I’m not an animal-rights activist, and I know where my cheeseburgers come from. (I like mine with lettuce and tomato…)
I have no problem with people in other parts of the world eating dogs or cats. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it; in our society, we’ve got a taboo against it because we mentally classify members of those species as companions. So we don’t do it here.
But I think there’s a big distinction to be made between raising an animal for food, which we need (although not necessarily by that route, though we seem to be designed for a diet that includes at least some animal protein), or to be beasts of burden, and raising them to be entertainment, and killing them as soon as they lose their entertainment value. That animals are dying that I might be fed - it’s nature’s way that one animal dies so another animal might eat. Maybe we should rise above that, and maybe we will. But that animals are dying that I might be entertained - IMO, the weight of their loss is entirely out of proportion to the ephemeral nature of our gain.
I’m not saying (yet) that the chicks fit that category; I’m still working that out in my mind, though I’m leaning that way. I’d been thinking about greyhound racing, which clearly fits on the ‘dying for entertainment’ side of my dichotomy: greyhounds are bred to be raced, and once their brief racing careers are over, they’re killed, despite the fact that they still have most of their natural lives ahead of them. Once they’re done amusing us, they’re history.
The chicks here seem to fall somewhere in between: the claim is that they’re bought as animal food, pure and simple, but that the zoo people figured that a short stop in the petting zoo before feeding the lions and the emus wouldn’t be a problem.
My problem with this is that I can’t make any sense of it. The chicks aren’t fed to the animals alive, so it’s not like they needed to receive live chicks in the first place. And it doesn’t seem like chicks, as such, are a particularly necessary part of, say, the lions’ diet. I have a hard time believing they’d order live chicks if they weren’t running what is basically a petting zoo within the zoo proper.
I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that the chicks’ real role in the zoo is to provide entertainment, and then incidentally be killed and fed to the other animals when they outgrow their brief stage of cuteness.
I’m also bothered by an implicit dishonesty here: when we go to a zoo, we assume that the animals there will more or less live out their natural lives there: we’re keeping them penned up for our entertainment, but not killing them. And while I have no idea what they do with the animals in private petting zoos, they’re being treated like pets, with the implicit messages that accompany that apparent status.
But here we’ve got a place that is a petting zoo within a zoo. The kids (and most parents too, I would guess) naturally assume that the chicks they’re petting are being kept around, rather than being killed and fed to the lions. That’s not true. This isn’t ‘educational’ at all; it’s a sham.
Is it a particularly important sham? Not really, I suppose. But zoos these days are claiming the mantle of educational institutions. If they want that mantle, they’ve got more than the usual obligation to tell it like it is.
