So there's a bear, he's born in captivity and raised by hand. He's called Knut and he died 3 days or so ago of brain damage they say.
The lesson, children, is this: Animals shouldn't be kept in zoos.
I've not got the background to make a call on this. Each side presents an argument. Some points make sense, some don't.
Personally I like seeing animals. I'm sure most people do. Fascinating. They impress, they entertain, they intimidate, all in a safe environment. Most often they will be seen in the zoo.
Is it wrong to imprison others for our own amusement? Yes. When you put it that way - zoos as prisons - it's wrong. But what is a prison to an animal? That I could not tell you.
I'll dance over to a BBC article with a few choice phrases:
"...an animal rights campaigner was calling for him to be put down rather than brought up by humans."
That seems a little harsh? Or is it just me?
Maybe that animal rights campaigner is now thinking, "See! This animal died 26 years premature, of brain damage and the animal was rejected by the mother at birth.... She smelled the brain damage. I was right to say he should have been snuffed out."
He's probably not thinking that because that's ridiculous. At the very least it's impossible for him to prove.
Even so there's that primeval appeal, that little voice inside, near those parts within that seem to know things we can't prove with reason or logic, a little voice that says "animals know better, know more than we do".
The birds fleeing before a storm, the dogs barking as a ghost enters your house and steals your stuff. Now a Polar Bear, rejecting a retarded cub. Nature knows best.
But the debate is more about nurture than it is about nature:
"...a zoo is an artificial, "controlled environment"."
Who is to say that the 'natural environment' for an animal doesn't impose harsher controls than those artificial prohibitions imposed by man? What if a Polar Bear got trapped on a floating ice sheet and managed to hesitate there long enough to become too weak to swim and starved?
"...little point in keeping large powerful animals in captivity. Not only do they lead "unfulfilled lives", but bears bred in zoos cannot be reintroduced to the wild as they lose the skills necessary to survive."
I have to agree that an animal, once imprisoned in a zoo can rarely return to the wild amongst the vicious and hardy kin it has been raised and mollycoddled away from. But what is a 'fulfilled' animal?
"... it would have been better for Knut not to have existed at all than live such a miserable life."
Who can rightly say what makes an animal miserable? What makes you miserable?
Pain, pain is universal too - were a Zoo to subject animals to pain that'd be wrong. That's easy to accept - all animals feel pain to varying degrees (if I was in a fight with a lion and survived I'd probably make more of a big deal out of it than another, defeated lion).
Lack of freedom? What is freedom of travel to a creature that does not choose to run the length of the icecap, the savannah, the jungle to stay fit, but that must travel the distances to hunt, so that it may eat, and therefore survive.
Lack of choice? What is choice to a creature that has been raised by an environment harsher than a zoo (whether or not it's 'idyllic' in the human imaginings). You don't choose your dinner. You don't choose your home. You don't choose much.
Lack of a natural environment? Why must an animal live in a wild wind-swept and beautiful ravine or a dark, moonlit grove, or a scorched desert filled with empty aching stillness? Because we impose that lovely image on them. That's where you belong polar bear. Don't come into the city and eat out of our bins badger! D: It's not as romantic.
I fear that an animal appreciates only the essentials. They don't have fancy wild wallpapers for their windows desktops. They don't admire views. They don't respect the world they come from because they appreciate the gifts it gives them. They don't want to help recycle. They don't want to do anything those crazy things they do, they have to do them.
We're applying the half understood, media mangled message of the new age, brow beating zeitgeist to these beasts.
Animals live in the now, with a devotion that lets them get to the heart of the present time. That and they have better physical senses than us. Maybe putting them in a zoo interrupts that devotion to the now, to survival.
Maybe the genes cry out louder and longer if your head isn't filled with calculus, philosophy, food hygiene or sports trivia.
Animals want to survive - I think that's a good bottom line. So Mr. Animal right's activist (if you even exist. You may be a conjured soul in the name of 'BBC Journalism'), I would have to disagree that an animal would be better off dead than in a zoo. That just doesn't make sense.
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