Zoos confound me.

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I love animals. I am one of those people who love nature specials, cat videos on YouTube, calenders with puppies in hats on them… and zoos. As a kid, I grew up in a house full of cats, and loved them all. I delighted in befriending the various dogs along my paper route, each of whom had their own vibrant and unique personality, and some of whom had never been friends with any stranger that regularly violated their territory before. I collected little cards with pictures of various animals and facts about that animal on them. I loved National Geographic in exact proportion to them amount of animals in each issue.

So you would think that, given all that, I would love zoos. The opportunity to see all those animals I have learned about from books? The chance to see lions and zebras and fennecs and wolves and elk and things with my very own eyes and watch them do their thing, living and breathing and moving and such right in front of me, just a few yards away? What could be better?

But I’m also the sensitive and thoughtful type, and I can’t help but think about the animals and how happy they are, living all cooped in in pens and cages and not able to roam free and live the lives their instincts lea them to crave? Is it really fair for us to capture and cage living beings which are capable of happiness, pain, emotions, and longing for freedom just because our human social instincts are so broad that we like to look at them and watch them?

Perhaps that’s just projecting out human desire for autonomy and freedom on to them. After all, the argument goes, they might be perfectly happy in captivity. Just because we human beings would be miserable living such a restricted life, and long for freedom all day, does not mean that a creature such as a leopard of an elephant couldn’t be quite content living the life of a zoo animal.

But I don’t buy it. I think freedom is an instinct, and if you need proof, just ask yourself what, exactly, it is that drives an animal to immediately try to escape if someone is foolish enough to leave the cage door open? After all, if the creature is perfectly happy, why need a cage at all? Happy creatures would stay where they are. They would know a good thing when they happened upon it and cages would be completely superfluous. Certainly, leaving the cage door open would not be a big deal.

But we all know that any animal brighter and faster than a snail will try to get out of its cage the moment it realizes that it CAN get out of the cage. Why? Because they want freedom. They want a bigger world, they want to explore, they crave novelty and stimulation and adventure. Just like us, they grow bored with a limited life with only the same stimulations day after day.

They are not really happy in there. They might be zoo-born and therefore have no idea that their lives could be any different than they are. But that just means they don’t know why they’re not happy. (How many of us are in the same situation?).

But I can’t con myself into thinking that locking up these marvelous creatures in cages and pens does not come at a cost for the creatures involved. I can’t convince myself it is perfectly okay. I know better.

So, that makes it simple, right? Zoos are bad. They lock up cute animals and make them sad! Animals should always be free and anything else is just plain mean. I might want to see the animals, but that doesn’t excuse abusing the animals just for my pleasure. Zoos are just plain bad!

But the thing is, it’s not nearly that simple. I have seen those nature documentaries. I know what it’s like to be an animal living free in the wild.

And the truth is, nature is a cruel and nasty bitch.

The life of creatures in the wild is brutal, stressful, dangerous, unkind, unjust, and just plain bad. Even predators have a life of constant toil and strife, danger and stress, terror and tiredness. And all creature know what it is like to be the hunted, to be vulnerable and helpless against great forces that wish to destroy and devour you, because even the mightiest hunters are prey when they are young.

So are the okapi in my local zoo really that bad off? They might long for more freedom, and wonder what is on the other side of the fence, but they have one another’s company, a completely reliable food and water supply, medical care when they need it, and no danger of being eaten by a predator or dying from the hardships of migration.

so it’s not as simple as all that. Modern democratic free society’s default position is always that freedom is the most important thing of all, but that is only true from the point of view of someone who already has material security in a safe, modern, orderly society. Once you have all that, it is freedom you want the most. But without that, freedom doesn’t mean a god damned thing. You don’t give a crap about freedom until you have security. You need freedom from the worries of survival before freedom of choice matters.

“Freedom from” trumps “freedom to”, every single time.

So even though the critters in the zoo might long for freedom and get very bored, the argument can certainly be made that they are, in many ways, far better off than their compatriots in the wild, and it is better to be bored and stifled than dead and digested.

So what’s more important, freedom and danger, or captivity and security? Are the animals in the zoo better off than the ones in the wild, or is that just foisting human values on nonhuman animals?

Zoos confound me.