zoos and aquariums serve a very vital purpose. most people only care about these animals because they can go SEE them alive. documentaries help but nothing beats getting a captive people into a room to see a wild animal and then bamboozling them with propaganda about how important it is to preserve these animals. Its the reason we have funding to keep these creatures alive in the wild at all.

if all zoos and aquariums were shut down, public concern about the environment would slowly drift to nothing within 2 generations.

While I totally agree, the underlying conflict is that Zoos over use the argument of preservation these days. On the other end they certainly have the need to stay entertainment venues, a conflict which they seldomly address.

Recently there was a obviously necessary mass culling of baboons in the Nuremberg zoo which shows some of the controversy [1]

[1] https://www.greenmemag.com/animals/the-nuremberg-zoo-controv...

Yet framing it as either captivity or guaranteed death is also a bit of a false binary. Zoos are a mitigation strategy, not a moral end state

So it will cost at least 100,000 usd to keep this poor elephant confined in a zoo in the US versus about 15,000 in a wild sanctuary in Thailand.

In the wild sanctuary it will have space to roam.

To be fair, elephant hunting and poaching in India over the last 20 odd years is negligible. I believe it accounts for less than 1% of elephant deaths since 2010.

Well, "[Raja] was the first elephant ever born at the Saint Louis Zoo and is considered a St. Louis legend. Male Asian elephant Raja, born amid fanfare nearly 31 years ago on Dec. 27, 1992, has three daughters at the Zoo..."

https://stlzoo.org/news/elephant-news

There is room for the elephant.