This is good news. I believe that circuses and zoos will be viewed, in retrospect, quite harshly in the future, and we'll wonder why the unnatural confinement of animals was so normalized. I have fond memories of these places as a child, but I went to the San Diego Zoo last year and the animals just looked miserable in the summer heat - especially the polar bears.
There are species that only live in zoos. In other words, if it wasn't for zoos, these animals would be extinct (in part due to human over-hunting). Some species that were once on the edge of extinction have been re-released into the wild due to the efforts of the zoos, and they should be commended for this kind of effort.
If feelings and social signalling get "us" to a place, you can't expect logic and reason to get "us" out. Zoos are utterly doomed, it doesn't matter if they're logically or rationally good or not.
Modern zoos are orders of magnitude nicer to animals than historic zoos were and far nicer than circuses could ever be. The Asheville zoo, which I visited regularly while growing up, gives the elephants 37 acres.
According to this preservation group's website[0], the territorial range of wild African elephants can extend as far as 2,700,000 acres. Zoos are moving away from the concrete boxes but I don't know that it could ever be enough to truly offer these and all the other animals in our zoos a decent life.
As I wrote in a separate post in this thread, I find zoos to be inhumane for this reason and I believe the millions spent on zoos could preserve and encourage the populations of wild animals in-situ by also providing economic development to the nearby human populations so they don't resort to habitat destruction or poaching.
I read your comment and I can understand your viewpoint.
My opinion is that it's most realistic to make the admittedly arbitrary call that domesticated animals are a historical fact at this point and there's no way to put them 'back into nature.' I think these domesticated animals and pets should be offered the most humane lives possible within the cultural relationship with humans. I try to eat mostly vegetarian but I don't believe absolutism is healthy or a realistic way to live life.
I don't approve of exotic animal pets, mostly because I feel that the animals likely won't fair well under care that is probably insufficient to their needs, and also that they like zoo inhabitants would be better off in their natural (non-anthropogenic) habitats experiencing life as their species should.
