Cons

There are quite a few risks and disadvantages associated with captive breeding as a measure of increasing species numbers.

According to WWF (2014), the biggest risk of captive breeding is that of breeding animals for commercial profit; this is especially so when the body parts of certain endangered animals have high value, such as the commercial breeding of tigers in Asia for use of their body parts in traditional medicine.

Another risk of captive breeding in zoos is the lack of or questionable international standards for such programmes in zoos, allowing for exploitation of such programmes for commercial purposes. If standards were stringently maintained, this risk can be lowered.

One difficulty of captive breeding is that such programmes have to be selective in what species to place under the programmes, as some species do not breed well under confinement. This may worsen the condition of the animals, and leave them worse off than if they were left in the wild. The lack of experience zoos have in managing some species may also contribute to poor progress, at least proper management is learned and implemented (which may take a long time depending on the expertise of caretakers in the zoo) (Ralls and Meadows, 2001).

Apart from the risks and difficulty captive breeding entails, another deterrent against this type of programme is the heavy financial costs it usually incurs. Sometimes, captive breeding of an endangered species may cost up to five hundred thousand dollars annuallly for just one species (Derrickson and Snyder, 1992). Also, a huge amount of space may be required in order to increase the success of the programme and the numbers in a species, which some zoos may be unwilling to provide without adequate compensation (Snyder et al., 1996). Indeed, according to Snyder and his colleagues (1996), captive breeding should not be implemented to restore species numbers just because a wild population falls to a size considered to be a threat, as captive breeding may prove to be more harmful than good.

An instance of when captive breeding is not useful as a conservation tool can be seen in McCleery and colleagues’ study on the effects of a captive breeding and release programme (CBRP) on the restoration of the endangered Key Largo Woodrat (KLWR). The results showed that the loss of individual woodrats taken from the wild to facilitate the programme outweighed the reproductive growth and survival of woodrats in confinement, thus the absence of a captive breeding programme in this case would have been more prudent (McCleery, Hostetler and Oli, 2014).

 

A general assessment of the zoo and its various roles, as well as how well it fulfils these roles