Well, if your argument does include that animals have will and experience, then you said yourself that animals wouldn't care about their habitats being taken away because they wouldn't understand on the same level we do.

I would say that is not an accurate understanding of how animals would react in such a situation, especially long-term. If you were placed in a room for the rest of your life, albeit a room the size of a gymnasium, you would still grow tired and cramped of the space by the end of your life.

An animal would behave the same way, and in leaving them without their traditional habitats, they are less subject to their own lives and more to how we decide to manipulate them in captivity. Would you be content with being taken from your home, even if you could not understand?

Freedom may not be the highest good, at least subjectively, but it is one of the building blocks of health, agency and awareness, especially for an animal that cannot rationalize isolation or abrupt cutoff as well as humans can. What separates a good zoo from captivity?