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Comment by acollins1331 | Hacker News Reader

All zoos are like that and incredibly sad from the inside even if they look fine to the guests. The only ones that have a moral leg to stand on are the rehabilitation ones that use proceeds to help the animals, but it's still a very wishy washy thing to be running an animal prison for profit.

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Yes. I support a local non-profit ape rescue centre. The vast majority of their primates were rescued from the pet trade, medical research, beach photographer props, circuses. Some have disease (e.g. rickets) / deformities from poor diet in their pre-rescue lives, while others lack social or survival skills. Some have physical injuries, e.g. from their teeth being knocked out by their previous owners. These factors mean that a return to the wild is rarely possible (assuming the original environment still exists).

The staff are passionate about looking after these primates and do not see the centre as a moral issue. The fact that the animals need to be rescued in the first place is the real moral issue.

Interestingly, the centre's worse reviewers are those who expect a zoo run for the visitors benefit, and who complain about the ‘untidy’ enclosures (i.e. good climbable trees that make it hard to see any action) or the fact that a given primate might have chosen to sit quietly in a sunny area where it has good privacy, rather than perform on demand.

Almost all zoos in the US are non-profit.

I wish they did the same for human prisons.

Only 8.4% of prisons in the US are private and for profit.

I suspect that figure is wrong, because the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not publish the rate on prisons but on prisoners.

"As of 2016, 8.5% of the prisoners are in private for-profit prisons. Since 2000, the number of people in private prisons has increased 47%, compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 9%."

Source: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

So, if the annual increase rate has not change since 2016, as of 2019 about 9.3% of the prisoners are in for-profit jails. [edit: computed the rate, it is not "more than 10%"]

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