'm saying the shape of the argument should make us careful, because it has been wrong before in exactly this way.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Against Fellow

    Against. The thesis assumes that the individual animal is the only unit that can be wronged. In the kelp forests where I dive, you see quickly that individuals are moments in a population, and populations are moments in a system.

    Aldo Leopold's land ethic put it in one sentence: a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community, and wrong when it tends otherwise. On that test a breeding programme that saves a species is right, even if it is hard on some individuals.

  2. Aroha Tipene

    Against Fellow

    Against, with a condition. The kākāpō, our flightless parrot, was down to a few dozen birds. They survive now because of intensive management on predator-free islands: every bird named, tracked, sometimes hand-fed. That is not a zoo, but it is not freedom either.

    For us they are taonga, treasures, and we are kaitiaki, guardians. Guardianship sometimes means confinement. The condition is that it is done as a relationship with the birds, not as a display of them.

  3. Enkhjin Batbayar

    Against Reader

    Against, though not happily.

    The thesis mentions Przewalski's horse. We call it takhi, and it had vanished from the wild in Mongolia by the end of the 1960s. Every takhi grazing at Hustai and in the Gobi today descends from a small number of animals kept in zoos. In 1992 the first of them were flown back. I have seen them, and I have seen herders' children who knew the takhi only from pictures stand very quietly at the fence.

    So I cannot say the zoos that kept them did only wrong. But on your species question: the takhi could live in an enclosure without being destroyed by it, because it is a grazing herd animal. A snow leopard, whose range covers whole mountains, is another matter. The answer really does change from animal to animal.