Caged Classmates: The Ethical Issues of Using Wild Animals in Education

This week marks Teacher Appreciation Week; a time dedicated to expressing gratitude to teachers for their crucial role in shaping students’ lives, communities, education, and development. The responsibility that teachers hold is immense; many children discover their first passions during a lesson from a memorable teacher and begin to map out what they want to dedicate their adult life to when they grow up. As a result, the work and influence of teachers should not be minimized.

Many Children Learn about Animals for the First Time in School

Many students learn about animals, behaviors, habitats, and ecosystems for the first time in science class in elementary school. Children are exceptionally receptive to learning new information at this age (5-10 years of age) and extremely vulnerable for the same reason, as critical thinking skills are not often fully developed for many children during elementary school. Formal operational thought typically develops during adolescence (after age 12), which allows for abstract thinking, hypothetical-deductive reasoning, and the ability to reflect on moral concepts. Therefore, if children are taught misinformed or misleading information before the age of 12, this may result in a flawed way of thinking for the rest of their lives.

Classroom Pets and Mobile Zoos Give Children Wrong Ideas about Wildlife

This happens frequently at schools where teachers participate in “educational” programs that involve wild animals, like classroom pets and mobile zoo visits. Our newest report, Teachers’ Pets: The Exploitation of Wild Animals in the Classroom (2025), explores the issues with using live animals for educational purposes, including the lack of regulation, human public health and safety issues, poor animal welfare, and the alleged educational “benefits” that cause more harm than good in both practices.

Although some wild animals may be advertised by exotic pet distributors as “tame” and appear to do well in captivity, these animals suffer and frequently include animals popularly kept as pets like fish, reptiles, insects, small mammals, and birds. A study conducted by the American Humane Association in 2015 interviewed nearly 1,200 teachers who had classroom pets in the U.S. and Canada. Problematically, almost 60% of all teachers admitted that they did not have a formal lesson plan involving the classroom pets, nor did they integrate the animals into their teaching in a purposeful way. Other studies have confirmed that there is no significant difference in academic achievements between students taught in-person with live animals versus a video lesson featuring animals on-screen.

We also discovered that false and misleading content appearing in materials at mobile zoos and in their education programs frequently cause negative learning to occur in children (the learning of false information), which can result in dangerous perceptions of wild animals, like the incorrect assumptions that wild animals are safe to interact with, make good pets, and are not threatened in the wild with extinction.

Close Contact with Wild Animals in Classrooms Can Be Dangerous

In terms of human public health and safety, estimates suggest that 15% of people have animal allergies, with children being most affected. While schools have taken steps to ban foods that many children are allergic to, the same precautions have not been taken with animals in schools, despite animal allergies being more prevalent in children than other allergies. Any student, whether they experience sensitivities or not, will be exposed to germs from these animals, and could potentially contract bacteria like E. coli, MRSA, or salmonella, or be exposed to highly contagious fungal infections like ringworm as a result. These risks only increase in younger children, who may be more likely to share their lunch with a classroom pet or forget to wash their hands after handling animals.

The Keeping of Classroom Pets Is Cruel to the Animals

Lastly, dozens of unreported classroom pet deaths likely occur each year. Due to their complex, species-specific needs, many of the wild animals kept as classroom pets die traumatic and premature deaths simply because of neglect or misinformation. Many of the wild animal species promoted by pet stores as “low maintenance” or “easy”, like fish, reptiles, or small mammals, have very sensitive requirements for temperature, diet, and social stimulation that are nearly impossible to meet in the small, restricted cages or tanks kept in schools. Handlers also often lack the knowledge of wild animal husbandry and/or biology and behavior, so detecting health issues and injuries is extremely difficult in these cases.

Animals Are not Props or Tools

After reading this blog, we believe that any well-meaning educator would conclude that engaging in these programs that use wild animals as “educational” props teaches children all the wrong things about these animals. Thus, banning classroom pets in school districts and prohibiting mobile zoos from school property remain the most effective and logical solutions to protect future generations of students and help keep wild animals in the only environment in which they truly belong: the wild. We hope that after reading this report, educators around the U.S. will agree that the use of live wild animals for education purposes is counterproductive and cruel, will pledge not to keep classroom pets, and choose not to participate in mobile zoo experiences moving forward. To help ensure that our future will continue with compassionate and well-informed generations, we must strive to change the components of the education system that may disrupt these goals.

Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Devan