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We hope our insightful zoo quotes collection makes us reflect on and change our opinions on zoo culture, animal extinction, and whether zoos need to be banned or cherished.
Some say zoos are suitable for wild animals; they protect them from poachers and save them from extinction.
Animal activists, including PETA, have anti-zoo opinions and feel that zoos are terrible for wild animals as they are separated from their natural habitat.
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
– Anatole France
The above quote by Anatole France encapsulates the deep bond between humans and animals.
It also serves as a poignant reminder to advocate for their welfare within zoo environments.
As zoos transition towards sanctuaries of conservation and education, such quotes inspire us to ponder our ethical responsibilities.
They affirm the need for facilities that prioritize enrichment activities—mental stimulation akin to wildlife challenges—to replicate natural habitats as closely as possible.
Let our curated zoo quotes collection be a worthwhile read.
Best Zoo Quotes and Sayings
We would consider it cruel to confine a dog permanently in a kennel. Yet we visit zoos where hundreds of wild animals are kept permanently in the equivalent of a kennel.
– Virginia McKenna
Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
– Evan Esar
Stop going to the zoos! Don’t take your children to the zoos! No creature ever deserves captivity without any crime!
– Mehmet Murat Ildan
The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
– Nadine Gordimer
Biodiversity can’t be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.
– Donella Meadows
Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country.
– Sam Simon
Also Read: 30 Famous Quotes about White Lies; Is it Good or Bad?
People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren’t for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today.
– Betty White
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
– Peter De Vries
I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.
– Christopher Walken
If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.
– Albert Einstein
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with ‘we’ I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.
– Frans de Waal
For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
– Diane Ackerman
Funny Zoo Quotes and Sayings
We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism.
– Rigoberta Menchu
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
– Yann Martel
The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
– Desmond Morris
Zoos should concentrate more on the preservation side of things.
– Gerald Durrell
I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.
– Grigori Perelman
The only place that work and motion are the same thing is the zoo where people pay to see the animals move around.
– Taiichi Ohno
Also Read: 20 Sustainable Development Quotes and Sayings to Save Earth
Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild.
– Jack Hanna
In zoos, along with the animals, the humanity of man is also prisoned! No cage is humane!
– Mehmet Murat Ildan
The Zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. But there it was, I wanted to see an oyster-catcher and I was no better than the people who’d caged oyster-catchers for me to see.
– Russell Hoban
Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.
– Margaret Atwood
Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they’re smart that amazes me. It’s baffling whenever you find someone who’s smart – incredible. Soon you’ll have zoos for such things.
– Frank Zappa
The voice of the natural world would be, Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it then when you start interfering.
– Jane Goodall
The only creature on earth whose natural habitat is a zoo is the zookeeper.
– Robert Breault
Meaningful Quotes On Zoo and Human Beings
Let us free all the animals in the zoos to show them that we are not animals!
– Mehmet Murat Ildan
If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.
– Jim Stengel
Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
– Michael J. Fox
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence.
– Wallace Stegner
Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby.
– Sy Montgomery
I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
– Carl Sagan
Also Read: Famous Quotes About Biodiversity Protection and Conservation
In my view this is not democracy, but a zoo. It was exactly what we expected, but not on that scale nor in that form. In a word, it was nothing but a zoo, you can’t put it better.
– Alexander Lukashenko
The whole idea of being in captivity in such limited space, especially in a zoo, causes elephants to suffer. They develop all kinds of foot diseases. They die. They get cysts. Not only is it painful, it eventually kills them.
– Lily Tomlin
We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture’s approval of this activity.
– Carol J. Adams
Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.
– Daniel J. Boorstin
It is hard to get mad at Donald Trump for saying stupid things, in the same way you don’t get mad at a monkey when he throws poop at you at the zoo. What does get me angry is the ridiculous, disingenuous defending of the poop-throwing monkey.
– Jon Stewart
A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be – will be – a human zoo. A high-tech slum.
– Edward Abbey
People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it’s scary. And the bear because it’s intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.
– Lorne Michaels
Freedom Quotes About Zoo
A good zoo, Stella said, is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don’t hurt. She pauses, considering her words. A good zoo is how humans make amends.
– Katherine Applegate
Met someone who works at the zoo. Apparently the panda is a nasty animal.
– Dov Davidoff
Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.
– Cees Nooteboom
A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal – of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania – but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place. Animals are far more flexible than we realize. IF they weren’t, they wouldn’t have survived. But my opinion about zoos came after research. Initially I had the opinion that most people have, that they are jails.
– Yann Martel
If you fall into a lion’s pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it’s hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it’s bloodthirsty, but because you’ve invaded it’s territory.
– Yann Martel
As you may know, some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment.
– Temple Grandin
Also Read: 30 Famous Liberal Quotes And Sayings On Freedom
What a lonely species we are, searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting companion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity.
– Diane Ackerman
It does get old to have to always be a monkey in a zoo. I don’t know what it’s like any more to be anonymous.
– Kevin Bacon
If I had my way there wouldn’t be a single lion or tiger in captivity anywhere in the world. They never take to it. They’re never happy. They never settle down… You can see it in their eyes.
– Hugh Lofting
What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be aware? The impression of a conscious presence is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are self-aware in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!
– Roger Penrose
I don’t have time for lie-on-the-beach vacations. I’m a zoo person. There’s one in New Jersey where animals actually come up to your car. I love the monkeys – I used to give them bubblegum to chew.
– Missy Elliot
Politics is the best show in America. I love animals and I love politicians, and I like to watch both of ’em at play, either back home in their native state, or after they’ve been captured and sent to a zoo, or to Washington.
– Will Rogers
We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.
– Germaine Greer
It is not only visitors to the zoo who are fascinated but uneasy in the presence of chimpanzees; the same is true of scientists. The more they learn about these great apes, the deeper our identity crisis seems to become. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
– Frans de Waal
We hope our famous zoo quotes and sayings are an eye-opener.
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