The unique welfare challenges of housing chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos in captivity, and what best-practice facilities look like.
Great ape welfare in zoos represents a microcosm of the broader captivity debate. These are cognitively complex, emotionally aware animals whose natural societies - in the case of chimpanzees - involve territories of many square kilometers, complex political alliances, and lifetime social learning. Even the best zoo enclosures fall far short of this. Yet accredited zoo great apes contribute to conservation breeding programs and public education about species facing extinction in the wild. The welfare calculus is genuinely difficult - these are animals that can suffer significantly in captivity but whose wild counterparts face even greater threats.