Hell's Teeth! One small aside I made seems to have caused such an argument!
For the avoidance of all doubt, my original point was that private breeders have no regulation and have therefore continued to breed unnecessary and in some cases, cruelly deformed animals, when they clearly should not be doing so.
I made no inference that zoos had not done so in the past, but assumed that most people would understand that regulated and responsible breeders would have ceased to do so once problems with offspring became clear and were undesirable.
Also bear in mind how much better our understanding of genetics is now than the 1960s and 70s when the zoos were breeding white tigers.
Also, to be clear, I don't include the true white lions (of Timbavate fame) as undesirable. They were a naturally occurring family in the wild and were paler cats but not the snow-white animals seen today.
King Cheetahs were thought possibly a divergent Forest Cheetah when discovered in the 1970s and 80s, an evolving species, rather than a simple colour morph. Read the book by the Botreils (sp?) from that time. Or even the episode of "Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World" that included mystery animals.
A lot of what went on then would not be done now by responsible breeders. But because people often aren't, they go for the quick buck for the weird and unusual looking and that is why private breeders should be subject to the same checks and balances.
Just because a zoo took a wrong decision, even an ethically or morally questionable one back then is no reason to justify someone doing it now.
Otherwise no one learns from other's errors. One only need look at the febrile state of modern politics to see an obvious example of that type of retrograde populism.
