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These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.
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Notes -
@TitaniumButterfly's original comment:
I'm broadly sympathetic to your overall point and would be on your side of such a debate 9/10 times but in this case I do want to push back a bit. I breed and hunt with birds of prey and have had a lot of time to consider this question.
Overall you're more than correct. People will see a falcon sitting on a perch in captivity and say things like "Oh that's so sad, it's tied down and it wants to be free." No, not really. Not at all, actually. Flying is hard work and if (actually when) they get to choose between flying around for a reward and simply sitting and being fed, they will choose the latter every time. And if they're pushed into the former it's not uncommon for them to try to weasel out of it by just sitting somewhere to see if they can outwait you into producing food to get them to return. This is a whole thing, most of them have to be trained out of that instinct, and more than once I've spent a night under a tree, refusing to produce a reward for a falcon until it's gotten back up in the sky and flown around a bit. Reward them for sitting once and they'll never want to fly again.
But there is an exception. Given the choice to sit and be fed, or go out and hunt some real game, they will about destroy themselves in their eagerness for the latter.
I will never forget the sight of my apprentice's hawk on his first live rabbit. He bound to it, we dispatched it, and then he spent roughly the next twenty minutes visibly trembling with emotion. His crest up, his eyes aflame, like every cell of his body was radiating golden light. It was clearly a transformative experience, and I don't think I'm prone to inappropriately romanticizing these creatures.
They live for this stuff. And I think other animals must feel the same way about a lot of things, including securing and defending territory, competing for mates, etc. Yeah, most of them are losers in such processes, but the winners get something I think they'd agree is worth having, and it is the impulse of life to shoot for the stars even if most must fall short.
Animals don't have any kind of abstract notion of freedom or self-determination. But they are wired to appreciate certain things, and I think that the zoo (or household pet) experience is rather like pod life. A lot of men, for example, would be 'happy' with something like state-issued ai robot waifus, plentiful netflix and video games, and enough industrially-produced food to satisfy them, but those who have felt what it is to be chosen by a beautiful mate, to have achieved mastery in their craft, to have lived in real, functional human community, would look at that and be horrified.
No, I don't think that captive animals, except perhaps those taken from the wild, have any idea what they're missing. But that doesn't mean they're not missing it.
To quote Doctor Alan Grant, the T-rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt. And huskies want to range hundreds of miles, and collies want to herd.
Does the T-rex want to hunt, or does it want to be fed through the process of hunting? Would it miss anything if, much like your falcon, it could engage in very authentic play that had no possibility of it failing and starving, or at least not starving as a result of failure?
Some falcons enjoy lure stooping (which is what you're talking about) while others treat it as a chore to be avoided. All of them love killing things.
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