In the coming days, Rio de Janeiro City Hall will review, perhaps from private sources, proposals to lease the city’s Zoo, which is closed due to dozens of irregularities and mistreatment of animals, who sadly live there.

The concept of zoos is completely outdated, but Brazil still insists they must exist, as places for humans fun and animal suffering.

To enrich this debate, we share here Carlos Magno Abreu’s, environmental analyst of IBAMA, opinion. He has been involved in this world of zoos and animal trafficking for a while, as it is reported in his book Boitatá Operation: the one million dollar snake.

Let’s see what he says about it in an interview:

“Magno: I think zoos and the use of animals in circuses also have to end. It is not possible today that we have this kind of activity as a form of entertainment.

Reporter: But zoos and circuses aren’t allowed? Don’t you think people have the right, or rather, should know the wildlife, so they could help to defend them?

Magno: There was a time I believed it, but today I don’t think so. Perhaps this was important many years ago, but not today. I really believe that we only defend what we know and love, but I do not think I need to see a lion, who once ran in the wild in African savannas, trapped in a steel cage for life, to know that he should not be arrested in a steel cage for life, but running free in African savannas. Today we have several other options for this, for example, several television documentaries show animals in the wild, safaris observation and so on.

But let me correct what I said before, I do not think that zoos have to end. What has to stop is the specific trade for zoos, because today wild animals are hunted and captured exactly to go to zoos, to be attractive and to make money. This makes no sense, besides being ethically and morally absurd. I think zoos should serve as an example of our stupidity. The other day a friend of mine went to Poland to study and went to visit the museum of the Auschwitz concentration camp. She returned from there depressed, spent days crying a lot, because she saw with her own eyes the level of stupidity that humans can get. She took a slap in the face of reality.

I think zoos should be not a fun and exciting activity where people laugh at animals that are trapped and suffering for years. People find it funny when a monkey crap in his hand and eat his own feces! Without even thinking that this is a very serious psychological disorder and that this animal must have passed, or worse, is going through everyday torture to get to this level of totally unnatural behavior.

In my view, schools and parents should take children to the zoo so they could see how their generation and previous ones were imbeciles. Children should see the imprisoned animals and weep with shame to see such a scene and know what their parents did was not enough to stop this nonsense to happen. This way, we would have fewer animals in zoss as time goes by, until we reached a point where there would not be more animals to put there, because we would have been able to prevent other animals to be hunted in their habitat to be sent to zoos.

Unfortunately I think we are closer a situation of having no more animals in zoos, because soon we will not have wild animals anymore (…) ”

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian

President, GAP Project International