That is the question posed by this article from the Financial Times, a UK broadsheet newspaper. The journalist Peter Barber has done his research well and managed to cover a lot of ground. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cf4587ba-3aa7-11de-8a2d-00144feabdc0.html
All in all: nihil novi-nothing new. However, thanks for posting. At least the author fell not completely for the anti-zoo lobby's propaganda-although said "German zoologist" is no one else but Frank Albrecht, a self-proclaimed PETA "zoo expert", and the yellow press in Berlin is surely not the apt authority to judge polar bear behaviour. To insinuate that Nuremberg, Stuttgart (or, say, Brno or Vienna) deliberately jumped on the polar bear cup bandwagon is utter hogwash, to say the least-and neglects the fact that at least in the case of the latter three, the cubs were raised by the mother. And wasn't Flocke's final "career" most likely a result of his sensationalistic journalist colleagues' attempt to create a "new Knut"...? Out of curiosity: how much money does BF invest each year in conservation projects? I only once ran into them in the case of an Ethiopian wolf conservation, and that project was also supported by zoos...
I liked the article, too. The challenges facing the director at Wroclaw Zoo is well illustrated in the gallery here at ZooChat.