If animals could talk, I bet they won't want to spend the rest of their lives confined in a restricted artificial habitat.
Zoos and wildlifes are products of mankind, created with the purpose of protecting animals from any form of threat. The zoo and wildlifes are kinda different in the sense that the former keeps animals in a form of enclosed space to serve as medium of attraction while the latter allows these creatures move about freely in their natural habitat supervised by humans. However their purposes are still the same at a fundamental level : Educational purposes, preservation, Research and many more.
In an ideal world, this serves as the perfect set up to ensure the safety of these animals protecting them from going extinct and unnecessary slaughter by the so called Top of the food chain but when it comes to any relationship that concerns humans, there is always bound to be an exterior motive and this very idea was built on nothing more than deceit. Don't get me wrong, the whole thing may have started as a genuine idea to help but corroded with time.
I stopped believing the zoo was created for educational intent after an encounter with one. When I was 10, my school went for an excursion to zoo after tasking students interested to pay some money for the trip. I was super excited about it because I have always wanted to see lions up close and personal and maybe learn something about that them from that particular encounter. Yet when we got there I experienced a lot of things that made me doubt if the whole zoo thing was a great idea. First off I noticed that the animals did not seem to happy about being locked up in cages with limited spaces to properly express themselves. Some these animals just laid down without even doing anything (not like they had much to do anyway) due to the state of the condition. After years of watching Nat Geo wild, I realized the zoo was not even a proper representation of how these animals act in the wild, rather it was just a reflection of where they find themselves. They have no need to hunt for their own food as everything is handed to them by the zoo keepers and they live their lives as amusements to humans.
They try to shove the "zoos and wildlifes are facilitators of education" every single opportunity they get but when you look further down the facade they display, it is quite easy to discover that this institutions are nothing more than tools to enrich their pockets. At one point I begin to wonder what happens to these animals when people stop paying to come watch them or the wildlife reserves once they loose their fundings. Nothing good I bet and if you think this is false, just take a look at the conditions of the zoo and wildlife in Nigeria. It might be different in other countries but it is horrible down here. I strongly believe that animals should be released back into the wild after serving time as recreational creatures so that they can finally revert back to their primordial culture.
Zoos and wildlife may have started off with good intentions some of which can still be identified till this very day. Nevertheless the setbacks far outweigh the benefits. These creatures deserve to be respected and allowed to make decisions autonomously with humans only stepping in when it is one hundred percent obvious that an animal is endangered and might go extinct without external intervention.
Thank you.
PS the second image is mine