Went to the Baltimore zoo a few years ago. If I was an animal there I would have bitten everyone. Everywhere we went people were being mean to the animals and the folks that worked their did not seem to care. My wife and I typically go to the N.C. zoo we like this zoo they have large areas for the animals to roam in not just a cage and since my wife is a teacher they have come up to her school in VA to teach the kids about animals. We have also been invited by this zoo to take her class down there and spend the night on more than one occasion. We will do this in the next few years. My wife and I have attended classes at this zoo at night and they are very informative and obviously care about animals. I feel a zoo when run properly has its place. It is a great place to teach children as well as adults that we are not the only ones on the planet and we need to take care of the world for all the creatures. Oh crap I sound like some kind of hippie tree hugger 
i have heard pretty good things about the NYC Zoo. I have been to the Sacramento Zoo and the San Diego Zoo. Sac is a joke, the animals look pitifully depressed and sad and people do the same as you said, jeer and yell and throw crap at the animals. The San Diego Zoo was better but it still wasnt that great. enclosures were still pretty small and most of hte animals did not seem happy at all. i have heard of a zoo somewhere in the states that has wide open areas with compatible animals, where you ride a safari bus around to look at them. the enclosures are at least a dozen acres or more each and it simulates a real environment, not just an enclosure. i dont mind zoos such as that where it is as realistic and the most comfortable for the animals. but i have heard a lot of negative things about the SF Zoo and many others. I dont expect the SF zoo to recover from this one. from what i have read they have had a lot of trouble in the past. I am all for education but sometimes I feel its better to watch a film or a lecture than to see the animal in all its depressed, suffering glory. the tigers at the Sac Zoo just paced back and forth in front of the glass. I tried to look into its eyes but there was nothing there but blackness. The animals I see on TV in the wild have life in their eyes, most animals at the zoo do not.
