Perhaps your last impression of the zoo was not of an astonishing place full of playful monkeys and towering giraffes, but of the sad and listless eyes of a poor wild animal imprisoned in a hopelessly unsuitable cage. For zoos are not always exotic and exciting places. They may be cruel, dank, and depressing. And however startling our first impressions of the zoo might have been, we soon begin to look at the world with clearer, more critical eyes. We no longer visit the zoo to marvel at the sheer size of the elephants or to gasp at the jaws of the lions, and we start to question the ethics of it all.
Most countries have at least one national zoo.
Britain, for example, has over eighty mammal collections that might properly be called zoos, the United Sates has over two hundred, and there is a huge variation in their quality. Most of us can intuitively recognise a bad zoo when we have the misfortune to visit one. Yet there seem to be very few rules to help us determine which zoos, if any, deserve to be called 'good zoos'. Today we are all becoming 'green consumers'. We have green supermarkets, and green products from washing powder to petrol.