Meaghan Edwards
Well-Known Member
The ARists are at it again 
Laidlaw had issues with Toronto's old tiger dying. He was 17 years old! Has he not had a pet that died?
Laidlaw had issues with Toronto's old tiger dying. He was 17 years old! Has he not had a pet that died? http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/778655--it-s-time-to-close-the-zooOn Feb. 24, Tillikum the killer whale pulled trainer Dawn Brancheur off her poolside platform at Orlando's SeaWorld by her ponytail, dragging her underwater and drowning her.
Some argue that Tillikum should be put down like a vicious pit bull. But others figure the tragedy was a clear sign that he should be released back into the wild.
Some activists contend this is just the latest in a long line of incidents and situations that prove marine parks, aquariums and zoos are nothing more than the modern equivalents of bear-baiting.
That's not as extreme a suggestion as it might at first seem.
Most people would agree that captive animal facilities are about four things: fun, profit, education and conservation.
No one's disputing the first two, but it's the latter two that form the moral underpinning of the entire multi-billion-dollar industry. In a world that's increasingly concerned about human impact, captive animal facilities are relying more and more on those rationales to justify their existence.
John Nightingale is a biologist and president of the 50-year-old Vancouver Aquarium, which was the first in the world, back in 1965, to capture a killer whale. Though the aquarium has since decided against keeping killer whales, citing the expense of creating and maintaining suitable enclosures, Nightingale is a firm believer in the ability of facilities like his to engage the unengaged.
(For the record, the Toronto Zoo refused to make an employee available to speak with me, and Marineland did not return my calls.)
"Given that we're now approaching 60 per cent of our population in North America are living in cities, people are more disconnected from nature than ever," Nightingale says.
Nightingale maintains that capturing and keeping wild animals is not justifiable except under very specific circumstances.
"You should not be keeping them unless you can provide for their well being, by which I mean their mental health and their physical health, and even then, you have an obligation to utilize them for that engagement, and for beginning that process of creating awareness."
He believes that the interaction implicit in going to see actual creatures, whether they're simply on display or performing, increases the likelihood that people will care enough about them to take some form of pro-conservation action.
But according to studies done at zoos in the U.S. and the U.K., people barely take in the live animals right in front of them. According to Zoocheck Canada, which cites the research to bolster its case against keeping animals captive, people spend an average of 8 seconds looking at reptiles in zoos, between 22 and 50 seconds with primates, and from 30 to 87.5 seconds in front of elephant enclosures.
"I challenge you to tell me what spending that much time with an animal outside its natural environment can do for you," says Robert Laidlaw, president of the 25-year-old Toronto-based organization. "It's very like people clicking through channels on the TV. For me, that's what the zoo experience is."
Jon Haidt, a professor in the University of Virginia's psychology department specializing in the way the human brain makes connections and forms sympathies, agrees with Laidlaw.
"Seeing something as an object is very different from relating to it in a way that involves some give and take," he says, explaining that while, say, swimming with dolphins might increase one's sense of personal connection, anything short of that probably doesn't.
"Seeing it as an object in the zoo is not very different from seeing it as an object on the Discovery Channel."
Though Laidlaw works with zoos as a consultant on animal rights, he says in an ideal world, there would be no zoos, aquariums or marine parks. Apart from their educational shortcomings, he's also not convinced they do much for conservation.
"You get literally billions and billions of dollars dumped into zoos for operational costs, and additional billions for capital projects," he says. Meanwhile, for all their claims about the value of captive breeding to threatened species, of the 16,118 endangered species on the red list of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, zoos have helped only 12 to 15 species. "If you examine the claims of zoos," says Laidlaw, "you'll see they keep bringing up the same few species: the black-footed ferret, the Vancouver Island marmot, the whooping crane ... Every zoo in the world does this."
Laidlaw's solution is to turn the whole concept of captive-animal facilities on its head.
He cites places "nobody's ever heard of" such as the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson or the Salmonier Nature Park in Newfoundland – which house only native animals in controlled but natural segments of their actual habitats – and specialist facilities like the Cochrane Polar Bear Habitat in Northern Ontario. Under this model, the only zoo where you'd ever see a Siberian tiger would be in Siberia.
"Zoos and facilities that people think are the best, they only think that because they have the biggest PR departments," he says of places such as the renowned San Diego Zoo. "In most of these facilities, they have a very skewed totem pole of priorities: the public first, the staff second, the animals third."
Though the World Wildlife Federation of Canada has supported zoos in various ways, conservation science director Steven Price concedes that zoos and marine parks represent "a broad moral equation," involving the capture of certain individual animals for the possible benefit of others in the wild.
Though he says that losing zoos would mean losing a tool in the broader efforts championed by organizations like his, "it doesn't rationalize every other legitimate ethical question about zoos." Such as, for example, whether predatory whales should be kept in tanks and trained to play nice with little bits of protein like us.