Zoos are places where wild and exotic animals are kept for public display.

They provide entertainment and can be great economically for their surrounding communities, but if zoos are places in which animals stay, shouldn’t they be beneficial to them and not just the people?

Sadly, they are not.

Zoos are terrible places for the animals within them.

The money spent on ticket purchases goes toward animals being imprisoned, not being saved and rehabilitated.

This leaves the economic benefits for their surrounding communities unimportant.

Animals should not have to spend their lives in captivity to fulfill our desires of wanting to see them.

Placing animals in zoos is putting them in an enclosure that doesn’t allow them to live their lives in a natural way.

Zoos take away animals’ natural hunting and mating behaviors, and they leave almost no opportunity for mental stimulation, often resulting in abnormal and self-destructive behavior.

The physical and mental health of animals is deteriorated when living in zoos, as well as their happiness.

Zoo animals need to be free and live their lives in the places they were meant to live, not a miserable life in captivity.

In a zoo, you may see animals engaging in odd, repetitive behaviors, with pacing being the most common.

These behaviors are caused by mental conditions like depression, anxiety, boredom, and psychosis.

This is terrible enough, but in some zoos, animals with these conditions are given anti-depressants or tranquilizers to control their behavior problems.

The only reason these behavior problems occurred in the first place was due to the animals being put into zoos.

If the reason to not close zoos is to see animals up close, we need to find easier ways to observe them in their natural habitats so we are able to see them living at their full potential.

Zoos are basically a prison — a prison where all the prisoners are innocent.