And roughly 200 million day old male chicks are killed each year by being thrown into a grinder or asphyxiated in garbage bags so that you can get your dozen eggs for a dollar fifty.
The killed lions contributed less in genetic diversity than the single adult they’re bringing in. If there were a suitable place to rehome them, I’m sure they would have done so, but in the end, they’re animals and we treat them as such.
Without disagreeing with you here, I do want to make the distinction between preserving a species and killing individuals within that species. They aren’t mutually exclusive. I think part of the philosophy is to preserve the species, not preserve individuals within that species. So this zoo is claiming its ok to kill individuals in order to better preserve the species. Whether that philosophy of killing individuals within a species is morally right or wrong is certainly the chief debate going on.
“Questionable” MH? Of course. There is obviously a question within the zoo community regarding which is the greater good or harm, allowing this one part of natural behaviors at the price of using some giraffes that have had fairly good zoo lives to feed the lions instead of having cows raised instead, and of killing off some excess lions (more humanely than the way it would have happened in nature), or avoiding those lives by preventing those portions of animal behaviors from occurring and having that many cows get raised and killed instead. The professional zoo community is not swayed so much by how cute or beautiful giraffes are compared to cows.
Not the same as the univeral American denouncing you claimed exists however or the widespread European dissent you seemed to imply existed (if all you meant to say was that a few individual zoos in Europe, not members of the professional society, disagreed, well, okay fine, but trite). American zoos don’t think they could get away with it with American public reaction.
Yes the public has a distorted view of what zoo animals are. And maybe the professional zoo community is fooling themselves or the rest of us when they state that their function is only partly edutainment and is more serious and responsible species conservation. I don’t think so but who knows? There is some balance that occurs, no doubt. But to the degree they believe that responsible species conservation is their greater function the standards promoted by the EAZA and put in place at the Copenhagen Zoo are consistent with those goals, and with public education, more than with appealing to a public who thinks of giraffes in zoos as their pets by proxy and “aw so cute” or like to see circus tricks.
Helena330 amazingly enough the disappointment runs both ways! “Beautiful” matters in what animals should live, the cow or the surplus giraffe … why?
If we accept that zoos play a part in conservation and education (and that is the only real justification) then we owe it to the animals to allow them as much natural expression as is possible within a closed-system. That will mean different things to different people but I don’t for one second think the choices made are from a point of cruelty or lack of compassion. They may be pragmatic and uncomfortable for us but hey…there is no perfect answer.
Allowing them to reproduce and raise their young seems sensible, removing a proportion of those young through artificial means (as a replication of natural wastage and with an eye to genetic diversity) seems sensible.
Not wasting the meat produced seems sensible, using the dissection as an educational tool seems sensible.
heck, were it financially viable I wouldn’t even have a problem (from an animal welfare POV) with raising Giraffe’s, Zebra Wildebeest etc purely for the consumption by the big savannah predators and scavengers, that’s the most realistic diet for them after all.
Zoos have finite resources, we have to let them do what is best for the populations as a whole. Focussing on the fate of an individual (photogenic) creature is a mistake and misses the point. Understandable of course, but a misty-eyed mistake nonetheless. If we aren’t willing to stomach that then we have no business having zoos in the first place.
Interestingly, I just renewed my local zoo membership this morning. My kids love the zoo.
Sometimes today’s animal is tomorrow’s peer.
At various points those exact words have been said to justify ethnic cleansing, murder, involuntary confinement and all sorts of other abuses of two-legged animals we now consider humans.
We are aware of how bad it is. One of our greatest fears seems to be “getting treated like we treat animals.” The cattle cars that carried people to the death camps remain one of the most poignant images of the Holocaust. Barbed wire, originally developed to control cattle, has become a universal symbol of imprisonment, even appearing prominently on the POW/MIA flag. Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man” exhibited as a freakshow curiosity, once complained that he had been “stripped naked, and felt like an animal in a cattle market.”
And yet science continues to show that we are not so different from them. The idea that humans are special and deserve unique treatment that other animals do not comes from the same roots as the ideas that the earth is the center of the universe, that humans were specially created to rule it, and that “our ethnic group” is the most evolved – our own egos and fears.
Every person who has been subjected to genocide, oppression and abuse has been a homo sapiens sapiens. Their inhumane treatment has been the result of bias, propaganda, and disenfranchisement. It has never involved actual scientific fact. Do you believe future research will determine that lions are also homo sapiens?
If all they care about is preserving the species, and have no intent on returning them to the wild at any point, why do they care about natural mating practices? Is that not about making sure the individual animals are happy?
The male lion kills all the cubs to put the lioness back into heat regardless of the sex.
Only because that’s how we define the term. Entire species have been eliminated by human intervention, and this continues to happen all the time. Her argument seems to be that the same motivation is ultimately behind both–an “US vs THEM” mindset. It’s just tribalism, with the whole species as the tribe.
The only reason I disagree is that I do think there is an actual distinction between humans and other animals. Consciousness has arisen in humans, but I don’t believe it has in animals. I don’t think animals are capable of “cogito ergo sum,” and thus do not exist as individuals. There is an actual difference, which allows humans to be treated differently without “species-ism.”
But, if you don’t agree with that position, I can’t see any problem with saying humans are bigoted to favor other animals of the same species.
So now we go down the “animals are people too!” path?
Indeed if one believes that every animal should have the exact same rights (and responsibilities?) as humans do then zoos are immoral, species preservation is the same as eugenics, eating meat should be a prosecutable offense, and maybe lions should all be in jail. Honey is exploitive of bees. Careful with your vegetables and fruits because a variety of critters are killed in the process of farming no matter how organic and humane the process.