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n Zooicide, Sue Coe employs her bold artistic style to confront the institution of zoos, showing that they are inherently cruel and why the solution is not to reform them, but to abolish them. Coe’s visual journalism investigates the mental anguish inflicted upon animals— including cases where they have killed themselves to end their torture. Zoos may pay lip service to education, enrichment, and conservation, but their depravity is systemic and ubiquitous; it is built into the very idea of animals as commodities. As long as they are considered property, animals will be treated as things, with no rights—things that can be caged, bred, abused, or killed for profit and entertainment. It’s time to end this cruelty.

A powerful accomplice to Coe's images, and written specifically for them, Stephen F. Eisenman's essay, "The Capitalist Zoo," is a history of zoos written from the future—a future in which zoos as we know them no longer exist.