When I was a kid, one of my most favorite things to do was to visit a zoo.

But as I grew older, I came across evidence to the fact that animals in zoos often suffer from boredom.

Was the younger version of me wrong?

I wanted to dig into Gaurav's question

in part because, as a parent of a young toddler, zoos are very much a part of my everyday life.

Going to the zoo clearly makes my kid happy.

And most zoos market themselves as a force for conservation,

protecting endangered species, and making us humans better stewards of the planet.

But then there's that evidence Gaurav mentioned.

Videos showing what zoologist call stereotypies:

Repetitive behaviors like hair pulling, tongue flicking,

bobbing and swaying that indicate under-stimulation and stress.

All of this left me with a couple questions:

What are zoos doing for humans, and for animals?

And are they doing what we want them to?

My first call was to Susan Clayton,

a conservation psychologist whose job is basically to go to the zoo and spy on people.

We watch people and we listen to people and, you know, pay attention to what they say.

Parents will use that as an opportunity to talk to their children about how it's important to try and keep species from going extinct.

But something much more concrete and more simple also happens.

Susan and her colleagues noticed that around primates, in particular,

visitors will frequently imagine themselves in the animals' place.

They might speak as if they were the animal.

"What are these people looking at me for?"

So you are temporarily imagining what it would be like to be the animal.

That does open the door to a greater empathy and concern.

Susan is describing an expansion of what philosophers call our circle of empathy.

We might start by only caring about our family and close friends,

but we can extend that circle to include other people and even other species.

I was just wondering if that kind of resonates with you as far as thinking back to your experiences in zoos growing up?

Yeah, absolutely.

Sometimes they would even allow us to feed giraffes.

We were allowed to touch some snakes and things like that.

I used to love going back to that zoo

so that they can create this bond and this empathy with animals.

So maybe zoos help us feel more empathy for animals.

But is that enough?

Emma Marris is a science writer,

who spends a good chunk of her book, Wild Souls,

trying to answer this question.

Do the benefits of zoos to wild animals and to conservation

outweigh any minimal amount of discomfort or unhappiness that the animals in the zoo might experience?

Talking with Emma convinced me that instead of just looking for pros and cons

I should look for evidence for two claims:

That keeping animals in a zoo somehow helps wild populations thrive.

And that visiting them has a measurable impact on human attitudes about conservation.

Lucky for me,

Emma had already spent a lot of time looking into this first question.

The idea that zoo animals are a sort of backup or reserve.

That sounds reasonable, right?

Basically, if a species was about to go extinct,

we could replenish their numbers with these reserve animals who had spent their lives in zoos.

The tricky part about that is that for a lot of species,

especially the bigger, more cognitively complex species,

putting them back out into the wild is incredibly difficult.

The key to knowing which ones can actually be released is a concept called cognitive complexity.

A good way to think about it is to look at how long it takes for a particular species to learn skills in the wild.

Orangutans stay with their mothers for up to 9 years.

It takes elephants the same amount of time

to learn how to function as members of one of the most complex social groups in the animal kingdom.

Orcas stay with their mothers until age 13.

For lions, polar bears, and gorillas, it's at least 2 years.

Once you realize how much these cognitively complex animals have to learn to survive in the wild,

it makes sense why the ones you see in zoos could never join their wild cousins.

This idea of cognitive complexity was just really game changing for me

as far as, like, understanding why so few zoo animals are able to be out in the wild.

When you were talking about this, I had a few examples in my head.

I remember seeing the footage of a baby gazelle that cheetahs often hunt.

So the mother would capture the baby gazelle and let her cubs, you know, go out and finish it, like kill it.

This is very hard to replicate in a zoo.

For comparison, the California Condor only needs 180 days to learn how to survive after hatching.

And a program to save them from extinction

by breeding them in zoos and releasing them in the wild has been a huge success.

But these programs are incredibly rare.

According to the Association for Zoos and Aquariums website,

there are approximately 8700 species represented in zoos around the world

and just 117 reintroduction programs.

This sort of notion that someday they're going to be like

"Oh, we ran out of elephants."

"Let's get all the ones from the zoo and just pop them out into Africa and Asia."

Like, that's not going to happen.

They're never going to let them out.

They're going to die in those zoos.

For cognitively complex animals

it's really hard for me to see the benefits and the drawbacks seem pretty obvious.

But what about the second item on the list?

Does visiting the zoo make us more conservation minded?

One study gave visitors a survey when they first got to the zoo

and asked them to write down actions they could think of that would help save animal species,

then have them do the same thing after they'd visited the exhibits.

Slightly more people mentioned recycling, responsible purchasing and diet choices.

But the share of visitors who mentioned habitat protection actually decreased.

So I really didn't find much evidence that zoos in their current form do much to help wild populations

or change people's attitudes and behavior.

But what if we could imagine a different kind of zoo?

My initial question was:

Do the benefits of zoos outweigh its cons?

But now, after listening to this and the evidence that you have provided,

now I feel that we must assess each species individually.

If zoos stopped breeding cognitively complex animals for captivity

and then released those they have to wildlife sanctuaries,

like this one in Tennessee,

they could devote more time and space to threatened species who can successfully be released into the wild.

Sometimes these are turtles or fish or freshwater mussels, right?

Like these are not necessarily your big blockbuster mammals.

To satisfy our very real desire to see and hear and connect with non-human creatures,

we might need to extend that circle of empathy in a different direction.

So we see squirrels or robins or pigeons, and we're like meh.

But actually, the more I learn about these animals and insects and the plants that are in the city, the street trees,

like, the more fascinating I find them.

Do you think we could design zoo experiences that people would want that are based on these different species?

I used to love going to zoos and seeing the big animals.

I mean, not having them around would be kind of sad for the younger version of myself,

but I think I have changed and that's because of education.

And I think people can also change if we... if we educate them.

Thank you so much for watching.

I really enjoyed digging into this question about zoos with Gaurav.

And if you haven't watched it already,

definitely go watch Joss's video about unions in the US.

That one was inspired by another question from a subscriber, Cameron.

We're really excited to make a whole series of videos like this, videos driven by your questions.

So, if you're up for going on camera and being a part of a Vox video,

hit us up!

We'll get some answers.

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Thanks for watching!