I really enjoy zoos, and completely disagree that Youtube kitties and such are any decent substitute, but I agree that some animals should not be kept confined, if, like large primates, they are visibly depressed.
I feel quite at ease with zoos housing the more stupid creatures though who are oblivious to their own captivity.
Being used to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo with its “Tropic World” exhibits, I was taken back by how shitty the exhibits in the National Zoo in DC are. Especially for the primates.
The Singapore Zoo rocks! As good as or better than San Diego.
A zookeeper there was explaining to the wife and me once that certain monkeys came and went at will but stayed close because that’s where the food was. As he was talking to us, sure enough, a monkey swung up into the trees from an enclosure and down onto the footpath and sauntered away.
I know that some do, but as far as activism goes, I see far more focused on zoos and circuses. It’s my impression that factory farms and slaughterhouses often ignore the rules on animal treatment and get away with it.
However, Scotland, like the rest of Great Britain, is warmed by the Gulf Stream and as such has a more temperate climate than Edmonton.
On another note: At this point, it really is zoos or extinction for many species. While extinction is part of the “natural order” of things, it would be a shame to lose certain species when it’s not necessary to do so
What surprises me is that animal rights “activists” have such a limited worldview. If animals weren’t kept for food, many would simply cease to exist as there would be a massive die off due to resources being directed elsewhere.
Chickens, beef cattle, most sheep and domesticated turkeys are NOT natural animals. They were the creation of hundreds or even thousands of years of interbreeding by humans. The majority wouldn’t survive in the wild and none would survive if resources were diverted from feeding and caring for them into something else.
That’s the point though. I would imagine many activists don’t want these animals to have existed in the first place. They don’t want animals to be bred for food and it wouldn’t make sense to breed them otherwise. Many abused farm animals are rescued and sent to sanctuaries and others may die unfortunately. There’s no perfect solution.
I hear a lot about activists protesting about factory farming. A lot of it is aimed at companies like McDonalds that use meat from substandard farms presumably because it’s cheap. Many grocery stores and restaurants in New York now advertise that their meat or dairy comes from humane sources.
Then they are living in a fantasy world. In fact, they are wishing that they had never been born because if humanity was restricted to a vegetarian diet, it’s doubtful that there would be the numbers of people alive today who are.
That’s my major issue with animal “activists”: They want to the world to exist a manner which is probably unsustainable and they don’t seem to consider how terrible things would be if the world was how they wished it to be, instead of how it is.
Leaffans point is also the view of our Dutch Animal Rights Party, one of the worlds few political parties in government focussing on animal rights. Theyve done a lot of research and they take the stance: zoo’s good. Bad is circuses, factory farming and pet shops selling live pets.
As for factory farming, it is perfectly possible to have large scale, modern high tech farming that is still animal and environment- friendly. The rondeel egg farms are a good example.
That’s painting animal activists with a very broad brush. I don’t think treating animals humanely is unsustainable and for most of humanity we have not engaged in factory farming. I do not eat meat, but I do not fault farmers who make an honest living treating their animals with respect and selling eggs, meat, poultry, dairy from animals who at least had a chance to enjoy life. The same goes for cultures that have hunted wild animals- ranging from ancient hunter gatherers to contemporary people who live in rural areas. There is a huge gray area between abstaining from all animal products and animal abuse.
Don’t forget animal testing, that gets more protests than all the rest put together, at least here in the UK. I find it kind of amusing that you get massive rallies campaigning against medical testing using mice and rats, but the same people don’t appear to give a damn about the ubiquitous sale of rat poison.
Personally, I just think most ‘animal rights’ protesters aren’t actually that bothered about the animals, they just like going for high profile stuff- they’ve no chance in hell of getting factory farming banned, but they just might manage to get circus animals banned. Then they can feel all good about themselves, even though they’ve pretty well ignored the much more widespread and horrific abuses reported in slaughterhouses.
As my family started a zoo, and I am a trustee of the charity running it now, it’s unsurprising that I’m generally in favour of them- yes, there are dodgy places, and yes, some animals are really not suited for captivity, but there’s a hell of a lot of good work going on at the decent zoos. There’s a long list of animals back in the wild now that were previously wiped out.
It’s easy to anthopomorphize, but animals don’t see the world the same as we do- it you put a barred cage over your whole back yard, it’d probably feel like a prison to you, but it wouldn’t bother your dog at all. What’s important to the animals is often not what we think it is.
Incidently, remember that apes and elephants can live for a long time- I know here in the UK a lot of the older zoo apes were previously pets (asnd some of the elephants are ex-circus ones), dumped on zoos when the rules on keeping wild animals changed in the 70s. Some of them are really messed up animals which could never be released, and won’t socialise properly with other animals. My Dad worked in a large zoo when the Dangerous Wild Animals Act came in- they had chimps dumped on them with a 20 a day cigarette habit, that attacked any other chimp that came close. Some settled down over the years, but some really didn’t, and yes, they were miserable. Should they have just been put down? I really don’t know. I wouldn’t like to be the person who made that choice.
Then of course, a lot which socialised and formed almost natural groups still didn’t know how to look after their own babies, so many born in the 80s and 90s were hand-reared by keepers with little info on chimps’ natural social structure, so a lot of those are also a little bit messed up. The last two decades have given us massive advances in knowledge, and maybe some of the offspring of the current chimp generation could actually be rehabilitated for re-release, but it couldn’t have happened before- we just didn’t know how. We are getting better, not worse.
Thanks for posting that Maastricht. I’ll wait until I’m on a computer to translate it into English, but their mascot is cute.
For most of humanity we haven’t had 7+ billion people to feed. That’s what makes the difference now: More mouths to feed.
If someone can draw up a sustainable method using the same amount of resources (or fewer) to feed everyone (safely, without foodborne illnesses or famine becoming significant problems) then I’m all for it.
If it will work.
However, most people have “pie-in -the-sky” ideas which don’t take into account:
[ol]
[li]Limited arable land[/li][li]Limited farming skills possessed by most people[/li][li]The ability to transpotr products to markets in a timely manner[/li][li]Food safety[/li][li]Land rights[/li][/ol]
When most ideas are studied carefully, they are found to be wanting. ANd “wanting” in this case, would be people going without food.
That’s unacceptable.
As far as hunter-gather cultures: you are aware that they caused many of the extinctions prior to the advent of the firearm, correct? The majority of the megafauna on Earth was hunted to extinction by hunter-gather cultures and that form of lifestyle would also have resulted in a much smaller and less advanced human population than exists today.
Sorry…but factory farms, like zoos, are necessary evils until human beings either decide to terraform vast areas of currently unusable land (like the Sahara Desert or Antarctic) or we create “Star Trek-style” matter replicators.
Since neither seems to be on the immediate horizon, then I suppose that we are “stuck” with what we have.
Elephants are social creatures. Especially the females. They form a matriarchal group. Males might be loners, but females are most definitely not. In the wild they’d walk at least 10 miles a day. And we expect good results by keeping one in a 1/4 acre pen?
Captive elephants live shorter lives, and most suffer with foot problems aggravated from standing around on concrete, instead of walking for hours a day on varied surfaces.
I don’t know enough about the captive status of other zoo animals, but a single female elephant in a small enclosure, in snowy Canada? Yea, no. Not a happy girl.
Eh. Some of the counterpoints themselves are a bit too sweeping. I’ll briefly try to summarize some rebuttals :
“Economic engines, community assets” - poor reason to do advocate any specific business when lots of other businesses provide the same value. Hell, dogfighting is an economic engine.
“Providing science education” - Ehhhh, a little. IMHO, zoos seem to be mostly used for gawking. The added educational value of a plaque or sign with a few dozen words on it is questionable.
“Saving endangered species, and offering wildlife rehabilitation” - excellent goals. Can they be met in other ways?
“Attendance at zoos is 175 million per year” - bear in mind the survey indicating many people went to find a place to while away time with children; the zooness was possibly incidental.
“It is impossible to understand the mental state of animals and what makes them happy” - the people who run zoos would explicitly disagree with this statement, not to mention modern animal behaviorists. That’s an old-fashioned argument at best.
“Today people can see exotic animals for 24 hours a day on Animal planet” - much better viewing and much denser educational content. Admittedly it’s not the real thing. I guess the counterargument to that is that neither is a bedraggled cheetah lying listlessly in a too small enclosure (cheetahs need scores of miles of open territory in order to breed naturally, so any enclosure is “too small” by that standard).
“There are some species that might disappear entirely without zoos, if poachers would otherwise exterminate them” - This “lifeboat” argument is one of the best remaining reasons to advocate for zoos, IMHO.
“I don’t think there’s a substitute for the real thing when trying to excite people about conservation and build an emotional attachment to the animals” - That’s the other one. Needs to be balanced against the fact that by having wild animals in captivity at all, we are sending an implicit message that it’s all right to do so.
“What puzzles me is why animal rights activists would focus on zoos and circuses” - Uh, they’re focused on a LOT of aspects of animal suffering. One of the constant complaints I hear in the movement(s) is that there’s TOO MUCH focus on food animals, at the expense of sending a comprehensive message.
And to single out this one:
Uh…where to begin. You think no one has thought of this argument before? You think it’s not possible to “let them down gently” by stopping breeding them and letting them live out natural lives, instead of some worldwide orgy of slaughter? More to the point, do you think any of them “survive” captivity as farmed animals? They are killed by the billions (the figure most often cited is 9 billion chickens annually in the US alone).
If the point is to alleviate individual suffering, don’t make more unnatural altered animals to kill. If the point is to preserve species, maybe we don’t need unnatural altered animals.
Obviously it would be a big deal economically to end animal farming; a straight-up economic hit on a large scale. But that’s not really the question of what’s right to do. The US South took a huge economic hit when the slaves were freed. All that lost capital, but would you argue that it was too expensive? Nazi Germany took a huge economic hit when its labor camps were overrun and liberated. But suffering was ended. Would you balk at the cost?
Yes, I’m aware that hunter gatherers caused the extinction of many animals. That’s unfortunate, but it’s not like they had mass slaughter houses for wooly mammoths.
As far as I’m aware factory farming only exists in first world nations. Many food shortages are also caused by inefficient ways of distributing food due to poor infrastructure, war or a corrupt regime- not a literal lack of food.
Sustainable farming to feed the world is absolutely possible. Resources just need to be put into educating people about proper techniques. That will obviously take a lot of time, effort and money (plus an end to civil strife in some food deprived areas), but I believe it is doable.
Plants produce more food value per acre than animals due to simple physics.
In developed countries – which produce most of the food – an increasing proportion of it is accomplished by raising plants for grain/ and then raising animals intensively with that feed. That’s even less efficient use of land, requiring more land to feed fewer people…and undeveloped countries are racing to emulate this system. Arguing “best use of land to feed 7 billion” is contrary to facts and trends.
Add to that significant public health issues, and that animal agriculture is a profligate consumer of energy resources and perhaps the major polluter, and what do you get?
You get a sobering report from an internationally respected authority, for starters.
Livestock’s Long Shadow [Warning: .pdf and possibly disturbing to the status quo]