Stop Animal Cruelty: Don't go to zoos

Zoos are truely terrible places. The animals that are taken there are seperated from their families. Also the animals are put in small enclosures with nothing to do but listen to people whoop and holler. Yes, the animals are given toys, but they don't play with toys in the wild, they take care of themselves and their families. Animals usually travel or run around in the wild but there is simply no space to do this in zoos. Zoos think they provide animals with their natural surrondings, but how could they when the climate is usually different, the animals aren't surronded by the other animals that they are used to seeing, there is people everywhere, and so on.

A friend of mine once said,"But people would not learn to care for animals if they didn't get to see them in zoos". At the time I didn't know what to say but after I read an article by Ric O'barry, I knew what I should have said. Ric O'barry was answering frequently asked questions and one of the questions said the same thing that my friend did. Ric O'barry said that many animals are being helped that people have never seen." I think that all it takes for someone to care, is to see a video, see another animal being treated badly, and so on. Many people also believe that zoos help animals that are about to become extinct. That job is up to organizations that have lots of land protected land for the animals in the animals' homeland. Animals in zoos usually die earlier because of stress. Dolphins often get ulcers.

Pretend that there were other beings on other planets. Say they came to Earth and took you back to their plantet and put you in a cage. You were confused, surronded by things that spoke a different language  than you did. Their way of life was completely different and you soon became homesick, but you would be left to die in this little enclosure. This is what life is like for animals in zoos.

If someone does something bad, we usually punish them by putting them in a tiny cell in a jail. This is what we do to animals except we call it a zoo. The sad thing is, these animals haven't done anything to us, we have done bad things to them. We cause global warming, tear down their homes, the list goes on.

Please stop going to zoos and remember, every person can make a difference if they try!