Many travelers who love animals find themselves drawn to zoos, aquariums, sanctuaries, and rehabilitation centers. Not all of those words mean what you think they do. One of them doesn't legally mean anything at all.
I should say up front that I worked in this world. I spent years in education departments at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Denver Zoo, and the Downtown Aquarium in Denver, and a summer internship at a zoo is the reason I went on my first international trip, to Kenya. Zoos are a large part of why I travel.
I think zoos are an ethical gray area. I don't feel the same way about them that I did when I started, and that's why I'm careful about which ones I recommend.
Anyone Can Call Themselves a Sanctuary
There's no law stopping a facility from putting the word "sanctuary" on a sign.
A place that breeds tiger cubs for photo sessions can call itself a sanctuary. A roadside attraction with a row of concrete enclosures can call itself a rescue. The words have real meaning in the animal welfare world. They have almost no protection in the marketplace.
This matters because "sanctuary" and "rescue" are the words that make a well-meaning traveler relax. You see the sign and assume someone has already asked the hard questions for you.
Often nobody has.
Licensing Is a Floor, Not a Standard
Most facilities that exhibit animals in the United States need a USDA exhibitor license.
That license does less than people assume. It sets minimums for things like enclosure size, cleanliness, and public safety. It isn't an assessment of whether the animals are thriving, whether the facility does anything for conservation, or whether those animals should be there at all.
A facility can hold a valid license and still be a place you wouldn't want to support.
AZA has estimated that roughly 2,800 animal exhibits operate under USDA license in this country, and that fewer than ten percent of them are accredited.
Roadside Zoos
Most of the facilities in that unaccredited majority are what people call roadside zoos.
They're usually small, privately owned, and built along a highway to catch passing traffic. Concrete floors and chain link. A few big cats, a bear, some primates, a petting area. Signs promising photo opportunities. Enclosures that give an animal nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Many of them are also breeding operations, because cubs and babies are what bring people through the gate.
Watch the animals themselves. Pacing back and forth along a fence line, head bobbing, rocking, and over-grooming are stereotypic behaviors, and they are what an animal does when its environment gives it no other outlet.
What Accreditation Means
Accreditation is voluntary, which is part of why it means something. A facility chooses to be inspected against standards well above the legal minimum, and it has to keep passing.
For zoos and aquariums, look for AZA. Association of Zoos and Aquariums accreditation involves inspection by a team of experts, review by a panel, and reaccreditation every five years. It covers animal welfare, veterinary care, conservation, education, staffing, and finances.
For sanctuaries, look for GFAS. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries accredits facilities that meet standards for housing, nutrition, veterinary care, and governance. GFAS accredited sanctuaries are nonprofit. They don't breed. They don't buy, sell, or trade animals. They commit to lifelong care, which means an animal that arrives is a resident rather than inventory.
Be careful with lookalikes. There are accrediting bodies with names and logos designed to resemble the well known ones. A badge on a website isn't the same as a standard behind it. If you don't recognize the accreditor, look it up.
Colorado, where I live, writes some of this into law. With limited exceptions, only AZA accredited or certified facilities can hold canids, cats, and bears, and a wildlife sanctuary has to be accredited by AZA or GFAS to be licensed at all. Most states are not that specific.
What a Good Zoo Does
If a zoo is going to keep wild animals, it should be doing more than keeping them well.
It takes part in coordinated breeding programs for species that need them. It funds field conservation, with money going to projects in the places those animals come from. It does research that feeds back into wildlife management. The people who work there can name the biologist they collaborate with in Peru or Namibia, because the collaboration is real.
And it teaches. Most Americans will never see a wild elephant, and a zoo may be the only place they ever stand near one and feel something about it. I taught in zoos for years and I still believe that matters.
But an animal in a zoo has given up a wild life it did not choose to give up. Good programming doesn't make that a small thing.
There are also animals that cannot go back. Injuries that never healed right. Confiscated pets that never learned to be wild. Animals born in captivity to parents who were born in captivity. For them a good facility isn't a compromise, it's the only place left to be.
What a Real Sanctuary Does
A real sanctuary exists because animals need somewhere to go.
The residents are usually animals that can't be released. Confiscated pets. Retired performers. Animals from facilities that shut down. Injured wildlife that would not survive on its own.
Real sanctuaries don't breed, because breeding creates more animals in need of sanctuary. They don't acquire animals to build a collection. Many are closed to the public entirely, and the ones that do open limit visits in ways that put the animals first.
Look at how contact is handled. At a real sanctuary you generally don't touch the animals, and staff don't handle them either unless there's a medical reason.
If a place calls itself a sanctuary and also lets you hold a baby animal, those two things are in direct conflict.
Rehabilitation Centers Are Something Else Again
A rehabilitation center has a different job from either a zoo or a sanctuary. It takes in sick, injured, or orphaned wild animals, treats them, and releases them.
Release is the goal, and it changes how a good rehab facility runs. Animals meant to go back to the wild need to stay wary of people, so contact is kept to the minimum the treatment requires. Many rehabbers use screens, one-way glass, or feeding methods designed so the animal never associates food with a human face.
Which means a rehabilitation center that offers tourists a chance to feed or hold the patients is working against its own stated mission.
Some legitimate centers do welcome visitors, and some have permanent residents that couldn't be released. That's normal. The question is whether the visiting is built around the animals' recovery or around the visit.
Traveling Abroad
Everything above applies to the United States. Abroad, the rules are different.
AZA accredits facilities in a handful of countries, but most of the world runs on regional associations instead. Europe has EAZA. Australia and New Zealand have ZAA. Southeast Asia has SEAZA. Above all of them sits WAZA, the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which has around 280 direct members and roughly 1,300 more through those regional bodies.
Standards vary between those associations, and welfare is only one part of what most of them assess. WAZA membership is still a reasonable first filter. WAZA also takes positions of its own, and it does not approve of elephant rides at member institutions, on welfare, conservation messaging, and safety grounds all at once.
The harder problem abroad is the enormous number of facilities that belong to nothing at all. Elephant camps, tiger attractions, and monkey parks across Southeast Asia mostly sit outside any accreditation system, and research on them has found welfare conditions well below what any accredited zoo would accept.
A few rules of thumb hold up anywhere. Look for a WAZA or regional association member. Be skeptical of any facility whose main offering is contact with the animals. And be especially careful with the word "sanctuary" abroad, where it is used even more loosely than it is here.
A Note on Cub Petting
If a facility offers photos with baby big cats, that isn't a conservation program. It's a breeding operation.
Cubs can only be used for photos during a narrow window of a few weeks. Keeping that window open year round takes continuous breeding, which produces a steady supply of animals that age out of usefulness. Where those animals go afterward is a question these places usually can't answer well.
None of those cats will ever be released. There's no wild population waiting for them.
Questions to Ask Before You Visit
Before buying a ticket, ask:
- Is the facility AZA accredited, GFAS accredited, or neither?
- If it calls itself a sanctuary, does it breed animals? Does it buy, sell, or trade them?
- Where did the animals come from?
- Am I being offered contact with the animals? Who benefits from that contact?
- Does the facility fund conservation in the field? Can it tell me which projects?
- Do the enclosures give animals somewhere to go when they want to be out of sight?
- Are the animals doing anything, or are they spending their time pacing, rocking, or sitting in bare enclosures?
- If it's a rehabilitation center, is the goal release?
- If I'm abroad, is the facility a member of WAZA or a regional association?
- What happens to these animals when they stop drawing visitors?
It Isn't a Clean Division
I don't want to pretend this sorts neatly into good zoos and bad sanctuaries, or the other way around.
There are excellent zoos doing serious conservation work. There are terrible places calling themselves sanctuaries. There are also small, legitimate facilities without accreditation, sometimes because accreditation is expensive and they've chosen to put their limited resources directly into caring for animals.
Accreditation is probably the most useful shortcut we have, but it is still a shortcut. The questions above will tell you more than a logo will.
Ultimately, each of us has to decide whether the facility we're standing in is doing more good for animals than harm. That's a complicated question, and people who care deeply about animals are going to land in different places.
I've worked in this field for years, and I still don't have a clean answer.
What I keep coming back to is the same thing I said in my piece about animal selfies:
Ask why the animal is there.
If the answer has to do with the animal's needs, you're probably somewhere worth supporting.
If the answer has more to do with yours, look a little harder.
And underneath all of it is the hardest problem of all. Whatever we decide about which animals belong in captivity, there is less and less wild left to return them to.