Yesterday there was an article in the Post Standard about the Rosamond Gifford Zoo getting an octopus. There is nothing more depressing than a zoo getting a new animal. I am always shocked by how many intelligent people think that zoos are great. That zoos are helping animals and providing a service to the public. I'm sure that there are some facilities that do this, but my guess is that they are called wildlife preserves and not zoos.
In the article, the zoo representatives stress that they are planning on getting a large octopus, much larger than could naturally grow in captivity. They are building the aquarium now to accommodate the octopus and then will have a trapper go hunt one down for them. The octopus will be female because they seem to live longer in captivity than the males. Octopi in general do not live very long so at best they are looking at getting 2-3 years out of this octopus. But they will catch another octopus before the first one dies and keep it in a smaller "holding tank". That way when they other one dies they can just move the other one in. What a disgusting business.
What is the purpose of a zoo? I don't need to you catch a lion and put it in a cage for me to believe that lions exist. If I want to see a lion then I will to go on safari to Africa and see one in its natural habitat. My need to see an animal up close does not trump that animal's right to live its life in peace. What is the educational value of seeing a bunch of wild animals locked in cages that in no way compare to their natural habitat? Why do we have penguins in upstate NY?
Turn on the National Geographic Channel. Buy a nature magazine. Go to the Internet or the library. Every year there is at least one story about an animal that died in captivity. There is generally proof that the zoo did not properly care for the animal. These stories are always played down in the media and immediately replaced with the story of the cute fuzzy animal that they have gotten to replace it. I'm not talking about these animals not being fed or being beaten, although that unfortunately happens as well. It's usually very obvious things like the habitat being too small, not mimicking the natural environment enough, the wrong type of food, no outlet for their primal instincts or the stress of having unnatural predators so close by.
The people that enjoy the zoo are generally the same people that love going to the pet store to see all the cute puppies and kitties. They argue that these aren't they animals from puppy mills because they are so clean and cute. Then they go to the state fair to see the bear that lives his life in a trailer or to the circus to see the elephant that lives his life in a tent. I don't know how humans formed this ridiculous obsession with trapping animals for the simple pleasure of watching them. We have televisions and computers people.
Every once in a while a wild animal gives in to its instincts and escapes from its cage and/or kills one of the handlers. The animal is then shot to death and replaced with another fuzzy animal because clearly, that animal was in the wrong. I know this is a losing battle. Every time I tell people I hate the zoo/circus/fair they act like I am from another planet. Maybe I am because none of this makes any sense to me and it seems to get worse every day.
Showing posts with label wild animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wild animals. Show all posts
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Water for Elephants or Why Zoos Suck
A couple of months ago I read Water for Elephants because I was so tired of hearing about it. People in my book club raved about it (I joined after they read it). Then Hollywood made it into a movie starring that annoying Twilight kid and the hype increased significantly. If the movie was half as good as people claimed the book was then I was probably going to see it. I picked the book up from the library, hoping to be blown away and excited about seeing a great movie adaptation of the book. I was not.
The book is about animal abuse in the circus. It is not a book that I enjoyed reading. The author tries to make up for the abuse with a feeble love story but it is not enough to distract the reader. The images of animal abuse in the book far outweigh the lovey-dovey ones. This book makes you realize that this behavior, and much worse, is commonplace at zoos all over the world. Even though the book is fiction the abuse that takes place at these places is very real. The author indicated that the book was a compilation of several stories that she collected while interviewing actual circus people. At the end of the book, Rosie the abused elephant, kills her abuser. The murder of the abuser is supposed to make the reader forget about all the abuse and focus on the triumph of the elephant. Then the two lovers ride off into the sunset with their elephant (seriously, they do because that's realistic) to live happily ever after.
This afternoon I watched a documentary called One Lucky Elephant. This documentary tells the story of a man who bought an elephant named Zora for his circus. This man and Zora went on to perform together for 16 years until the elephant stopped "enjoying it". The focus of the documentary is finding a place for Zora to live out the rest of her days. It is difficult for the zookeeper to place Zora because she hasn't socialized with other elephants since she was baby and has formed an unnatural attachment to the zookeeper. The zookeeper admits that he should have had more than one elephant because they are social animals and they do not do well alone. Oh yeah and he did use negative and abusive training methods on her but that was how everyone did it and how else were you going to get her to do what you wanted? Maybe he had spoiled her too much and she had never learned any sense of boundaries. Maybe there were incidents where she showed herself to be aggressive and potentially dangerous for humans to be around but he had excuses for all of this.
We're were supposed to feel sorry for this poor guy because he needed to find a new home for his elephant and not focus on the fact that he had created this awful situation in the first place. At first you think his urgency is due to how much he loves the elephant and how he can't stand to see her unhappy but then it's clear that's not the case. He plans to bring in new, younger elephants at the beginning of the next season and needs to unload Zora so he can focus on them.
In the end, after many failed attempts at other locations, the elephant found a good home at an elephant sanctuary. The sanctuary noticed that Zora slipped into bad behavior every time the zookeeper visited. An animal expert diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress syndrome. The expert guessed that it started when Zora was a baby and witnessed her mother being killed when she was captured and continued throughout her life as she was shipped from one facility to another; bonding with a new owner only to be abused by them and then shipped to another location. Whenever the zookeeper visited he brought up all these old feelings in Zora and she slipped back into old habits. Once they recognized this pattern, the sanctuary did not allow the zookeeper to visit any more.
The zookeeper never stopped thinking about himself. Even as he watched videos of Zora coming out of her shell and learning to be an elephant and heard everything the experts were saying, he missed Zora and he wanted to see her again. He had developed a number of medical problems and hoped that this would make the sanctuary feel sorry for him and let him see Zora one more time before he died. At the end of the documentary it had been 9 years since the zookeeper had seen Zora. Unlike the zookeeper, the sanctuary did what was best for Zora and never let him see her again. The zookeeper continues to do shows with elephants despite his experience with Zora and his declining health.
The postscript at the end of the movie listed a handful of countries that no longer allow elephants at their zoos and in some cases, no wild animals at all. The United States is not one of those countries and probably never will be. We seem to thrive on turning nature into our entertainment. So many reality shows and circuses where people try to manipulate nature (Grizzly Man, Sea World, etc.) are popular here and they almost always have a horrific end. But no matter how many people get injured or killed by the animals that they have raised we continue to make excuses. We often blame the animal for being too wild and then have it euthanized. At no point do we consider that these sort of shows shouldn't exist at all. In a perfect world the only places where people could visit wild animals would be at sanctuaries and safaris.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Fireworks and Zoos
Every year at this time I find myself being the grinch of summer. There are endless invites to fireworks displays and events at the zoo and I always decline. I do not see holding wild animals in captivity or generating air pollution as acceptable ways to honor nature or celebrate our nation's independence.
Every year my mother always bought the giant fireworks variety pack from our local store. In Virginia they have what many refer to as the "good fireworks". These are the fireworks that people cross state lines to buy. These fireworks can also cause significant injury if they malfunction or someone gets too close. My brother and our friends would sit in the driveway while my mom would set off our own private fireworks display. All of our neighbors did the same thing. The next morning our cul-de-sac looked like a war zone with burn marks and used fireworks everywhere.
When I was 15, I went to Washington D.C. to see the fireworks display on the national mall with my friend Laura and her family. We watched the parade (I'm pretty sure this is when I started hating parades too but that's a different blog), had a picnic and then waited for the fireworks. This was the biggest fireworks display I had every seen. Patriotic music blared in time to the fireworks making it quite an impressive production. There were American flags, "God Bless the USA" spelled out and even a giant bald eagle all with the reflective backdrop of the Potomac River. It really was quite beautiful. Throughout the entire display I noticed the giant pink cloud of smoke that was forming. Before the smoke from one firework dissipated, another firework would go off and add to the cloud. By the end of the display the sky was an unnatural shade of pink. The cloud seemed to cover the entire city. It was disgusting.
On the drive home I thought about all the fireworks displays taking place in driveways and in major cities. I thought of the millions of pink clouds that were forming all over the country on Independence Day. I wondered how the pollution generated by fireworks affected the environment. How many days would it take for that pink cloud to go away? Once the pink cloud disappeared were there secondary effects that we couldn't see? There were no more fireworks for me after that.
My anti-zoo position took longer to form. I am an animal lover. I have always been fascinated by all animals (even the ones that scare me). I had a membership to the World Wildlife Fund since I was a little kid. We went to visit their headquarters in northern Virginia every year on a school field trip. They told us all about the animals that they had saved and the sanctuaries that had been set up for endangered and injured animals. For a long time I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian because I wanted to save animals for a living.
We also had an annual field trip to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. I grew up in the time of Ling Ling and Sing Sing, the famous pandas from China. People from all over the world came to the zoo to see the pandas. When they had a baby there was a live camera feed so the world could experience the miracle together. I was very fond of all bears. My bedroom was full of stuffed polar and panda bears and koalas purchased from the national zoo. I also loved penguins, giraffes and animals whose names I couldn't pronounce. Animals from countries and climates that were beyond my imagination.
As I got older, National Geographic, PBS and Animal Planet added to my love of animals with tons of great articles, documentaries and shows about animals. A lot of negative stories started to come through about animals abused while in captivity. About the tactics that some trappers used to catch animals. About the life of an animal in the circus or at the zoo. I don't think there was one defining event that ended my love affair with zoos. It just slowly built up over time and now I can't stand them.
It seemed like when I was younger there were a lot of zoos that acted as animal sanctuaries. If there was an animal that was injured in the wild it would live in captivity until it was nursed back to health. The public got a chance to see this animal up close while it healed. If the animal could be integrated back into the wild, it would be released as soon as it was healthy. But if that animal could never live a successful life in the wild because of its interaction with humans, then they would create an environmental that was as close to its natural habitat as possible.
Panda bears are not native to Washington D.C. Neither are penguins, polar bears, ocelots or most of the animals you will find at the zoo. The 400-1000 square foot enclosures that they have created for these animals to replicate the hundreds of acres of forest/ocean they are accustomed to is a joke. It would be like a human being's entire existence being scaled down to a 1 bedroom apartment.
There are real animal sanctuaries that exist and do fabulous work. But there don't seem to be school buses of children going to visit those. There continue to be stories of animals being put down for being to "wild" with their captors. Of animals abused into performing tricks. Of shortened life spans caused but the unnatural captive life. There always stories about the negative effects of holding wild animals in captivity but they rarely get a lot of traction.
Every year the Syracuse zoo has an event called Brew At the Zoo. This is a time for adults to come out and get drunk and walk through the zoo and look at the animals. The Syracuse zoo has received a lot of bad press during the 6 years that I have lived here because of the untimely death of a lot of young animals. Poor management seems to be the cause of these tragedies but the publication of that information does not seem to affect the popularity of this and other events. I have been invited by friends and declined with as little political rhetoric as I could muster.
Yesterday fireworks started in my neighborhood at 2 pm and continued well after midnight. Tonight there will be giant fireworks displays at all of the local high school and parks. I will have my radio cranked to drown out the sound of all the explosions and turn my chair away from the window so I don't have to watch the pink cloud form.
Every year my mother always bought the giant fireworks variety pack from our local store. In Virginia they have what many refer to as the "good fireworks". These are the fireworks that people cross state lines to buy. These fireworks can also cause significant injury if they malfunction or someone gets too close. My brother and our friends would sit in the driveway while my mom would set off our own private fireworks display. All of our neighbors did the same thing. The next morning our cul-de-sac looked like a war zone with burn marks and used fireworks everywhere.
When I was 15, I went to Washington D.C. to see the fireworks display on the national mall with my friend Laura and her family. We watched the parade (I'm pretty sure this is when I started hating parades too but that's a different blog), had a picnic and then waited for the fireworks. This was the biggest fireworks display I had every seen. Patriotic music blared in time to the fireworks making it quite an impressive production. There were American flags, "God Bless the USA" spelled out and even a giant bald eagle all with the reflective backdrop of the Potomac River. It really was quite beautiful. Throughout the entire display I noticed the giant pink cloud of smoke that was forming. Before the smoke from one firework dissipated, another firework would go off and add to the cloud. By the end of the display the sky was an unnatural shade of pink. The cloud seemed to cover the entire city. It was disgusting.
On the drive home I thought about all the fireworks displays taking place in driveways and in major cities. I thought of the millions of pink clouds that were forming all over the country on Independence Day. I wondered how the pollution generated by fireworks affected the environment. How many days would it take for that pink cloud to go away? Once the pink cloud disappeared were there secondary effects that we couldn't see? There were no more fireworks for me after that.
My anti-zoo position took longer to form. I am an animal lover. I have always been fascinated by all animals (even the ones that scare me). I had a membership to the World Wildlife Fund since I was a little kid. We went to visit their headquarters in northern Virginia every year on a school field trip. They told us all about the animals that they had saved and the sanctuaries that had been set up for endangered and injured animals. For a long time I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian because I wanted to save animals for a living.
We also had an annual field trip to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. I grew up in the time of Ling Ling and Sing Sing, the famous pandas from China. People from all over the world came to the zoo to see the pandas. When they had a baby there was a live camera feed so the world could experience the miracle together. I was very fond of all bears. My bedroom was full of stuffed polar and panda bears and koalas purchased from the national zoo. I also loved penguins, giraffes and animals whose names I couldn't pronounce. Animals from countries and climates that were beyond my imagination.
As I got older, National Geographic, PBS and Animal Planet added to my love of animals with tons of great articles, documentaries and shows about animals. A lot of negative stories started to come through about animals abused while in captivity. About the tactics that some trappers used to catch animals. About the life of an animal in the circus or at the zoo. I don't think there was one defining event that ended my love affair with zoos. It just slowly built up over time and now I can't stand them.
It seemed like when I was younger there were a lot of zoos that acted as animal sanctuaries. If there was an animal that was injured in the wild it would live in captivity until it was nursed back to health. The public got a chance to see this animal up close while it healed. If the animal could be integrated back into the wild, it would be released as soon as it was healthy. But if that animal could never live a successful life in the wild because of its interaction with humans, then they would create an environmental that was as close to its natural habitat as possible.
Panda bears are not native to Washington D.C. Neither are penguins, polar bears, ocelots or most of the animals you will find at the zoo. The 400-1000 square foot enclosures that they have created for these animals to replicate the hundreds of acres of forest/ocean they are accustomed to is a joke. It would be like a human being's entire existence being scaled down to a 1 bedroom apartment.
There are real animal sanctuaries that exist and do fabulous work. But there don't seem to be school buses of children going to visit those. There continue to be stories of animals being put down for being to "wild" with their captors. Of animals abused into performing tricks. Of shortened life spans caused but the unnatural captive life. There always stories about the negative effects of holding wild animals in captivity but they rarely get a lot of traction.
Every year the Syracuse zoo has an event called Brew At the Zoo. This is a time for adults to come out and get drunk and walk through the zoo and look at the animals. The Syracuse zoo has received a lot of bad press during the 6 years that I have lived here because of the untimely death of a lot of young animals. Poor management seems to be the cause of these tragedies but the publication of that information does not seem to affect the popularity of this and other events. I have been invited by friends and declined with as little political rhetoric as I could muster.
Yesterday fireworks started in my neighborhood at 2 pm and continued well after midnight. Tonight there will be giant fireworks displays at all of the local high school and parks. I will have my radio cranked to drown out the sound of all the explosions and turn my chair away from the window so I don't have to watch the pink cloud form.
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