Are zoos ethical in the modern age?

Predators born in zoos are likely to die if released

Question: Are zoos ethical in the modern age?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, zoos are bad
Argument‹7 of 7: Predators born in zoos are likely to die if released

Predatory animals born in captivity are unlikely to survive if released into their natural habitat.

The argument

Proponents of this view point to what happens when zoos try to return their animals to the wild. Some zoos have attempted to have release programs instated, but such programs are most likely to fail, and the failure ordinarily ends with the animal dying. Predators are the clearest case. A carnivore's survival depends on capacities that are learned rather than inherited, including finding, stalking and killing prey and judging which other animals to avoid, and an animal born in a zoo never learns predatory skills because the conditions that would teach them are precisely what captivity removes. Food arrives; nothing has to be caught. The consequences show up in two ways. Carnivores are given only a 33 percent chance of surviving in the wild. They also usually have little fear of other large carnivores, and they fail socially, unable to read or enter the relationships that order life in a wild population. Most efforts to introduce predators into the wild have accordingly ended with the animal dying shortly after, so carnivores born in zoos will have to remain in captivity in order to survive. That last point is the argument's charge rather than its consolation. Keeping and breeding animals in captivity is widely defended on the ground that it serves the animals and their species, with return to the wild as the eventual purpose. On this view the record of predator reintroduction shows that for carnivores no such return is realistically available: an animal bred behind glass is committed to spending its entire life there, and a captive-born predator that cannot be released is not a conservation success but a life produced for confinement. Proponents count this among the reasons why zoos are bad.

Premises

[P1]Zoo release programs for predators are most likely to fail because captive-born carnivores never learn predatory skills, giving them only a 33% chance of surviving in the wild. [P2] Such animals also lack fear of other large carnivores and fail socially, so most reintroduction efforts end with the animal's death soon after. [C] Therefore, because captive-born predators are likely to die if released, this counts among the reasons zoos are bad.

Counter-arguments

Some predators survive after being released into the wild. Zoos can prepare animals for the wild by mimicking their natural habitat. Some cases of released animals are successful, therefore it is possible for predators to survive after being in captivity.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The 33% figure is given with no source and no comparison to survival among wild-born young carnivores, which is itself low; without that baseline the number does not show that captive rearing is the cause. [Rejecting P2] What follows is that release programmes for predators need better preparation — which the counter says some zoos provide, with successful cases — and an argument about what happens on release is a reason about reintroduction policy rather than about whether zoos should exist.