“A lion always hunts for himself.”
I’ve heard this phrase numerous times in movies and cartoons, but it’s a misfortune that I’ve seen lions only in a zoo, caged behind bars. I have often come across news of lions or tigers attacking the cattle or people in a human settlement. Lions and tigers are wild animals. My primary school books have taught me that wild animals eat flesh and I’ve watched on Discovery channel that wild animals love to hunt their prey. The point is, wild animals live free. But I’ve never seen a lion hunting, simply because the zoo isn’t a place to hunt.
Wild animals are served with meat sufficient for their survival and insufficient for their health. Serving them food in their cages makes them weak, unhealthy, and lazy. They need exercise which is impossible to come by and the tourists visiting them are a source of mental and physical disturbance. It pains me to see the King of the Jungle become a source of entertainment for people. It is another thing that zoos bears a tag of ‘saving wild life’, by breeding and nurturing them, but the truth lies in plain sight.
The number of zoo animals that die annually on a global level is a matter of concern. Keeping wild animals in a zoo is a modern version of cruelty, where the animals aren’t tame nor are they free. Humans are snatching away their rights. The forest is the home of wild animals and we humans are cutting down the forests to make way for industries. That’s why they wander into human habitats. It’s not those animals that are attacking our place, it’s we humans who are attacking their shelter in the name of ‘development’. We need to understand that a hungry carnivore can’t live on food served to it. It should be free to find its own food. We need to build wild life sanctuaries to save them and not zoos to make them our slaves. It’s time to shut down zoos. Slavery hurts! Cruelty gives pain. Who can better understand this than us?