Bald Eagle 5

Curious porcupine checks out river otters at Oregon Zoo

“anti zoo” people when they see a disabled animal living out their best, most healthy life in a large enclosure and everything it could ever need but it’s not “free and in the wild”

good day only to that one lady tiger in Wrocław zoo who massacred three different cameras in her enclosure!

i think if youre Pure of Heart, zoos should allow you to pet the animals without any fuss or signing a liability waiver

You fools

Zoos and aquariums are good! Obviously do your research on the individual facility you plan to visit but my god. Just saw a video of a lady saying she’s gonna take her service dog to the aquarium because he loves sharks and the comments were telling her not to support zoos or aquariums and I’m gonna lose my mind. (I know sharks are an interesting case when it comes to aquariums and are often unable to exist in those environments but that’s not what they were talking about. Just all zoos and aquariums are bad)

What do you want them to do with those animals? A lot of them were born in captivity and don’t have the capabilities to survive in the wild. Zoos and aquariums take in illegal pets who would otherwise be put down because they couldn’t be released, as well as taking in baby animals who have had their parents killed by poachers. Zoos and aquariums teach the public about their environment and remind them of what we have to be working to protect. Zoos and aquariums of today are not zoos and aquariums of 100 years ago! Stop acting like it and start looking shit up!

You’re mad at the wrong people! You’re thinking that it was bad they were born in that position in the first place and you’re right! It’s a problem we have been grandfathered into that can’t be fixed in the way you want without the senseless killing of thousands of animals.

Fuck sea world and any place like it that is exploiting animals for entertainment and providing them wildly inadequate space to live, but that is not every place! Go to zoos and aquariums goddamnit

So the previous tenant of the place I live have a subscription to Animal Welfare Institute Quarterly. It still comes to this place and it’s been that way for the whole time I’ve been here.

It’s funny cause I never would pay for this as they get into some pretty animal rights stuff. They are staunchly anti-cap and pretty anti-zoo in general, and they are pro-feral horses in the US. But it is interesting to get insight into their world.

That’s not to say I don’t not agree with them on some things, but there’s just some positions that they are going against science because they have an agenda to push…

Hi! I talked a bit about the differences between zoos and sanctuaries here. Unfortunately, this isn’t really a topic there’s a lot of formal research on this topic. But let’s use some quick stats. For the purpose of this post, I’ll focus on the United States.

There are roughly ~2,000 facilities in the US holding a USDA Class C (exhibitor) license. This is the license required to legally hold exotic warm-blooded animals for public display, including zoos, circuses, educational organizations, and sanctuaries. Note that this expressly does not include facilities that house only cold-blooded animals. These animals are largely unregulated.

If a sanctuary does not display the animals to the public under any circumstances, (including private tours), they may be exempt from this requirement. However, most sanctuaries do rely on private donors, which count as “the public” according to USDA guidelines. For example, the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee (which is a great place by the way!) explicitly does not allow tours. However, they still hold a USDA Class C license.

It is technically possible for a facility to exist that calls itself a “sanctuary” but is free of all regulatory oversight, even the USDA. However, this likely isn’t a common situation, since as I mentioned above, most sanctuaries do count as “exhibitors” and would require a USDA Class C license, subjecting them to inspection.

USDA guidelines, however, are the “bare minimum.” The “gold standard” of care is found in voluntary accreditation. In the US, that usually means the AZA. AZA inspections are incredibly rigorous. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Their guidelines are publicly available on their website. Of the thousands of USDA-licensed exhibitors in the United States, only 229 are AZA-accredited or certified (the remaining 25 accredited facilities are outside the US). Very few of these are sanctuaries.

To rehash what I said in my linked post, the sanctuary “counterpart” to the AZA is the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS). They accredit sanctuaries for both domestic and exotic animals. There are no exact statistics on their website, but it does state there are “over 200” worldwide (not just in the US). The website does provide a map of where their members are found, but there’s no list breaking down exactly how many are found in the US, or how many house captive wildlife rather than domestic species like cattle and pigs. I do not know how GFAS standards compare to AZA, as I’m not overly familiar with them.

Tl;dr it is technically easier for sanctuaries than zoos to operate without regulatory oversight, particularly if they do not display to the public. In the United States, there are fewer sanctuaries than zoos that are voluntarily accredited by organizations ensuring high standards of animal care.

I don’t believe that animals in zoos can ever truly be happy, no matter how good the conditions are.

Are you happy in your little prison? Do the little human treats that you are afforded make it agreeable to live under late stage capitalism? Surely you don’t resent the loss of freedom, you have so much space to walk around…

As a human you have the ability to make a conscious choice to recontextualize your pain so that you no longer suffer from it. And yet most people find it exceedingly difficult to live in confinement. What would make it easier for an animal, who runs mainly on instinct? Animals can’t choose out of their instincts as easily as humans can, so it would be more difficult for them. Even if they eventually become amenable to being in a cage.

“One way of avoiding the reality-bending properties of AI media is to get out of its way by spending our time with art and art forms created before AI’s popularization. We can read more novels and poetry. We can experience more live theatre and music, and see more art on walls or in books. Now, more than ever, the archives of creativity from the before times can drive us forward.”

Michael Maiello, @middlebrowmusings

I wish people would stop making posts on how fun human zoo’s would be.

There have been human zoos and they were not fun but deeply racist and dehumanising

ZOO ANIMALS - Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo 🌎

- at Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo.

I took care of this animal while training as a zookeeper.

Life advice: Follow the social media accounts of your local zoos. They’re generally full of delightful pictures and videos of the animals. As I write this, it’s Decembers, so there’s a lot of photos of the animals being given gifts; another seasonal event is giving them pumpkins to play with in October.

I can’t believe people go to the fucking zoo in 2025

Like you’d think the cognitive dissonance would at least not be there when you can SEE the animals right in front of you…but I guess that’d be having too high hopes for people’s intelligence.