Everyone has been to a zoo at one point in time in their life. We pay money to see and watch animals walk around and sleep in cages while looking depressed. As stated by Corrine Henn, "For thousands of years, humans have put wild animals on display for the sake of our entertainment." There has never been a proven point for the existence of zoos and animals do not exist just for our enjoyment. Animals in the wild have been declining drastically since zoos have been in existence. With the number of zoos, illegal and legal, increasing so does the number of animals endangered or threatened. While many people find zoos to be fun and entertaining, the animals in the zoos do not, and hope and dream to be free one day from what they feel compares to a prison.
The prisons zoo animals have to call home, compare nothing to what their natural habitat could provide for them. Zoos spend thousands of dollars to create extravagant habitats for the animals to live in, but the problem still lies in the location of the animal. Animals do not have the ability to thrive or survive naturally in the fake environments zoos put them in. "The environment zoos present to the public is entirely artificial; the animals have nothing like their wild counterparts. This, of course, is not to say that they have somehow domesticated or that they have lost their instincts. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth" (Henn, "How Zoos"). Caretakers put the life of the animals in their hands when they take them away from their natural environment, and make them dependent on them. "There is nothing natural about a penguin, giraffe or elephant living in the middle of an Australian city. It's only when things go wrong that we're reminded that a city zoo is no place for an animal" (Australia Animals). When animals escape the zoos the only thing the keepers can do is kill the animals for the safety of the people.