Refugees deserve a better welcome.
There's a large banner over the main entrance to Dudley Zoo at the moment. "We've packed our trunks," it reads, "but we're not gone yet." Sadly, we are about to lose our elephants – they are just too big for a small, town-centre zoo like ours.

Although the departure of the elephants will represent a loss of something deeply regarded by local people, we are ambivalent nowadays about keeping large animals in such a necessarily constrained and artificial environment. The future for town centre zoos is not bright, and I fear many of the zoo's other residents will soon follow the elephants.

The consensus is that animals are more likely to thrive and be happy if they are living in natural communities and in a setting as close as possible to the condition in which they would live in the wild.

Meanwhile, some 30 miles further south in my diocese, almost the exact opposite is happening. The government has recently announced that some 750 asylum seekers will be housed in an accommodation centre on the site of a disused airfield close to the tiny village of Throckmorton. A place that, 12 months ago, was sufficiently remote to be suitable for the disposal of 100,000 foot-and-mouth carcasses is now apparently appropriate for human beings to live in because of its "good transport links".

My colleagues and I are not nimbys; in fact, we are the opposite. We want these asylum seekers in our front yard, living among us, where we can provide support ranging from simple befriending to integration into the community. We want them to be able to tell us their personal stories so that we can understand the pressures that have brought them here.

We want them to be easily within reach of compatriots living in the urban areas of the West Midlands. Above all, we feel that they should live in an environment far less constrained and artificial than a converted military base on a remote rural site.

In every other category of housing and support, there has been a clear dynamic over the 25 years in which I have been involved. We have moved steadily away from the institutional environment towards the most natural setting we can provide, consistent with the care or support being delivered. First the old ward-style accommodation went, then came the pressure for ever smaller bedded units, greater individual privacy and for policies that offer residents the most independence and opportunities to participate in normal life. We might call it "social inclusion".

We are being told that asylum-seeker accommodation schemes are not about incarceration. So why are they not subject to this same requirement to provide a natural and sustaining environment?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a regime is being devised with the intention of its being so austere and unattractive that it will in itself act to dissuade asylum seekers from coming to Britain.

But an individual who is prepared to cross continents squashed like a tinned sardine in a truck or a container, to face the rigours of a French refugee camp and then to undergo a dangerous Channel crossing, is unlikely to be deflected from this by the prospect of six months in cramped conditions in rural Worcestershire.

Perhaps the lesson we can draw from this is brutally simple: if you are forced by circumstance to come to the UK from Africa or Asia, you will find more sympathy and concern for your well-being and happiness, more determination to provide you with a good living environment, if you are an elephant than if you are a human being.