Consolation in a Cage
By Eric Nunnally

Zoos like to present themselves as conservation’s frontline: sanctuaries where endangered species are given another chance. Captive breeding programs, glossy fundraising campaigns, and carefully worded signs all reinforce the idea that by visiting, you are helping to save the wild. It is an attractive story—but it is a dangerous one. 

What zoos actually offer is not conservation but consolation. A tiger born in Minnesota is no substitute for a thriving Siberian ecosystem. A ferret released into the desert does not undo the destruction of its habitat. To equate survival in cages with survival in the wild is to confuse curation with preservation. It is ecological taxidermy. 

Zoos do not save the wild. They repackage its demise for public consumption. 

The article praising zoos’ efforts overlooks the obvious: the same capitalist system that annihilates rainforests for palm oil and carves logging roads for poachers now markets itself as savior through zoo philanthropy. Millions are raised to protect a few species even as billions are earned destroying their habitats. This is capitalism’s favorite trick—profit from destruction, then sanctify yourself by donating a fraction to repair it. 

And what of the psychology absorbed by children pressing their hands against glass enclosures? They are told this is education. But the lesson is not interdependence—it is dominion. To cage, display, and breed life is presented as normal. It is no coincidence that 700 million zoo visits a year coexist with accelerating biodiversity collapse. 

The history of zoos makes this clearer still. Menageries of kings once displayed exotic animals as trophies of conquest. Today, the rhetoric has shifted, but the practice is the same: animals extracted from their habitats, confined, and displayed—only now the cages are painted green. Conservation has become the new imperial alibi. 

Real conservation requires protecting ecosystems, not just species. It requires challenging the structural drivers of extinction: industrial agriculture, extractive logging, fossil fuels, and speculative land grabs. Yet zoos rarely confront these forces directly. Instead, they offer individual consumers the option to shop 'sustainably,' as if palm oil plantations collapse because a child refuses a candy bar. 

Until we confront the engines of extinction, captive breeding is not conservation but consolation. 

The harder truth is this: zoos are not proof of our progress but of our failure. Their very existence signals that we have already allowed ecosystems to collapse. The question is not how many ferrets Phoenix can release or how many oryxes Abu Dhabi can breed, but whether we will dismantle the logics that made such captivity necessary in the first place. 

Outside the classroom window, a dragonfly hovers. It knows no ticket stubs, no glass, no fundraising campaigns. It is what we claim to save but refuse to emulate: free, fleeting, whole. Until we build

societies that protect habitats instead of cages, the dragonfly will live closer to freedom than we ever allow the tiger to.