Can modern zoos be justified by conservation and education?

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Few institutions provoke such different reactions as the zoo, and the disagreement is not really about facts. It is about what we owe an individual animal. Defenders point to work that happens nowhere else. Breeding programmes have returned species to the wild that had no wild population left, among them the Arabian oryx and the California condor. Zoos also fund field conservation and, less measurably, create the attachment that pays for it later: a child who has stood close to an elephant is more likely to care about a forest they will never see. Critics answer that this proves less than it appears to. Only a small share of the species in most collections belong to any breeding programme, and the animals that draw crowds are rarely the ones in danger. Large predators and marine mammals show behaviour in captivity that they never show in the wild, which is difficult to read as anything but distress, and no benefit to the visitor transfers to the animal that provided it. My view is that the answer depends on the species rather than on the institution. Keeping amphibians, insects and small mammals in good conditions costs them little and has saved several from extinction. Confining animals that range over hundreds of kilometres cannot be justified by a conservation claim their presence does not support. A defensible zoo would be smaller, far less impressive, and considerably more useful than the one most cities have.