Amnesty For Animals – Part 2

The December 3^rd Seattle Times headline read “Scuffle at zoo board’s meeting on where to send elephants”. It seems that dozens of activists showed up at the Woodland Park Zoo board meeting to protest a plan to close the zoo’s elephant exhibit and send its two animals to another zoo. The activists were “demanding its two elephants be sent to a sanctuary rather than another zoo”. They were blocked from attending due to lack of space in the meeting hall, but, after police were called, tempers subsided – at least for the moment.

In November, the zoo had announced that it would phase out its elephant exhibit, saying its two remaining Asian elephants need “a larger social group”. The move was coming after several years of criticism over the zoo’s small, aging exhibit and the quality of the elephants’ lives in captivity. Officials were looking for a zoo that had a stable elephant collection that was free of disease and had an active conservation program that would highlight the threat to elephants in the wild. It sounded like a good plan and a responsible thing to do except for one thing. Activists, according to news reports, said relocating the elephants to another zoo would mean more of the same. “The elephants,” the activists said, “need to go to a sanctuary. They've been in captivity since they were taken from their mothers as babies. They deserve to be off exhibit to heal from the trauma of captivity.”

It is a sad fact that zoos have allowed the perception (not entirely undeserved, unfortunately) that some captive situations can be traumatic. Zoos also stand accused of wantonly breeding animals to produce the cute babies which make them money at the gate. When the babies grow up they become surplus to the zoo’s needs. Sanctuaries have been rescuing these “unwanted” and “surplus” zoo animals for decades.

If zoos are going to survive, I believe they need to step up their game and become the sanctuaries to which people refer, and that will begin with a renewed focus on welfare. At Chehaw Park, for example, the zebras and antelope call a 40-acre pasture home. The cheetahs regularly lie atop a mound watching the world go by, much as they would in the wild. And Bogart the camel appears to enjoy his time interacting with people during his outings as Chehaw’s animal ambassador. Chehaw is a good home for these animals and is an example of a zoo that is also a sanctuary. But animal rights activists would close down even the good zoos and return animals to the wild.

As suggested in a previous post, instead of trying to repatriate all wild animals, I think we need to find ways to allow some of them to live in our midst – a kind of Amnesty for Animals Program. Abolishing zoos, marine parks, and circuses is not the answer. It is these institutions that have developed the ability to live with animals. Granted, there has been plenty of abuse in the past, but times have changed. We need to talk about living together in a global community of zoos, game parks, marine parks and, yes, even circuses. We need to give animals their rights, take them out of the hands of those who will not or cannot care for them, grant them protection under the law, and assimilate them into our lives and into our societies.

Amnesty For Animals – Part 1

I like to think of myself as an optimist – one who sees the glass half full. I am happy with where I am and what I have (although I wish I could do more for my children and grandchildren). But as a conservationist, I can’t help but feel a little gloomy.

Human populations in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to double in the next forty years while the killing of African wildlife for ivory, horns, bush meat, and as a result of warfare continues to escalate in spite of worldwide outrage. A fifth of the vast Amazon rainforest has been destroyed in the last thirty years despite government crackdowns and in 2013 deforestation actually increased by almost one-third.

In Indonesia, nearly nine million acres of forest have been lost to oil palm plantations in the last twenty years. The Orangutan Land Trust's scientific advisory board estimates that some three thousand orangutans are lost each year to habitat conversion and hunting. And if all that is not bad enough, there is global climate change to worry about. Polar bear habitat is literally melting before our eyes.

People who lobby for “animal rights” are also lobbying for the repatriation of captive animals back to the wild. Repatriation is a term that was bandied about in the first half of 2014 with regard to children who were illegally pouring across the U. S. – Mexican border. The term literally means to return someone to his or her own country. But repatriation, in this case, was not a straightforward issue because these children were not from our neighboring Mexico. They were from hundreds of miles away in Central America, fleeing crime, gang violence, and grinding poverty in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. They had no homes to which they could be humanely returned. 

If we are going to repatriate wild animals and move them out of zoos, aquariums, and marine parks, to what wild will they be humanely returned? Does anybody really think we can stem the tide of human population growth and the resulting destruction of animal habitats in wild areas? We may need to accept the fact that the people of Africa, Asia, and South America have a right to expand just as we did in North America and Europe, and that global climate change is going to continue into the foreseeable future. Tying the fate of wild animals to the future of their natural habitat might be ensuring their extinction rather than preventing it.

So here is a glass-half-full thought. Perhaps it is time we recognized that zoos, marine parks, and yes even circuses may hold the answer. It is these institutions that have developed the ability to live with animals and it is to these environments that most wild animals have been able to adapt. Facilities are getting better and more humane while enlightened and loving caretakers learn new techniques to ensure that animal welfare is a top priority. A large, diverse zoo habitat might be a perfectly good, permanent home for some wild animals.

Instead of trying to repatriate all wild animals, we need to find ways to allow some of them to live in our midst – a kind of Amnesty for Animals Program. If we really want to stir up an interesting partisan debate, maybe we could expand our already controversial immigration reform policies to include wild animals from around the world. It puts a whole new spin on the concept of illegal aliens!