Shaka the African savannah elephant is standing in the middle of an expansive field, staring intently at us. His ears are forward, his face is alert and he doesn’t appear stressed or, can we say, unhappy. He’s a 33-year-old bull in the prime of his life at Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm just outside Bristol, and he will be forever captive because of society’s prevailing view that zoos are both good and necessary.
“Daddy’s taking us to the zoo tomorrow, zoo tomorrow, zoo tomorrow,” goes the song – a celebration of an exciting and wholesome day out. As Noah’s Ark CEO Larry Bush says, visitors can encounter “the power of an African elephant” or watch an “Andean bear climbing a tree trunk”, experiences that are arguably more intense and longer-lasting than watching the same species in a documentary.
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“These animals are ambassadors for their wild cousins,” says Bush. “It is educational and inspiring. Very few people can afford to go on safari in Africa, and it’s not very good for the planet.”
It is a fair point – why fly thousands of miles to see and smell exotic wildlife when you can pop down to your local zoo? Nevertheless, many people do question whether zoos have a role to play in 21st-century Britain. Why should animals – in particular, emotionally and socially complex ones such as Shaka – be sacrificed for their wild cousins in a way that we would never sanction for our own species?
What are the arguments for zoos?
There are three main arguments for the continued existence of zoos: they raise awareness about the threats facing wildlife; they use money raised to fund conservation initiatives in the wild; and their animals can be used for reintroduction programmes or act as ark populations in case of severe declines or, indeed, extinctions. Zoos also increasingly argue that they perform another vital function as community assets that are good for mental health.
Starting with the education angle, research by Eric Jensen from the University of Warwick has shown that about half of schoolchildren gained knowledge of and concern for endangered species after visiting a zoo, while families retained some of what they had learned even two years later. “Good zoos have the potential to deliver effective conservation-related outcomes,” says Jensen.
A more recent meta-analysis of 56 studies published last year found a “small to medium positive effect” of engaging with zoo-led initiatives, with visitors more knowledgeable about conservation and more likely to act for the benefit of biodiversity.
But Will Travers, executive president of the animal welfare and conservation group Born Free, is not convinced. At London Zoo, which I visited with Travers and Born Free’s captivity research and policy manager Chris Lewis, Travers points out how many of the visitors are parents with pre-school children.
“This is as much about entertainment as it is about anything more profound,” he argues. “The idea that bringing children to see some animals in captivity is intrinsically valuable for its educational benefits is too simplistic in my view.”
Outside the enclosure for Gir lions, where a lioness and her cubs doze in the weak November sunshine, Lewis questions just how much any of the people filtering through are learning about this extremely rare Asian subspecies. “They’ve gone, ‘Ooh, a lion,’ taken a picture and walked out,” he says. “They haven’t learned anything.”
What is the future for zoos in the UK?
But the times they are a-changing. At Bristol Zoo Project, which is moving from its former city-centre site to a larger, out-of-town location, a whole section enveloped by broadleaved woodland is devoted to native, but extinct in the wild, British carnivores – bears, lynx, wolves and wolverines. Their enclosures are unusual in having plenty of places to skulk out of public view (though this is becoming more normal elsewhere), so you could visit without actually catching sight of any animals.
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More importantly though, it’s hard to come away from the exhibit without at least a smidgeon of understanding about how these predators once roamed our woodlands and why they disappeared.
Justin Morris, chief executive of Bristol Zoo, argues that zoos attract a broad cross-section of society and have a fundamentally different relationship with those people than other conservation organisations. “It can’t be only the relatively well-educated middle classes that solve our environmental issues,” he says. “Zoos have a role there.”
When it comes to the so-called ark populations that zoos provide, let’s make one thing clear – the vast majority of animals in zoos will never be reintroduced into the wild. For one thing, if their wild counterparts were ever to die out, the chances are it would almost certainly be too late for that species. You can’t reintroduce a tiger if there’s no forest for it to live in.
How have captive animals saved wild species?
That’s not to say that captive-bred animals haven’t played a significant role in restoring populations and even saving species. Zoo-breeding techniques were used to save the Mauritius kestrel in the 1980s and more recently the Iberian lynx, when both were perilously close to extinction.
These weren’t strictly zoo animals but zoos have been involved in other successful reintroductions – Partula land snails, for example, which have been bred in a number of UK zoos and used to repopulate their Tahiti island home. Plans were announced in 2024 to restore tigers to Kazakhstan, with two captive Amur tigers, previously held at a zoo in the Netherlands, used as breeding stock for offspring that will be released into a reserve in the south-east of the country.
But Lewis argues that examples of species that have been saved by captive-breeding are few and far between. “It’s always the same species that are regurgitated,” he says. “The California condor, the scimitar-horned oryx, the Partula snail. They are the exception, not the rule.”
Indeed, it’s not as if zoos mainly keep rare species. By 2035, Bristol Zoo is aiming to have 90 per cent of its collection classed as threatened with extinction and part of a conservation breeding programme, but the average for zoos in the UK is 25-30 per cent, according to Justin Morris.
Western lowland gorillas are classified as Critically Endangered by the IUCN because this subspecies has declined by 80 per cent over three generations. But in 2013 (the last year for which there is data) there were still an estimated 362,000 individuals spread over some 700,000km², though that population could be declining at a rate of 2.7 per cent a year.
“Would the IUCN identify captive breeding and reintroduction as a conservation strategy for western lowland gorillas?” asks Travers. “I think the answer is almost certainly not.”
And yet London and Bristol zoos both keep this species, so why would that be? “Studies going back years show that the most common animals in zoos are large, charismatic, cute, fluffy and have forward-facing eyes – they are the most attractive animals to visitors, regardless of their conservation status,” says Lewis.
Do zoos help with conservation?
Finally, let us consider the role zoos play in field conservation – that by charging visitors, they can put money into in-situ work across the globe. The 2023-24 annual accounts for ZSL, which owns and runs London Zoo, show that its total income during the year was just over £83m, with expenditure of a little over £80m. Nearly £20m was spent on ‘science and research’ and ‘conservation and policy’, which sounds as if money raised from the zoo is indeed making a difference for wildlife.
But there’s devil in the detail. The accounts reveal that £14.5m of that £20m comes from ‘restricted’ sources, including ‘endowments’, so it isn’t raised by ticket sales. Arguably, the zoo could shut tomorrow, and ZSL would still be able to carry out the majority of its science and conservation work unimpeded.
ZSL doesn’t see it that way. “ZSL is absolutely reliant on income from our two conservation zoos at London and Whipsnade to fund our global field science and conservation work, and their role in conservation far exceeds the provision of funds,” says chief operating officer Kathryn England.
As an example, she cites the rescue of 53 highly endangered Darwin’s frogs from a remote part of Chile because they were threatened by chytrid fungus, which had been detected near their Parque Tantauco forest home. They are now being cared for at London Zoo until they can be put back into the wild.
The 120 zoos that are members of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) contributed £33.5m to conservation in 2023 and worked in more than 100 countries, according to its chief executive Jo Judge. “Zoos are more important and relevant than they have ever been,” she says. “A good zoo – and there is no argument that there is any place for a bad one – has conservation at its heart.”
Are UK zoos changing?
But does all this justify keeping wild animals behind bars? There are certainly species we previously maintained in captivity in this country and no longer do, notably dolphins – but that’s not because it’s illegal. Instead, a government-commissioned review argued that any facility that wanted to keep them would have to invest in bigger, deeper tanks, making it economically unviable.
The same could happen for elephants, say Travers and Lewis. Recommendations that are currently with the government would require all enclosures to be at least 20,000m². They say there are currently only 10 zoos that have elephants in the UK and only three of them – including Noah’s Ark – have enclosures that conform to these new regulations. But a report published by the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation in 2022 suggested that even 20,000m² (2ha) is nowhere near sufficient – 100ha would be more appropriate, it said.
Nevertheless, elephants have been the subject of a unique exercise in attempting to improve their lives in captivity. Lisa Yon, a professor in zoo and wildlife medicine at the University of Nottingham, has developed an app-based tool that allows elephant keepers to monitor and evaluate how their charges are faring over time. Behaviours that are assessed include relationships with other elephants, feeding and sleeping, and the presence of so-called stereotypic actions – repeated and well-defined movements or other acts – which indicate stress.
Yon’s research has led to the growing acceptance that elephants should be kept in related, multi-generational family groups because that’s how they live in the wild. “We found there were lots of social interactions in zoos where the elephants were related and very few where they weren’t,” says Yon. “Conversely, about 6 per cent of the behaviour was aggressive in the former, and one third in the latter. It was a huge difference.”
Noah’s Ark keeps a bachelor herd, a small group of four male elephants, as that’s how males live after they leave their maternal groups and before they become breeding animals. As well as creating the largest elephant enclosure in northern Europe, covering 80,000m², it has planted a willow copse in which the herd can browse as if they were wild.
The zoo also completely rebuilt its internal space, and the elephants can now come and go as they like. There’s a bank of sand indoors against which they like to sleep but, when it’s warm in the summer, they frequently opt for a night al fresco.
But can we even say whether Shaka, any elephant or indeed any animal in a zoo is happy? Lisa Yon is reluctant to do that but says we know when they are not mentally well – lots of ‘stereotippies’, aggression and not sleeping properly are all red flags. Travers has a different take. “You know when your dog is happy or fearful,” he points out. “We are not so divorced from other species that we can’t reasonably interpret how they are feeling.”
Back at London Zoo, Travers and Lewis say they’ve just seen a giraffe in an enclosure that is just “two tennis court-sized bits of flat land with some dead trees and branches strung up for browse”.
“Try to put yourself into the life of that animal,” says Travers. “It can’t choose where it lives, what it eats, who it mates with or what happens to its young.” We live in a society where choice is regarded as almost sacrosanct. But when it comes to all other animals, it seems that right is off the table.
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Main image: the transfer of Shaka to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm near Bristol was organised by the European Endangered Species Programme. Credit: Noah's Ark Zoo Farm
