I was planning to donate the couple bucks I had left over from the year to the charity called “San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance”, I was doing a background check on CharityNavigator and they gave the charity full ratings so it seemed good.
Then I stumbled upon the salary section. What the fuck? I earn <20k a year and was planning to contribute to someone’s million dollar salary? WHAT.
I would also add that some Zoos are independently funded. Support them as they usually have the skill and drive to support communities and animals.
I am a big fan of most zoos too, so I wouldn’t want anyone to write them off completely. As I’ve gotten to learn more about the animals, when I get time to talk to staff now, I’ve been getting more info on the regulations and licensing they have to navigate, and transitioning from a place helping animals to one that also displays animals is a pretty big leap, and that is going to require much more overhead. While many cases won’t be as extreme as a huge zoo like OP was looking at, that would seem to be what leads to larger and larger zoos starting to look more like a typical corporation on paper like that.
Zoos are NOT in it to “support the animals”. If they were they would keep people away from the animals.
I did some in-depth research on a Zoo near me because I was looking for fraud by one of their board members because their name was found in the Panama papers. I found that they get ALL the money they need to support the animals and staff from the government, and it gets put in a nice non-profit which they happily told people on their website. But the Zoo had a second for-profit company, which was the company that made profit from all the people and children visiting.
So no, fuck Zoos. They are only in it to make money.
The Zoo near me is actually completely supported by the community. They have several acres of land and have build impressive exhibits and done work to help save endangered species via breading. They also employ quite the staff and get volunteers of all ages. It is actually pretty impressive given that they are very careful about where there funding comes from.
Some Zoos are corrupt but not all of them. Lemmy seems to want to find the corrupt evil version of everything.