If you were a hunter perhaps you would understand the true cruelty of zoos.
One visit to a long term prison for violent offenders, and you would be shivering in your boots just after walking through such a place. Its much worse for predatory animals than for predatory humans.
The world is just like that. Animals eat other animals, with a delight which most humans see as abject cruelty.
Put yourself in that world with a liberal vacant smile and your feather duster. If you are not just about the fastest 100 meter sprinter in the world, you would simply be dead meat.
A predators burp would be the only footnote to your life , in the natural order of things.
Such is the world of fang and claw, and as humans, we deserve no part in it without understanding that.
Zoos preserve nothing. They are black holes of suffering imposed on animals and the natural order. Show me one where there has not been tragedy and death. You can't.
I agree with your comments although I am not a hunter.
Black holes of suffering is right. Zoos are just prisons for animals who have done no wrong.
And for that matter, since I worked on the Cuban Prisoner's Project back at the time of the Mariel Boatlift, sorting out the political prisoners from the criminals, I spent a good deal of time in the Atlanta pen, and a couple of the guys assigned to me were fellows it would make you shiver in your boots to be alone in the room with (although with an interpreter and a corrections officer within call, it still would have been too late for me . . .)
Your position is hyperbolic. Certainly there are animals that do not do well in captivity -- as Kipling said, "Some - there are losses in every trade - /Will break their hearts ere bitted and made, /Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard, /And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard."
But I have seen contented animals in captivity in the revamped Atlanta zoo, and in the National Zoo in Washington, as well as some of the open air situations like Wild Kingdom. The old-fashioned concrete-and-bars zoos are thankfully passing away and will not be missed. Since I have worked with animals my entire life, I'm confident I can tell the difference between a terminally bored, anxious obsessive captive and a bright-eyed soft-coated calm animal.
Of course the animals are dependent on the good will and competence of their keepers, and those who do not care well for the wild animals under their charge deserve the scorn and reproach of everybody. But living in a decent zoo is better than dying slowly with a poacher's underpowered AK bullet in them. Capstick told us about the encroachment of "civilization" (read subsistence farmers) on the game preserves in Kenya and other African countries, with the resultant near extinction of many species. For that matter, it beats being a South Georgia deer with the browse line at 46 inches and climbing.
P.S. . . . everybody who happens to disagree with you is not necessarily (1) ignorant; (2) a liberal. Pass the word.