For the past couple years, I’ve had an urge to go to the Pittsburgh Zoo because I live a few streets over from it, and it seems insane that there are tigers and piranhas and warty pigs living in my neighborhood that I’ve never met. I do, after all, value the importance of getting to know your neighbors. Just the other day, for example, I was eavesdropping on my next-door neighbor telling one of the guys restoring the mortar on his brick house that there’s poisonous fluoride in our water. Anyway, I wanted to see what the tigers were up to.
I grew up in the DMV, so my local zoo was the Smithsonian National Zoo, which is A. Free and B. In my memory, the pinnacle of a good zoo. It’s one of only two zoos in the U.S. with pandas. They have several endangered species and have a heavy focus on conservation. It’s free so it’s accessible to everyone.
But that’s just my rosy childhood memory of the zoo, which I went to fairly often. My dad would sometimes take me as a kid on early Saturday mornings to watch the zookeepers feed the seals. In middle and high school, it was a place I could go with my friends unsupervised, which was cool because it was in the city, but also not concerning to parents because it's the zoo. I remember taking a lot of photos with my friends on point-and-shoot cameras to post on Facebook later.
But I remain conflicted on whether there is such a thing as a good zoo and whether any of the good that zoos might contribute to the world are outweighed by their ethical sins.
It really crystallized for me on this trip that zoos are designed to entertain people in general, and are not specifically designed for people who love animals. Zoogoers generally care about taking a photo of the elephant and seeing the gorilla walk around, not so much worried about whether the gorilla has a good life. But to be fair, zoos don’t have that much enforcement on how people act. Children bang on the glass to get the animals’ attention and parents tell them not to, but not that strongly. I saw grown adults yelling through the glass to get an animal’s attention.
For what it's worth, the Pittsburgh Zoo lost accreditation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums — the organization that validates zoos based on a rubric of how their facilities are run — in 2015. The loss had to do with the zoo's treatment of its elephants.
Much more than I did as a kid, I now wonder how the animals feel about being in the zoo. They probably don’t understand the concept of a zoo, but they do understand the feeling of being watched constantly, having people stare and yell. A few years ago, my perspective on zoos really changed when I read about how it’s fairly common for zoo animals to be on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotic medications. It’s surprising when you first learn that a leopard is on Prozac, but then it instantly makes sense because what would make a creature more depressed, anxious, and/or psychotic than living in a watched enclosure far from its natural habitat. (My perspective on zoos also changed when I learned about the heinous history of “human zoos.”)
A New York Times article from 2014 profiles animal behaviorist Dr. Vint Vigra as he goes from zoo to zoo to help the organizations figure out behavior problems with their animals. He spends time helping Molly, an aoudad, also called a Barbary sheep, who had become overly agitated, anxious, and fearful after losing her tail. The zookeepers tried all kinds of methods to help her, as did Dr. Vigra, but nothing helped.
“So, reluctantly, Virga did what thousands of mental-health professionals have done before — he prescribed Prozac. Within weeks, Molly began a gradual return to her preinjury self,” Alex Halberstadt wrote in the article. Many zoo animals end up on Prozac or similar drugs because, for a variety of reasons, they have trouble living in captivity. One of the first zoo animals in history to be treated with Prozac was Gus, a polar bear living in the Central Park Zoo. In the ‘90s, he started obsessively swimming figure eights in his pool for 12 hours every day.
A Slate article about this same subject, also from 2014, succinctly describes the main issue: “Zoos are, first and foremost, for people—not animals. Zoos exist to serve the human gaze.”
Every morning when I feed my dog Sesame, I give her a cup of kibble and 30mg of Prozac. When I got a dog in 2021, I had a vague understanding that some people had their pets on anxiety medication but didn’t consider that my dog would need that too. When we adopted Sesame from the shelter, they didn’t have much information on her; just that she had been transferred from another shelter in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she went after she was found in a parking lot around Christmas. We don’t know anything about the first year of her life, where she came from, how they treated her, or if she had a good or bad life. A DNA test has told us she’s a mix of 7-10 breeds.
A few weeks after we got Sesame, she started showing signs of stress and anxiety that continued, unabated, for the next year or so. We tried basically everything: training at home, training classes, long walks, the dog park, enrichment toys (so, so many), chew toys, frozen treats. All of these things helped briefly, while she was engaged, but as soon as it ended, she was back to her stress. It wasn’t a type of stress or anxiety that was easily explained to a friend or the vet.
It wasn’t a classic separation anxiety where she was stressed when we were gone but fine when we were home. When we were home, she was the most stressed. She would growl and bark at us when we were sitting on the couch, she got stressed when people came over — even though she loves people — to the point where we stopped having friends over. She had so much trouble relaxing. She could get frenetic on walks in a way that was concerning. I remember once taking her on a five-mile hike in the dead of summer, expecting that she would pass out for the rest of the night, but she couldn’t do it.
We had a consultation with a trainer who told us that, as a result of her stress, she probably wasn’t getting enough sleep every day, and suggested we talk to our vet about medication. At that point, I’d spent so much time on dog behavior subreddits that I knew medication could make a night and day difference, or might not do anything at all (or for some dogs, make it even worse). Luckily, it changed everything for the better. It’s so clear to us how much more content she is now, without having lost any of her spunky little personality. People are often taken aback if I casually mention my dog being on Prozac, but I came to terms with it almost instantly, because so many humans I know are on psychiatric medication, myself included, and dogs live in a human world.
People often have the same criticisms of dogs being on medication as they do for people: it’s not “natural,” it wouldn’t happen in the wild, etc. But dogs don’t live in the wild and we’re not cavemen. Dogs are fully domesticated animals and they live in a world with vacuums and cars and sirens and abusive people. Watching how my dog’s behavior has changed on medication has helped put into perspective how the same medication helps humans.
But zoo animals are not domesticated. They were either born into captivity or taken from their home and transferred to captivity.
I'm not an animal behaviorist or an expert on zoos. I know that zoos are probably not a morally sound concept, but there are over 400 zoos in the U.S., and it's hard to think of a reasonable way for them to stop existing. And I don't even know that they should stop existing. I just know that sometimes at the zoo, you'll see a lady in a Carole Baskin t-shirt letting her kid bang on the glass and feel depressed about the whole thing. Other times, you'll look at two monkeys cuddling in a hammock and feel as close to the animal world as ever.