Zoos and Rehabilitation Centers
Hi guys! I was just remembering back to a couple years ago when I used to volunteer at a non-profit rehabilitation animal park up in Big Bear Lake, California. It wasnt too long after I first became vegetarian and started learning about animal rights.
I'm curious how you guys feel about zoos! Its one of those areas where theres a lot of moral fuzziness, I think, because at a rehab zoo you have all these carnivores who can no longer fend for themselves (many which can never be set free). Since humans are the ones who injured the animals in the first place, are we morally obligated to raise other animals to kill and feed to injured?
How about working at a zoo? Sometimes I wondered if it was right of me to be supporting the zoo by telling my friends about it and volunteering there myself. Volunteer work was very needed, and I think the volunteers there make a serious difference on the living conditions of the zoo animals. However, it could be argued that thanks to the volunteers, the animals are better fed, as in they are getting more meat than needed.
I think at the least we are obligated to feed the zoo animals only the amount of meat needed to remain healthy. Well, the animals at the zoo can get pretty chubby because they dont have a lot of space to exercise :'(, but I'm not sure if that really means they are eating too much or not.
I have actually killed baby rats before at the zoo to feed to the snakes, and it was rather awful. The common method for killing rats and small birds at the zoo I volunteered with was suffocation, which might be what made me feel like it was so wrong as opposed to just the killing in general. The rats I killed were just pinkies, who could not see yet and did not have fur. I was cleaning out the cages of the rats and you're supposed to take out pinkies and put them in a baggie then put the baggie in the freezer to be taken out when needed by the snakes. Usually I would just leave the pinkies in their cages because I couldnt kill them, but they would always be gone by the next time I cleaned the cages out.
Actually thats not true, at one point I was cleaning the cages so often that some of the pinkies got really old and the zoo employees decided not to kill them. So instead, the cages were even more overcrowded, and more pinkies were being born than ever.
Anyways, at one point I did kill the pinkies, because I figured they were going to die anyways and the experience might be good for me as in the future I would no doubt come against difficult decisions about putting down pets or unplugging family. I killed 4 pinkies, and it was rather awful to watch them writhing in the plastic baggie, alone and away from their parents and nest. The mother of the pinkies are always easy to recognize because they hang around the pinkies the most and when seperated from their babies they become very distressed and upset.
So there you go. ;D Theres my zoo story. I'd really like to hear what other vegans feel about zoos and if you guys visit or help out ever at them.
I really go back and forth on the zoo thing. I think there are "good zoos" and "bad zoos" (I'm watching The Wizard of Oz right now, so I'm thinking in terms of "good witch" and "bad witch" ::) ). I think a lot of zoos do good things in terms of educating people about endangered species, habitats, etc. and I think that the face-to-face encounters with animals gives people a closer connection to different creatures (others on here likely disagree and think that these things could be learned just as easily by books--that could be true, I'm not sure about that which is why I'm ethically torn about zoos). Many zoos provide substantial living quarters for their critters and have fantastic animal health programs (the Phoenix Zoo just put in a brand new animal health facility that I might be touring, so I'll report back if I actually get to).
I think that there are also good and bad parts of zoos--for instance, I don't like that they create the idea that animals are there to gawk at or that it's OK to take animals out of their natural environment so that humans can be entertained by them. However, there are zoos that work with conservation and captive breeding programs for threatened/endangered critters and I consider that a good thing.
Thanks for sharing your zoo story--I bet it was hard killing the pinkies. That's why I couldn't have a snake because I couldn't deal with the whole mouse food thing--I'm fairly separated from my cats' food which may or may not be a good thing :-\
Sidenote: while I think that zoos are not inherently bad, I do think that CIRCUSES are inherently bad and would be curious to see if someone could make a strong case for the good that circuses do vs. the good that zoos do.
I'm not a fan of zoos, but I'm wishy-washy about them because I don't like caged animals, but for endangered species, it seems like you could do some sort of re-introduction with offspring.
I'm in the IE, but I haven't been to the Big Bear zoo. So many animals are harmed by human activity that if an animal can be rehabilitated I'm all for rehabilitation zoos, but if they can never return to the wild, I'm really torn. I don't think the animals are especially happy going from freedom to a cage and it doesn't work for the animals being killed for food, either. It's hard to know ahead of time, though, if an animal is permanently injured and if someone collects one and "turns it in" can you really refuse it? And then you're stuck feeding it. I really think the answer is for people to leave the animals where they are. They'll either recover or be eaten by another animal or something. It seems like a more natural process.