Zoos shaping attitudes to animals

If an animal is kept in a tiny cage, it doesn't behave normally. After all, would you? It gets savage, and may spend its time swaying back and forth because it is bored and unhappy. So people look at the animal, and think it is dangerous, and are scared of it. That is how people thought of the animals in the past. By the way, this cage is in a modern zoo in Indonesia - not one back in the old days. What do you think of that zoo?

But eventually, zoos began to become more open, and they built big open-air enclosures for the animals, instead of just small concrete cages with bars. These cages had moats and chain link fences to keep people safe, and then the enclosures started to look better, with grass and rocks in them. This made the animals behave more normally, and people began to change their attitudes.

When television started to show wildlife documentaries, people could see how the wild animals really behaved. Now, when they went to the zoo, they wanted to see animals in realistic environments, not little cages. So the zoos changed the way people thought about animals, and the people changed the way zoos cared for and displayed their animals.

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