Why I don’t visit zoos

January 23, 2025

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

I loved visiting Auckland Zoo as a child, and I loved taking my kids there when they were young. But even as a child, I knew it wasn’t a delightful existence for the animals: my memories are of concrete enclosures reeking of urine, big chains around the elephants’ ankles, and the polar bears Joachim and Ingrid pacing back and forth in their small enclosure. (Seriously – forcing Arctic animals to live in almost-subtropical Auckland.) By the time I was a parent, Auckland Zoo had improved considerably. The polar bears had died and not been replaced, and overall the enclosures were better designed for inmates and their viewing public. I haven’t been to the zoo for 20 years but I imagine it’s improved even more during that time. Part of me would love to see the animals at the zoo and to see my grandchildren enjoying the zoo, but most of me can’t face the thought of supporting an institution which relies on animals being there for human entertainment.  Zoos have done a great job of improving their reputation by becoming involved in education and conservation work. But they’re not sanctuaries, they’re Victorian relics which are there for their entertainment value. Their very existence depends on humans being seen as superior to other species. (I did have a vegan friend who used to visit the zoo occasionally with the excuse that he was going to apologise to the animals, which I thought was a cunning strategy.)

Avoiding zoos doesn’t have to mean missing out on seeing different species of animals. In Northern Ireland, we visited The Donkey Sanctuary outside Ballyclare. Until a few years ago they offered donkey rides as a way of raising funds but they decided it was exploitative. Now visitors pay to simply see the donkeys doing donkey things (including playtime with large robust soft toys in an indoor arena). On one visit to Melbourne, we hired a car for a day to drive down the Great Ocean Road so we could see koalas and a wide range of native birds in the wild at a small settlement called Kennett River. We also stopped in at the Anglesea Golf Course, where for a small fee they’ll take you on a golf buggy tour to see some of the 300 Eastern Grey kangaroos that have made the golf course their home. In Tasmania, we saw lots of wildlife in the wild: platypuses in the Tyenna River, echidna and wombats strolling down the side of the road near Cradle Mountain, and pademelons (a small species of wallaby) at our campsite at Narawntapu National Park. We also visited the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary near Hobart, which rescues and rehabilitates Tasmanian wildlife including wombats, emus, kangaroos, echidna, snakes and Tasmanian devils. In our friend’s garden in Spain, Colin had a black-and-yellow salamander walk along his arm, and we saw hundreds of tadpoles and frogs in an old stone drinking trough.