capitalism is killing our future

we went to the zoo today.

this picture is not from the zoo but an anarchist houseproject, the 'reil78', instead. so why even mention it? 
well, when we moved here, we got free tickets for the zoo. i suppose it was a welcome 'gift'. it is today we decided to go, knowing we wouldn't like it all that much but since we had the tickets, why not at least give it a chance. 

it didn't take more than 10 minutes for us to realize our mistake. 
we've always been critical of zoos because their supposed function, preserving animal species, is a function they aren't equipped for, especially given the fact that things like wildlife reserves or wild parks exist. 
the enclosures lack enrichment, are generally too small and crowded, the food is of mediocre quality, some animals are still forced or at the very least incentivised to perform tricks for uncritical onlookers, some require specific temperature or weather conditions most zoos simply can't recreate and so on.
the only function they can fulfill reasonably well is to make money. 
this was their sole function back in the colonial days (spoiler: they didn't just display animals in sub-animal conditions back then but everything considered 'exotic' from a western european perspective. yikes.) and it hasn't much changed since, though the rhetoric employed by zoos has.

in our relatively short visit, most animals we've encountered were either staring at a wall for more than 10 minutes straight, repeating the same motion over and over, ramming dull objects or literally playing dead.
 
my personal 'highlights' here included an otter trying to dig their way through a billboard for 5 minutes before moving to a seperate spot and continuing, the birds having clipped wings and being surrounded by an electric fence, an elephant just gnawing away at a locked door, a penguin staring at a wall without motion for 10+ minutes and a mountain goat lacking enrichment so much it was bouncing itself off an enclosure wall over and over. 
some of those incidents i've attached in the "additional photos" section, though if i were to catalogue them all, we'd be here a month.

on days like these, i wanna burn it all down. capitalism has killed our future, we simply live in its rotten corpse.