What to do About Bad Zoos

The other day, two zoos were arguing on Twitter. One of them was trying to explain to the other that giving your dog treats after performing sexual acts can be weird, because it can reinforce the behavior for reasons other than the animal's enjoyment. The other zoo was arguing that the first zoo was then clearly against the idea of "after care", saying that enjoying a meal together after sex was just something people do, and it doesn't need to be that deep. In response, the first zoo dropped some screenshots from the second zoo's Discord server, a space where apparently they were posting a lot of zoo porn. The screenshots painted a pretty bad picture. It was the first zoo posting in the server about how whatever porn was posted looked like the animal in question wasn't enjoying themselves, or was being coerced into sex. The second zoo replied to these criticisms incredibly dismissively, saying that if they didn't like it, they just shouldn't watch, or that the content was hot, so who really cared if the animal was distressed.
 
 
This was, of course, an extremely disheartening thing to see. It's not like I knew the person in question all that well, but I'd definitely seen them around, and interacted with them a couple of times. The fact that they were so clearly unconcerned about animal welfare made me... Well, it made me feel a lot of things. Disappointed for sure, that another zoo like me could be so callous. Angry that it was going on for presumably a while and this was the first that I was hearing about it. Sad that this was another case that people outside the community could use to throw us all into one basket and say that we don't really care about animals at the end of the day. But it also made me motivated to do something about it. I was halfway through writing a quote tweet condemning this zoo when I stopped for a minute and thought about what exactly I was doing. What my goal was. 
 
 
Was calling this person out really the best way to help? I mean, sure, it would get a bunch of negative attention on them, and maybe it would cause them to lose some reputation, but does that actually cause them to close the group, or reconsider the kinds of content they find acceptable? Probably not. But what it might do is direct people to that space and give it more attention. There aren't a ton of great places on the internet to discover new zoo porn, and advertising that there is a space where it's being shared, even if some of the content is bad, could definitely bring people to that space to engage with that content. In that way, people could almost see an influx of users as an endorsement to their philosophy: that it's fine so long as it's hot. 
 
 
But not calling it out doesn't really feel right either. Like I mentioned, I'd interacted with this person for a while. I was even following them. They otherwise seemed pretty cool. I'm sure there were other people, besides just me, who were following them too and would have also liked to know that they were doing some shitty stuff behind the scenes. I have the privilege of having a pretty big brand as far as zoos go. Isn't it my responsibility to try and share this message, to help others beware of this person? 
 
 
There's the outside factor to consider as well. Since I'm a pretty big name at this point, there are lots more than just zoos that see my tweets. There are anti-zoos sure, but there are also people outside the whole zoo sphere that come across what I say fairly often as well. What if the first way that people actually engage with a zoo is by seeing them calling out another zoo for being somewhat abusive? It's not a great look. If something like that gets shared, especially by me when I try my best to avoid "drama", I'm pretty confident other zoos would feel compelled to share it too, and then suddenly it becomes a big story. And while obviously, that's not as important as keeping animals safe, at the same time it feels worth considering. 
 
 
I'll be honest, I felt really stuck in that moment. It really didn't feel like there was a great way to deal with this. And that sucks. 
 
 
Anyway, speaking of transitions, it can be really hard cheerleading a minority movement. We talked about this a lot in our article on representation, but that's mostly focused on how to be good representation yourself; There's a backside to that coin as well, and that's that sometimes there are people out there that are bad representation, and there really isn't a lot you can do about it. People are quick to judge groups based entirely on whatever piece of that group they can see, and unfortunately, the piece that people see tends to be the worst of that group.
 
 
In fact, it doesn't even need to be someone actually from that group. There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from putting a trans flag on their truck before driving through a crowd of people, and then it's suddenly a "trans mass murderer". There's nothing stopping someone from buying a Swedish flag and then running out into the street and kicking a baby, and then suddenly Swedish people kick babies. There's nothing stopping someone from putting a zeta in their bio and then saying a bunch of slurs, and then suddenly zoos are all bigots. False flag undertakings like this probably don't account for any of the big and notable figureheads who we see representing the zoo community right now, at least, not as far as I know, but in an online landscape where bots and alts are everyday sights, it can be so hard to know if that new viral zoo tweet from someone you've never heard of before is actually even from a zoo or not. Some of you might be familiar with Knotty Princess, a Twitter account from a while ago now that got fairly large posting adult content, and then suddenly started going crazy antisemitic, and then just other kinds of racist as well. Famous YouTuber Moist Cr1tikal even made a video about it. To this day, it's impossible to know if that was just someone trolling, but it certainly hurt our reputation.
 
 
The worst part about it was that if you were a zoo on Twitter at the time, it was awful just sitting there watching as this person wracked up millions of impressions saying "Hello I think dogs are hot and also think this minority is the ugliest minority", or other likewise awful things. And even though we were trying our absolute best to provide a counter narrative, at the same time us saying "Hey actually this person's opinions aren't representative of the whole group we're actually very chill", that did not make it into the stories around this. 
 
 
And that's all just thinking about outside actors that are trying to make a group look bad. There's also the possibility that there just are bad people within your minority. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffery Dahmer were pretty awful sources of representation for gay men during a time when gay rights were just starting to find their footing. I'm sure had you polled all gay men during that time they probably would have agreed that they'd rather not have people like that in their community. But, that didn't stop the media, and especially people against gay rights, from using their existence as ammo against the gays. Similarly, I think the vast majority of our zoo friends would love to be able to delete the whole Sappho chapter from the history books, but that's just a thing that happened, and that's something that we have to live with and adapt away from. 
 
 
There's a question that we've touched on before, that goes something like this: Is evil something that we're born with, or is it learned? Chosen? Is there even such a thing as an "evil person", or is that just a narrative shortcut for when we want to talk about people who do things that we obviously know are bad, and it's easier to label them as evil than it is to internalize someone's whole life story and understand why they've done the things that they've done. Maybe one person is choosing evil deliberately, while another is trying to chose good but is seriously misguided. I don't know. I'm certainly not saying that I can read anyone's mind except my own. But, regardless, I think that if someone is going around killing puppies because they think it's hot, I'm very comfortable labeling them as a bad person.
 
 
There are always going to be bad people, and as such, there are always going to be bad zoos. So what do we do about it? 
 
 
Well, it's hard to say. If there was an easy answer, this would be a tweet instead of an article. Even if you do get someone dead to rights doing something abusive, it's so easy for that person to just delete that account, and make a new name with a new face and just start from the bottom again. That's one downside to the fact that we're all operating so anonymously. In fact, it's extra easy because that person can message all the other bad people who were enabling that and say "hey this is my new account please help me grow my audience again." And that's if they choose to do anything at all. Someone can catch them doing something abusive, and their response can always just be "So what? It's hot." Maybe you can get their space taken down. Maybe you can get some kind of outcry going against them. But on the internet nothing is ever dead forever. 
 
 
I don't know what to do. I really wish there was some kind of zoo run initiative that could help. I hate cops as much as the next raccoon, don't get me wrong, but I do think that some kind of community information and investigation force could really give us some tools to shield us from some of this. Maybe they could be a group that had members in all of the big zoo groups, just checking in to ensure that everything's all good within those spaces. Maybe you could message them and ask them to check on a space, and they could do so and come up with some kind of response, at the very least to inform others of whether that space is healthy or not. They could also to reach out to people in that space and inform them that the space is hosting content that's bad, because I know you can join a group and then just never check it, and be unaware of what's actually going on there. Maybe this group could keep some kind of record of people and their known aliases, as well as groups, and make it easier for zoos that do care to avoid engaging with people and places that they don't know are abusive, including some kind of evidence verification that allows people to see why certain folks have been in trouble before. 
 
 
If we're getting really crazy, maybe they could even have some kind of bot that exists within groups that helps to keep problematic people out. That way, it makes it just that little bit harder for abusers to join in with the regular zoo crowd. It doesn't fix the problem, but at least it gives some kind of punishment to those folks, and makes it so that it's less likely that zoos just looking to make friends do so with people that aren't so good. Maybe they could even have some kind of social media presence, to help articulate what's going on in cases like this, where they can step in and say "by the way, this person doesn't really care about consent, and otherwise offer tips and things to help give guidance on what to do when people do stumble across abuse. 
 
 
I wish that something like that existed. But unfortunately, it doesn't. 
 
 
There are lots of problems with that idea too, even if it did exist. For instance, you're leaving a lot of community power to a group of people that just happened to be the ones to do it. There are levels to badness, determined only by your morality. Like, someone creating abuse content is obviously evil, but what about someone that consumes it? Are they evil, or just bad, or not even on the radar for these purposes? What if you're in a group that posts mostly good stuff, but every now and then something questionable gets posted. Should that be enough to get you flagged? What if you're not just in the group, but you react to specifically that content, and give it a heart or a fire emoji or whatever people are doing these days. Should that be enough for a group like this to put you as an offender in bad standing? Or should a group like this just be for the worst of the worst? The other thing is, it's so hard to expect a group like this to stay neutral. Say that you get into some kind of beef with someone that runs this hypothetical organization. It could be totally not about zoosexuality at all, but they still have the power to just add your name to the list and say "this guy is bad". The barrier of needing some kind of evidence helps for sure, but when one group is in charge of being judge, jury and executioner, faking evidence is far from difficult. 
 
 
And that's all not to mention just the amount of work that it would take to do all this. You'd need people super knowledgeable about what abuse looks like, who are proficient at networking and getting into spaces, who also have the time and energy to actually facilitate all the pieces around just doing the investigating itself. You'd also need people of incredible rapport and moral standing within the community to foster trust from outside the organization, because of course this all doesn't work if people don't believe in the organization. And to that end, you'd also need people who can communicate well and help to actually publicize the message of this group. A PR person, if you will. It would be complicated, and in depth, and hard. Maybe so hard that it's just not possible for this idea to work at all anyway. But, it's about the best thing that I can think of to tackle this problem. 
 
 
Or, maybe the solution actually isn't that complicated at all. Maybe the solution is just to try and create so much positivity that it drowns the negativity out. I mean, when it came to the knotty princess things it's not like the zoos banded together and threw her out of the castle. She did her thing, got more and more crazy, and was eventually banned off of Twitter. Her saga just happened, people took their shots, and life moved on. Nowadays, you don't hear anything about her. That's not to say that we shouldn't do anything when we see abuse, but maybe thinking about it this hard just leads to us spinning our wheels and not actually getting anywhere. Catholic priests are touching altar boys left and right, and there are even documented cases of people trying to cover that up at a core institutional level, and yet the Catholic church still has hundreds of millions of followers and billions of dollars. Maybe they did create a secret sect that went around killing bad priests, that does sound very religion, but the reputation still remains and yet nothing really happened. Sure, religion is falling off, but I think that's more to do with social advancement than it is with any specific scandal. 
 
 
What if instead of actually trying to focus in on this, we just spent that effort being the best zoos we could be? We could just keep pushing, keep putting out our message, keep striving for animal rights. Maybe we could drown out the negativity. Or, at the very least, create something so that when outside forces point at the rot and say "this is what zoos are", we can point to all the good we do and say "actually, it's more like this." Evil exists everywhere, that's something that I think most people recognize. Maybe trying too hard to get rid of it just leaves you with less time to bring good into the world. 
 
 
I really don't have a solution here. Sorry if you were waiting for a dramatic third act reveal where I say "Here's the actual way to fix this!" If I had a real answer, I'd be out creating world peace right now. No, all I've got is half baked fantasies and a lot of frustration. I wish this was something that just had a way to solve it. But it doesn't. Especially if you're just a normal, everyday zoo living your life, loving your partner, and existing in the world. "If you're a zoo, you should stop all animal abuse that happens in the world!!" Yeah I'd certainly love to, but I work until 6 and then I have to go walk this dog and get a bunch of dishes and laundry done and by that point I'll be kinda worn out for the day to be honest, maybe next week would be better, also I don't have a trillion dollars lying around in my bank account to go dismantle the meat and dairy industry with. 
 
 
The only thing we can really change is ourselves. We can hold ourselves to higher standards. Don't be friends with people that propagate evil. Challenge your friends when they imply otherwise. Don't stay in spaces where bad stuff is being posted, even if there's a lot of good stuff too. We might not be able to stop bad zoos from being bad, but we can at least create a culture within our community to show that that kind of thing isn't tolerated. We can paint as clear of a picture as possible by showing the difference between *us* and *them*, the good shit and the bad shit. And that's something that everyone can do. Each and every person reading this has the power to impact the culture of the community. A drop of ink is very visible within a shot glass of water. But if every good zoo is a drop of water, and every bad zoo is a drop of ink, maybe we can dilute that ink enough that it becomes lost within our ocean. 
 
 
Because at the end of the day, I really do believe that there are WAY more good zoos than bad zoos. The majority of zoosexuals love animals, want the best for them, and would never engage with harmful content. And the majority of the zoos that aren't in that group just don't know better, don't understand what's abusive, and don't know of alternatives when it comes to expressing their sexuality. 
 
 
I would love to see a zoo community that's as free from abuse and harm as possible, and thriving in as much health and goodness as possible. It's just not that simple. If you've got a better answer than me, dear readers, I would really love to hear it, because this is something that's super important to the community as a whole. I just wanted to give my thoughts. 
 
 
Thanks for reading, see you in the next one. 
 
Article written by Tarro (August 2025) 

 

 

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