Environment

I'm going to post one of my nested comments here, because I think it bears pointing out:

[This] article is full of rhetorical fallacies designed to influence you towards their view that zoos aren’t good.

Take this part about conservation funding:

“Zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens are critical conservation partners, and their role should not be under-valued, under-recognized or misunderstood,”

To which the opposition interviewee states:

“But the reality is that it’s really a very small fraction of their funding that is going to field conservation.”

That is not a direct response to the first assertion. The first quote didn’t assert that the majority of funds went to conservation, just that the funds that do are both significant and critical to conservation partners.

“That puts them collectively among the world’s largest contributors to conservation,” Daniel Ashe, president and CEO of the AZA, told Vox.

To which the clearly very biased author then responds:

However, it’s just 5 percent of how much zoos and aquariums spent on operations and construction alone in 2018.

Soooo? You think getting rid of those funds is better for conservation?

If you read the part on breeding, they do something similar; they embed one section, that acknowledges that zoos have in fact been key to successful breeding and reintroduction programs, inside several quotes of personal opinions: the first one literally from a newspaper opinion piece, and the second from an actual scientist who acknowledges that the breeding programs do work, but just doesn’t personally think that is justification enough for zoos.

This article is biased trash. There are plenty of arguments to have about the ethics of zoos, but this article is not dealing with those head-on, because they’re not clear-cut. Instead, it’s trying to trick you into thinking that none of the actual positive impacts of zoos exist.

This is how smart misinformation works; use leading language and selective quotes to make the viewers think you said something you didn’t, so you can always go, “Oh, but I never SAID the breeding programs don’t work, or that the funding isn’t important!”