The zoo near where I live keeps an elephant. Many people in the area protest against the keeping of the elephant because it is some form of animal cruelty. It isn’t like they beat the elephant, but they keep it in a cage, make it walk in the yearly parade, and so forth – a lot of usual things that zoos do.
I don’t find the protesters convincing. It is possible that the elephant would prefer the wild, but I don’t think we have a good idea of animal’s utility functions. Animals don’t discuss their preferences, and they don’t employ elaborate means to achieving their goals. Typically we can look at what somebody is doing in order to infer what they want, but the actions of animals are typically only one step adjunct from their goals which is not much information about what circumstances are best for their total life utility. Animals clearly prefer to eat, not get eaten, and not have their babies messed with. But besides that, animals don’t want much else that we know of.
I think the root of some of this kind of sentiment is in the failure to acknowledge natural evil, or at least realize the extent of it. It is not clear that an elephant would prefer a cage and regular meals or prefer the tooth and claw of the wild. It is easy to imagine that the wild is like Bambi, but it is like Animal Planet. I think a lot of popular movies that appeal to the kindness of mother nature demonstrates that people are eager to buy into a fantasy version of what the natural world is like.
There is another sentiment that human beings disrupt the self sustaining natural state. I don’t believe that nature when left alone is kind nor self-sustaining. The sun is not going to burn forever. Life on Earth is not going to continue after the sun stops burning. Nature is going to destroy all life on planet earth when left alone. We observe the fossils of extinct animal species in areas of the world where man did not live. If humans caused extinction by some random action producing an unpredictable string of causation, then the random action itself can just as well be produced by an actor within the natural system. If a human being can step on a mosquito and it lead to the eventual extinction of frogs, then so can a fox.
Some people root their belief that nature is self-sustaining in God -- Everything God made is good and self-sustaining, but man sinned and now man alone is a disrupter of the natural state. This not only goes against everything we observe in the cruelty and entropy of nature, but it fails to recognize God’s imposition of natural evil after man sinned. The lion will not lay with the lamb, and the thorns and thistles will now prick you.
So I don’t think there is anything wrong with zoos or putting animals in cages. I don’t think it is clear than animals prefer nature, and I don’t think that mankind is the disrupter of an orderly, self-maintaining, kind natural system.
