An Article by SHERENNA AURAFANI RUMAIZA

I used to be a little kid, just like every other people. Back then when I was far younger, I loved it whenever my parents took me to the zoo, I enjoyed seeing the animals that were being caged as I read every information, descriptions about every species and I liked it as I feel like it gave me knowledge about animals and part of the zoo where I could take pictures with the animals, such as tigers, snakes, baby lion, orangutans, and even birds. My parents, of course, expect me to learn and love the wild animals, however, now as I grow older, I know that it was more than just learning the animals and their habitats. But also, I could not denied that the zoo did not taught me something about the species I saw, I did learn something, but I now I could feel something is not right.

Now that I am older, I did not know if I could picture the zoo the same way as I saw it when I was a little girl.  I have seen a lot of videos of how animals are being treated inside the zoo and how they were taken away from their real habitat, including their family. It is absolutely a different life they have in the wild and in the zoo.

Yes, I do know that zoo has their own standard operating procedure, and the main point of creating the zoo is for saving the animals’ life from extinction, danger, or even work as a quarantine if they are sick and zoo works as the ‘hospital’ and I believe that the real purpose of zoo was to safe animals from any harm.

However, I am not very sure that the zoo could save the animals if they were just putting them in a cage where they don’t have enough room as in the wild for them to move. And to put them in the cage for the sake of human’s pleasure? I am not a hundred percent sure. There are a lot of pros and cons about zoo life, but for me, at least zoos need to make the environment more comfortable for the animals so the perspective of ‘zoo is not feasible for animals’ could disappear, as environment is one of the important thing for every living things’ sustainability, including animals.