Many zoos provide homes, food, and veterinary care for animals that would not be able to survive in the wild. For example, the mountain lion at Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is blind, and many of their other animals had been kept illegally by their previous owners, were confiscated by Arizona Game & Fish, and needed a place to live so they wouldn’t die.
It's objectively the greatest evil humans have ever committed, and for our own pleasure at that. We inflict pure hellish suffering because "tAsTe bUdS gO BRRR!"
It's hard to even comprehend something more comically, absurdly evil, both in terms of motive and sheer scale of suffering.
At least zoos do trigger an empathy response and get people to care about animals more.
Purely for taste.
> We need to eat meat.
False. 10-20% of the world population does not and we're just fine.
> So we need to kill animals for that.
No, we want to kill animals because we want tasty food. Not because we "need" meat. No one living in an industrialized country does. It's trivial to create a plant-based balanced diet (and a tasty one at that.)
> Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.
Neither are factory farms. They exist to satisfy "taste buds go brr." But that is not worth literally torturing[1] an animal to death.
All the primates and megafauna especially, it is a tragedy.
I'm certain they'll be looked back on with shame.
Even as zoos market videos of animals "eating birthday cake" on social media.
See also zoos' dark history entwined with ethnological expositions https://archive.is/xsuEU