I don’t like zoos. I think they’re cruel to animals, plain and simple. I remember visiting Belfast Zoo when I was a kid and watching an elephant bang his head repeatedly against the wall, clearly distressed, clearly not where he belonged. Mind you, it was the 80s, so maybe he was just caught up in the general gloom that blanketed Belfast back then. Still, that image stuck with me, sadness dressed up as entertainment.
But even beyond the animal welfare argument, Belfast Zoo has been a financial millstone around the city’s neck for years. According to a BBC report:
It would be “incredibly wasteful” for the council to keep running Belfast Zoo as it is, according to a councillor.
Councillor Ronan McLaughlin said the zoo had lost about £1.9m in the past year, with an additional £2m earmarked in the past week for safety works in the next four years.
McLaughlin, who sits on the council’s strategic policy and resources committee, said “we have reached the point now where this is completely unsustainable”.
A spokesman for the Zoo said that “it continues to operate in a challenging environment, due to a general increase in the cost of goods, services and utilities, and continued competition from other venues and visitor attractions”.
Let’s cut through the PR-speak: it’s a financial sinkhole. Millions spent just to keep an outdated attraction limping along. That’s money that could be used to improve public services, support community initiatives, or invest in genuine conservation projects that don’t involve caging animals for our amusement.
And let’s be honest, zoos themselves are a relic of a colonial mindset. A mindset that collected exotic animals (and, tragically, people) and paraded them for the entertainment of others. They may not be staging atrocities quite as dehumanising as the case of Ota Benga, a Mbuti man from the Congo, who was literally put on display in the Bronx Zoo’s Monkey House in September 1906 alongside apes, presented as the so-called “missing link.” He was caged, exhibited, and made to perform trivial tasks like shooting a bow and arrow, his clear humanity entirely disregarded. In 1914, when World War I broke out, a return to the Congo became impossible as passenger ship traffic ended. Benga became depressed as his hopes for a return to his homeland faded. On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32 or 33, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, and shot himself in the heart with a borrowed pistol.
No, Belfast Zoo isn’t doing that, but the ethical roots are tangled. And while we might flatter ourselves that things have changed, the fundamental dynamic is still there: confinement, performance, spectatorship. Being stuck halfway up Cavehill is not the natural habitat for giraffes.
I really resent £2 million of my rates going to prop this up. We need a serious rethink, not just about this zoo, but about how we treat animals and what we consider education or entertainment. Conservation can happen without cages. Respect doesn’t require bars. And nostalgia is no excuse for cruelty, however well-meaning it might pretend to be.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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