Mr. Aspinall,
First let me say that I would not consider myself a zoo enthusiast. I like them just fine, but don’t have the attachment to them that most people here are going to have, so I’m not going to feel the same need to defend them that others here will. I’m more an aquarium guy, and even so I’ve been happy to see the phaseout of cetacean shows and the keeping of cetaceans in captivity. Unless injured and unable to survive in the wild, such wide-ranging species as orcas, belugas, dolphins, etc. do not belong in captivity.
From what I’ve learned in googling you since yesterday, I do have to say you try harder to make the world a better place than a certain other real estate mogul we all know, whose “charitable activities” have turned out to be fraudulent. But your zeal to advocate for animals which inspires you to call for the closing of zoos, it is the zeal of the passionate amateur I as an environmental scientist have often seen from environmental activists – big on passion, but lacking in knowledge and objectivity. It leads you down the road to extremism. Your belief that zoo animals are “enslaved” and “exploited” is the same rhetoric of the vegan, of people who push for the
abolition of keeping fish in both public and private hobbyist aquariums. It’s the same type of overblown rhetoric that leads to
some so-called “ethicists” to say that it is unethical to keep pets at all, even dogs and cats. This last example shows how impoverished in knowledge and reason this kind of rhetoric is; we did not “enslave” dogs and cats, they are two species that evolved to domesticate themselves to humans because it was advantageous to them to do so, and in the case of dogs there is
good evidence that dogs “domesticated” humans as much as they domesticated themselves to us.
All this handwringing over humans exploiting animals, whether for food, for companionship, for entertainment, as if it is “unnatural” or wrong – allow me to let you in on the open secret pretty much anyone who as objectively studied the natural world is already aware of: animals exploit other animals, that’s the way of nature. Predators exploit their prey. Parasites exploit their hosts (you call humans a “horror species” for putting animals in zoos, take a university-level course in parasitology and you’ll see some species that will give you nightmares). Dogs exploited us for our trash heaps, cats for the rodents our granaries attracted, and then both manipulated our behavior to get us to care for them. You see an animal being “exploited” by being cared for in a large modern naturalistic enclosure with regular feedings instead of the intermittent starvation many wild animals deal with, protected from the predators that would exploit them in the wild, treated to live healthy and free of the parasites that routinely exploit wild animals. And in the meantime their species is being saved from extinction, with the tradeoff for this comfort and security for them and their species being kids get to come and see them and enjoy their beauty, learn a little about wildlife up close in the way that a picture in a book can’t inspire them to do, and some, as a result, may go on to university to study the environment and biology in the desire to continue the work of keeping these animals and their natural habitats from disappearing.
