The Ethical Battle For Aquariums and Zoos
Zoos and aquariums have been a source of entertainment and spectacle for centuries with exhibits enabling visitors to see and sometimes interact with animals they might not have seen otherwise within their lifetimes. While it may be a great photo-op to pet a tiger cub or pose with a dolphin, the damaging effects zoos and aquariums have not only on the people visiting them, but also the animals and other life they house can be detrimental. Valuing entertainment over education, these facilities can quickly turn into exploitative and harmful environments, preventing proper education, creating a mystified divide between the spectacle of exotic and non-native plants and animals, and failing to successfully rehabilitate and release back into their natural habitats. Without proper educational efforts and consideration for animal and environmental conservation and wellbeing, zoos and aquariums quickly devolve into ethical paradoxes, creating conflict between wanting to create environments to showcase animals that might not have otherwise been seen, but also wanting them to live as they naturally would in their provided environments, forgoing equipping animals in their care the proper skillset to do so successfully.
Going to an aquarium and seeing 20 fish that all look different but are all beta fish might be intriguing to some for a short period, but the novelty would soon wear off. Diversity, even within exhibits, not only is visually pleasing, but can increase the overall health of the exhibit and create an understanding of the need for biodiversity not just in exhibits, but in nature. Creating, maintaining, and conserving biodiversity, even within places like zoos and aquariums, ultimately leads to the bettering of humankind, catering to both intrinsic and utilitarian values. Biodiversity plays into utilitarian values as it provides humans with the food and shelter they need. It also offers important processes that add intrinsic value like nutrient cycling and regulation of pests on food sources and other plants. Threats to these natural processes and to biodiversity as a whole are a by-product of the Anthropocene era. The term was coined by Eugene Stormer and Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe the present geologic time in which human life and activity has had a major, detrimental impact on the planet. Inevitably, humans are still a contributing factor in biodiversity, connecting directly to not only animals, but the environment, and planet as a whole. Each living thing plays a part in the give-and-take web that makes up all life on earth, with each element contributing in different ways. For example, bats help maintain the mosquito population by eating them and mosquitos help pollinate plants and flowers. If one or more elements within the earth’s biodiversity web becomes compromised, that delicate balance between living things can be derailed and threatened. This leads to imbalances in populations, eventually leading to endangerment and extinction. The effects do not just impact living things, but also non-sentient beings like ice and the ocean’s tides, leading to declining numbers of floating sea ice and oceanic dead zones. Biodiversity is essential for maintaining symbiotic relationships between humans, animals, and the environment.
Zoos and aquariums have long been places where visitors are able to disconnect from reality for a moment and witness animals and other living things they may not ever see again in their lifetime. This novel experience enables visitors to detach what they are seeing from the reality of the fish, animals, plants, and other living things from their natural environments and living conditions. This disconnect also enables zoos and aquariums to create false narratives surrounding their animals and fish, using them purely for entertainment instead of rehabilitation and education. Institutions that participate in the former do harm not only to the animals, but also to the visitors who are presented with a carefully crafted narrative about the life they contain. On the flip side, facilities with rehabilitation and education in mind may not be as visually appealing but enable visitors to get a more realistic sense of the animal’s significance in the natural world. The vast differences between the two operations are perfectly exemplified by early quarantine social media phenomena Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. Exotic ran the now defunct Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, which focused on giving visitors up close and personal experiences with big cat cubs, all while abusing the animals behind the scenes. In contrast, Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue facility focuses on rescuing and rehabilitating big cats, like a Canada lynx and caracals, for eventual re-release into the wild as well as advocating for federal changes regarding ownership of big cats, like 2003’s Captive Wild Animal Safety Act. Baskin’s facility, located in Florida, offers visitors the chance to see animals that they might not see again in their lifetimes, while also trying to simulate the cats living in the Florida-adjacent of their natural habitat. Both of those elements make Baskin’s park somewhat paradoxical as it showcases non-native animals, but also tries to recreate their natural environments.
This unconscious detachment of humans from animals and the environment prevents visitors from realizing the full extent of this, but more and more zoos and aquariums are shifting their ethos towards conservation, sustainability, and research in an effort to protect and care for the animals and other living things that are housed within the walls of their facilities. Instead of making their exhibits a spectacle or marvel, they are actively working to shift the focus of visitors from pure entertainment to education not only educates visitors on the animals themselves, but also the environments they live in and how human’s actions can both hurt and help the life around them. Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California has entire exhibits dedicated to human’s impact on the ocean. One exhibit in particular houses small fish and shrimp living in an environment filled with plastic water bottles, netting, bubble wrap, and other consumer waste. With some crafty mirror work, the exhibit and the plastic housed inside the seemingly small window seems to go on forever, mimicking what the ocean floor could look like, scattered with plastic, bottle caps, and other relics of human waste. The aquarium’s efforts to educate visitors on their impact on the ocean and the earth does not stop once they pass one exhibit to the next but remain a constant theme throughout the aquarium. These exhibits on sustainability, rehabilitation, and research are not meant to only be keeping the cute sea critters alive, but to keep the biodiversity of the oceans alive. The digitization of exhibits in response to COVID-19 also reflects Monterey’s efforts at conservation and education with leading issues like plastic pollution, sustainable seafood, and California’s ocean ecosystem. Each issue has its own page on their website detailing what the issue is, how it affects humans, fish and other sea-dwellers, and the environment. In addition, the website also details what people can do to help alleviate the environment from human stressors as well as what the aquarium is doing to help, whether it be research or stocking more sustainable products in the gift shop, like metal water bottles as opposed to plastic. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is able to skirt the ethical paradox mentioned earlier as it accurately depicts how the fish and other living beings are in their natural environment, even if simulated like the realistic plastic wasteland of the ocean floor, while also avoiding making a spectacle of their exhibits and making conscious efforts to sustain and educate others on a population of quickly diminishing creatures.
While zoos and aquariums are moving more and more towards more conservationist ideals and practices, this methodology is not always fool proof. Conservation seems like an attainable goal and is the American Zoo and Aquarium Association’s priority, but it is not always possible in every facility with every animal they bring in under their care. In the case of Canada’s Vancouver Aquarium, the facility riddled with controversy and numerous deaths of cetaceans, has slowly shifted its goals to a research-first paradigm after the mysterious poisoning of two of their belugas, one born in captivity. The aquarium is also home to a dolphin with partially amputated pectoral flippers from Japan, transported to Vancouver’s aquarium in an effort to research echolocation’s usefulness when trying to locate fishing boats and nets. Belugas, in particularly, have not had a stellar history of successfully being bred within captivity. Aquariums across the nation and the world have not been able to keep belugas alive and well for much longer than a few weeks after birth, as in the case of SeaWorld and the Georgia Aquarium. As pointed out in Rolston Holmes’s “Animals,” “the zoo is not really a suitable facility for a captive breeding program. Reintroductions are complicated and difficult procedures…zoos are not equipped to undertake much of such activity” (Ralston Holmes 85). Keeping a baby beluga, in this case, alive for more than a few weeks is an already daunting task, let alone looking forward into releasing them into the wild. With that in mind, it complicates the zoo’s and aquarium’s morally good mission to rehabilitate and release, especially with disabled dolphins and mysteriously poisoned belugas. Not only do zoos and aquariums have to undertake the effort that goes into housing and fostering animals, but also the sometimes- messy logistics of the animal’s eventual re-release back into its natural habitat. The intersectionality of caring for the planet becomes more and more present as the time nears for the aquarium to release their fostered animals with little public fanfare regarding the social and economic politics that brought upon the need to rehabilitate the animal and the politics surrounding the re-release. A near-death polar bear cannot survive on the same dwindling ice block it was rescued from only a few years prior. Without changes that span across all sectors of public life and reform, no actual rehabilitation can occur.
As spectacular and educational zoos and aquariums can be, they consistently create ethical paradoxes within their walls, failing both their visitors and the animals they came to visit. Without the proper balance of research, rehabilitation, and thorough consideration of the planet and its politics, animals under their care will have no satisfactory or ethical endings, remaining to be just an extravagant display of a utopic, human-controlled nature. Zoos and aquariums constantly walk the fine line between creating spectacular exhibits to showcase their animals that may not otherwise be seen and educating their visitors on the importance of biodiversity and animal population sustainability. By advocating and making education about not only the animals, but their environments, and the earth as a whole, zoos and aquariums can bridge this gap and create not only an entertaining experience, but an educational one. Providing visitors with the knowledge and tools to realize their impact on the nature around them and the planet as a whole is more beneficial to both the human and the animal experience as opposed to having the chance to see one of the rarest animals on the earth. Without zoos and aquariums, many people would not know what animals and plants live beyond their communities.
