Quotes About Zoos

I've always had a repulsion going in a place where animals are in captivity.

In zoos, along with the animals, the humanity of man is also prisoned! No cage is humane!

After this, he'd probably be going to zoos, climbing the enclosure, saying, 'Here, watch this...' Famous last words, as yet another unfit human is removed from the gene pool.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

Much later I would see this kind of behavior with gorillas in captivity. They had nervous tics similar, if not identical, to mine: hair plucking, picking at scabs, scratching, rocking, chewing on themselves, and other repetitive and self-stimulating behaviors. One gorilla spun in tight, fast circles. Another bobbed her head up and down.

Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And

Cuando uno presta atención a las reacciones del público que visita un parque zoológico, advierte el despilfarro de una piedad sentimental, en la conmiseración que despiertan animales que se encuentran perfectamente, mientras que casi nadie se da cuenta del verdadero sufrimiento, que también existe en la mayor parte de los jardines zoológicos.

Nearly half of all zoos in the U.S. now admit to giving psychiatric drugs to their animals,

Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart — incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things.

The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

Every time you go to the zoo, you prolong the captivity of the animals there! If no one goes to the zoos, there will be no zoos! Destroying the evil is very simple and it is in your hand!

Where does a child of mine get all that hair, I wonder? Arthur's not exceptionally hirsute, and the men on my side of the family are as bald as potatoes. I must have had an affair with a gorilla before he was born, but you'd think I'd remember something like that, wouldn't you? ... Be a dear and remind me to leave my brandy flask at home the next time I visit the zoo.

Els zoos, com diu John Berger en el seu fantàstic assaig «Per què mirem els animals?», estan fets perquè els animals hi estiguin exposats tothora a la nostra mirada (encara que els zoos actuals s'han «humanitzat» -o potser hauria de dir animalitzat?-, en disposar zones ocultes a la mirada de l'espectador), però també perquè no puguin mai retornar-nos la nostra mirada, o en tot cas, retornar-nos-la en situació d'igualtat.

I do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!

I cannot concur with those who advocate saving gorillas from extinction by killing and capturing more free-living individuals only to exhibit them in confinement.

It's really bizarre because no one knows this, but elephants have killed more animal trainers than any other animal.

After counting all the sheep in the world I enumerate the wildebeests, snails, camels, skylarks, etc., then I add up all the zoos and aquariums, country by country. By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood

For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they're ultra-high-fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. They injure more people in zoos than the tigers do.15

In fact, there's no single species of bacteria that we humans all share. We house personalized zoos.

I am an indication of what occurs around me. For instance, some snakes occur in forests, whereas others occur at the zoo. This is something zoos will not confess, for when you read the labels, snakes occur someplace other than in their cages.

It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck with them in some sense. You can't return them to the wild.

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

'Tiger King.' They are absolutely gone with the fairies, they're all absolutely raving out of the box, the lot of them. All those people with animals like tigers, who've got their own zoos in America, and one guy's got something like 2,000 tigers in his back garden. It's absolutely mad.