Much gratitude to Theriomorph for sharing this.

What motivates the murderer, rouses the rapist, and thrills the thief?  The same curiosity that begs those questions with each news report you see likewise fuels your desire to visit a zoo.

Look at the caged animals, you think in both cases.  Just look at them, each restrained in their respective cells, each incarcerated for whatever crime they committed, each held behind cold bars and safety glass meant to distance you from the truth of it all.

But what crime have animals committed that lands them in such jails?

Oh, wait a minute!  You don’t tour your local criminal holding tank to snap photos, to point and laugh, and to be entertained, and you certainly don’t do it to gain an understanding of that which is so alien to you.

Yet you participate in that very crime each time you pay a zookeeper to grant you access to the nature defiled by entrapment and enslaved for your enjoyment.  They are nothing more than whimsical objects to be patronized in alien environments, abused for your pleasure, and mistreated so that you can sleep at night thinking you know something about wildlife for having visited your local jail.

You know nothing more about that wildlife than you do about the criminals you don’t visit.

I have abhorred and avoided zoos for more than two decades.  The closest I’ve come to them has been wildlife parks, and even then I’ve forgone the experience for several years in light of my own understanding, my own feelings about such things.

“And what might that be?” you ask.

To wit:

THE BEAR TAKES seven steps, her claws clicking on concrete. She dips her head, turns, and walks toward the front of the cage. Another dip, another turn, another three steps. When she gets back to where she started, she begins all over. This is what’s left of her life.

Sound familiar?

Then go read this series of excerpts from a book I must have: Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos.

It beautifully speaks to my very thoughts on this subject.  It rends the heart of anyone not heartless, and it stabs again and again at that trait of humanity which, as I’ve made clear, we humans seem to have forsaken: being humane.

I realize the article is long.  I realize you might have to forget about some menial task or selfish intent so that you might read it all.  But do just that: read it all.  Read it and comprehend it and feel the words as much as you understand them.

This is who we are, poppets, and what we ask our children to become.  This is the legacy of life we drain from the world around us for whatever reasons we can justify.

This is the horror of what we have become in our quest for “civilization.”

I beg of you to read it sincerely and fully.