Many of the African-origin animals in well established zoos are the result of captive breeding programs run in cooperation with hundreds of international zoos.

Many of the African-origin animals in well established zoos are the result of captive breeding programs run in cooperation with hundreds of international zoos. The rest are animals taken from the wild due to injury or environmental circumstance, who were then unable to be returned to the wild for some reason. China is building cities at a tremendous rate, and many of those cities are building zoos. The existing captive breeding programs and animal-swap programs are simply not capable of supplying those new zoos with the larger animals with slow breeding rates. In any case, going out to poach animals from the wild is cheaper. It's not bad because Chinese, but bad because it's going faster than the existing systems can handle.