The following text was originally going to be a response to a now-deleted thread and has been modified so it does not go to wasteAlthough zoos sometimes get a bad rap for being "Animal prisons" they can actually be quite good for animals, depending on the animal in question and the conditions it's held in. The idea that having animals in captivity is always inherently bad is just not true. While measuring the happiness of a large group of animals isn't exactly easy, there isn't any good reason to assume that a dog, for example, is better off in the wild than in a house. Wild dogs live shorter lives, experience more stress and are sick more often. Still, many animals obviously cannot be held as pets and to do so is abuse (Big Cats, Large marine mammals, Primates other than humans). Zoo animals, assuming it's a professional zoo (Especially a non-profit), are generally either fine living in captivity or, while typically better off in the wild, have defects that makes it unable to do so. This is why you don't really see any large scale advocacy against zoos or owning pets as a concept, instead it's against specific zoos or specific pets. Personally, my experiences with Zoos have been confined to the Philadelphia Zoo, which is run by a non-profit organization and generally considered to be ethical, so my understanding of them may be biased. Nothing is perfect or ideal in any zoo, but I don't consider it to be an inherently evil institution, at least no more than any other institution under Capitalism.
Meanwhile, with circuses, they are ultimately using animals for entertainment in a performance sense, unlike zoos where just seeing the animal is the entertainment. This means making them do tricks and putting them in unnatural situations. They also often use elephants which basically aren't supposed to be in captivity at all. This is why the aforementioned Philadelphia Zoo removed their elephants. What I have read about circuses with animals generally does not exactly scream "ethics". I certainly don't trust them.
And for the record, I think you should try not to dismiss anything PETA says as being automatically nonsense. I don't support PETA and I feel that the theory that they're basically a front for the meat industry isn't
impossible but on many occasions I've seen them outright tell people the truth just to have everybody whine about it. The other day they were telling people not to let their cat
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