The Battle Over Killer Whales

If you want to know how vehement and even hostile people are in opposition to SeaWorld, just read the comments at the end of the recent editorial in the LATimes, What to do about SeaWorld's captive killers.

The State of California was considering a bill that would phase out killer whale shows, an idea that has gained greater popularity thanks to the 2013 documentary Blackfish, but the bill did not pass because it went “too far too fast” according the editorial.

 The article seemed pretty even-handed to me. “Legislators,” it warned, “should keep in mind that requiring SeaWorld to suddenly shutter its signature attraction could destroy the rest of the marine park's business. Though animal rights activists might think that's fine, SeaWorld has invested heavily in its killer whale program and done so legally. In the absence of documented animal abuse, the company shouldn't be stripped of its most valuable assets overnight.”

One of the problems I see in the arguments over killer whales (as well as apes and elephants) in captivity is that there doesn’t appear to be any room for compromise. While there are legitimate concerns over welfare of killer whales and I might even be convinced they should not be kept in captivity, that does not mean we should eliminate places like SeaWorld. The amount of good done for wildlife by zoos and aquariums is immeasurable. The ultimate irony in all of this is that people wouldn’t even care about killer whales if it wasn’t for the work done by SeaWorld.

People need to lighten up on their attacks on SeaWorld and on zoos and aquariums in general. And zoos and aquariums may need to listen to the people. “The next step, according to the editorial, “might well be the prohibition of captive breeding as well as a ban on bringing new killer whales into the state. SeaWorld would have years to devise a new headline draw while continuing to show its existing whales, but the public would know that, at least in California, an outmoded way of viewing the magnificent marine mammals is coming to a close.”

Seems like sound advice. I wonder if anybody is listening.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-killer-whales-ban-california-20140408,0,7980414.story#ixzz2yLojsEqL

Copenhagen Zoo in the news - again

The killing of four healthy lions by “euthanized injection” at the Copenhagen zoo has sparked another round of debate in the zoo community and beyond.

http://guardianlv.com/2014/04/copenhagen-zoo-euthanizes-four-healthy-lions/

Two of the lions were older adults and the other two lions were cubs that were too young to fend for themselves. The Copenhagen zoo explained in the media that they euthanized the animals to make room for a younger generation of lions.

I have been seeing a microcosm of the debate on a LinkedIn forum in which I participate. Here is a sample of some of the comments that have been exchanged between participants. See if you can guess the origins:

In zoos our primary role is to educate visitors, we need to show all aspects of nature. Nature does contain both life and death.

Nice try Mr. _____. This is horrific zoo management devoid of animal ethics. If the zoo opted to have the lions they had, they had an obligation to hold onto them or place them until they died of natural causes.

The giraffe in Copenhagen was euthanized in order to avoid inbreeding. Should we just neglect the effects of inbreeding on animal and population health? It is never taken lightly to euthanize an animal, but should the public not know what goes on in the zoo? We need to be open and honest about what we do. The world might be connected through the web, but the public in Denmark are supportive of what we do here. I must ask why is it so hard to accept that cultural differences exist, you don't need to try to convert everyone to what you feel is right.

If the Copenhagen Zoo feels like it is not getting the support that it should, from other zoos, perhaps it's because their lack of public relations sensitivity has put a lot of zoos in defensive mode... UNNECESSARILY!

( Australia) This is a subject that is difficult to deal with without emotions takes over. Except of course if we talk about food production animals which for whatever irrational reason are not a concern, despite their welfare frequently are totally compromised. What I really do appreciate from Copenhagen Zoo's standpoint - regardless of my own opinion - is that they have been totally consistent and rational in their approach for a long time, and as a result have a lot more credibility than writers of some of the ridiculous un informed comments seen in the wider discussions around this issue. Anyone who seriously believes that they do not care about their animals are sadly mistaken.

Sorry, can't agree that Copenhagen has been rational. Your opinion. Not mine. And again, have to disagree, zoo administrators do make decisions based on bringing in money; babies make money. And quite subjective to say that reproduction is necessary part of captivity: in my opinion, rationalization to make babies to make money. Copenhagen and credibility in one sentence: that's amusing. And please don't try to snow your audience with "regardless of my opinion": what each of us writes is of our opinion.

I find it very disturbing that the main drive in the arguments against the Danish and European Animal Management is based on the fear of how the public react.

I have left out some of the more personal, mean-spirited exchanges, but you get the idea. This reminds me of some of the Republican – Democrat debates over ObamaCare or the debates over gun-rights. Strong opinions on both sides and both sides convinced they are right! This is the subject I intend to tackle in my book.

Forty years of memories

Do you know where you were on this date, forty years ago? I do. I was a young, senior zoo keeper hired the previous fall as one of the original keepers for the new Metro Toronto Zoo. According to my diary entry for March 13^th, 1974, I was helping TB test 17 white-tailed deer. The operation was part of a bigger challenge that began on 8 January 1974 when a female blackbuck antelope died of tuberculosis (TB) in our outdoor holding facility. This began a long-running quarantine and numerous TB tests of the animals – and of the keepers, since TB is one of the many zoonotic diseases that can be passed between animals and humans.

The Tuberculin skin tests that I saw used consisted of an intradermal injection of a tiny amount of purified culture filtrate of Bovine TB under the skin in such a manner that a pea-sized bump was produced. After 2-days, the vet would need to inspect the site of the injection to see what, if any, reaction had occurred. If the test was positive, we would see what appeared to be an allergic reaction – redness and marked swelling – at the site of the injection. In hoofed stock, finding a bare patch of skin can be a challenge. In most cases, the veterinarians preferred the bare patch of skin under the tail around the anus, an area known as the Caudal Fold. A test in this area was not visible unless the animal was caught a second time to have the tail raised for a visual inspection. Another site for testing was in the skin of the upper eyelid. This method was almost always used in primates, and on a few occasions in hoofed stock. The results of the eyelid test were obvious without a second capture. One of the challenges is that a positive reaction does not necessarily mean they have TB, just that they have been exposed to it and have antibodies in their system. Diagnosis based on these clinical signs alone is very difficult, even in advanced cases.

All of the animals in the areas that had housed the blackbuck had to be tested, so on Monday, March 4^th, 1974, we began the testing with a male wapiti (elk) and a male roe deer. The following day we caught and tested four reindeer, two muntjac, and seven Chinese water deer. All of these animals tested negative when they were caught-up two days later. The next Monday, on March 11^th, we tested seven yak, three tahr, and one male barasinga deer. The female barasinga, according to my notes, was not tested because “the dart glanced off front knee” – meaning she did not go down. The following day we tested ten white-tailed deer and the female barasinga deer and on Wednesday, we tested seventeen more white-tailed deer.

The method of catching and restraining these animals varied. The larger and the more “flighty” animals were shot with tranquilizer darts. Some of the animals could be cornered and physically grabbed and restrained while others were caught in large hoop-nets. Of the ten deer we caught on Tuesday, for example, my notes say we caught two by hand, four in nets, and four of them were tranquilized. These procedures did not always go as planned. One of the white-tailed deer jumped into the pen next door that housed the Pere Davis’s deer and, on two occasions, deer jumped out of their pen and into a perimeter area in which they were still contained.

On Monday, March 18^th, we tested eight blackbuck and, on Thursday of that week, we tested six Pere David’s deer and one mule deer. After nearly three weeks, we had caught, tested, and read the results on nearly seventy animals, which equals 140 captures with remarkably few casualties. All animals to this point tested negative.

On Tuesday, April 30^th, our luck changed. We tested a male and three female European bison and when the tests were read on Friday, the male’s test was “suspect” and one of the females was positive. They were re-tested the following week with a more sensitive test in the eyelid instead of under the tail, and the male and two of the females were positive. We had not seen any signs of tuberculosis since the initial diagnoses in the female blackbuck, but now we were in for a long period of quarantine, treatments and endless testing. Unfortunately, I was transferred to a different area and have no record of what happened afterwards.

1974 was an eventful year for me. My two little boys, Mike and Jason were just 2 ½ years and 10 months old respectively. We had moved from the balmy, gulf coast of Florida to spend our first winter in Canada and I was in the midst of opening one of the largest zoo operations in the world. For a zookeeper, much of the work can be mundane – cleaning cages and feeding animals – but there was nothing mundane about those early days at the Toronto Zoo. We received new animals on a weekly basis – many of which I had never even heard of. We were catching, crating, uncrating, and moving animals around on a daily basis and, at one point, I found myself on a Polish freighter in the middle of the North Atlantic with a load of animals bound for Canada. So from now until the 40^th anniversary of the opening of the zoo in August, I would like to remember some of those times.

A Sad Day at the Zoo

Marius was only two years old when he was killed. News reports disagree as to whether it was with a bolt gun or a rifle, but the young giraffe was considered surplus to the population – at least the population of the Copenhagen Zoo and the rest of the accredited zoos in Europe. My heart sank when I saw the report. Is this how zoos are supposed to operate? Not any zoo I know. Not my zoo.

I am not a hypocrite. I have been in the business of running zoos for more than forty years. I do eat meat and recognize that cattle are slaughtered every day to satisfy our needs. I have seen plenty of animals euthanized. It is as much a part of the zoo business as it is that of a veterinary practice. And the practical side of the Copenhagen Zoo’s case was that euthanizing the animal without chemicals made two hundred kilograms of meat available for the hungry carnivores, like some efficiency or “circle of life” argument.

I also recognize the potential educational opportunity. As a Copenhagen Zoo spokesman said in an interview with the Associated Press, "I'm actually proud because I think we have given children a huge understanding of the anatomy of a giraffe that they wouldn't have had from watching a giraffe in a photo".

That may be true, but what about the worldwide damage to the public perception of zoos? The LA Times correctly noted in a recent editorial that, “the action, and the explanation, cast a harsh spotlight on the role of zoos, a role that is increasingly being questioned as we learn more about wild animals and their difficulties in captivity.”  The editors go on to observe that “more than ever, zoos are taking responsibility for the well-being of their animals, which means keeping them alive and healthy as long as possible. That's not what happened here. And what lesson does it teach the public about respecting and admiring wild animals when that education includes the killing and dismemberment of an animal?”

The Associated Press reports that animal rights organizations around the world are now claiming “the case highlights what it believes zoos do to animals regularly”.

"It is no secret that animals are killed when there is no longer space, or if the animals don't have genes that are interesting enough," said one organization. "The only way to stop this is to not visit zoos."

A spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in the U.K. said Marius' case should serve as a wake-up call for anyone who "still harbors the illusion that zoos serve any purpose beyond incarcerating intelligent animals for profit."

This whole business makes me sad – sad for the giraffe, sad for my own sense of having been let down by my profession, and sad for those thousands (or millions) of people who think this is how zoos operate. According to CNN, “numerous American zoos did not immediately respond to requests for interviews”. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) also declined a request, issuing a short statement stating that European zoo "programs and procedures vary from those of the AZA." It seems to me that no response is akin to tacit approval.

I am sorry, but I can’t stand by and say nothing. I feel that zoo animals are more like our pets than they are farm animals. We celebrate their births, give them cute names, and commemorate their birthdays every year. We talk about the urgency of our conservation work and how we are the best hope to save animals from extinction. Surely we can’t think it is OK to shoot them and slaughter them for meat at the end of the day. After all the good work zoos have done over the years, and all of the heart and soul that zookeepers put into giving the highest standards of care (and, yes, love) to their animals, we have handed a perfect argument to our critics who claim the true purpose of zoos is “incarcerating intelligent animals for profit". What a shame.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.   Gandhi

The case for animal welfare

According to an article in sciencemag.org, three lawsuits filed last week that attempted to achieve “legal personhood” for chimpanzees have been struck down. They were the first step in a nationwide campaign to grant legal rights to a variety of animals. The Nonhuman Rights Project (NHRP) Executive Director Natalie Prosin tells ScienceInsider that her group expected this outcome. “We were pleasantly surprised at how respectful the judges were, specifically the two that allowed us to have oral hearings,” she says. “We were thrilled to be able to do that. Now we have something on record that we can take to appeals court.” She says her group is now preparing those appeals, which she hopes will be heard in about a year.

The author of an article in spiked-online.com disagrees, saying that even accepting a certain, limited capacity for cognition and emotion, chimpanzees can never be persons. A chimpanzee will never represent himself in court and demand his autonomy. A chimpanzee will never take on a job, walk into a store and make a purchase. A chimpanzee will never even express disdain at all the rubbish on TV. Chimpanzees will merely go on doing what chimpanzees have always done because they lack the scope for flexibility and engagement in anything beyond their spontaneous desires and immediate environment. Someone, the author says, should let the NHRP know that significant social change requires social and political engagement, not the swift turn of a judge’s gavel.

I have worked with animals all of my adult life and I have come to believe that it is not so much about the rights of animals as it is about our responsibilities as humans and as stewards of the planet. Societies decide what is right and what is wrong, and we create laws to prohibit the wrong. Keeping a chimp in a small cage is just plain wrong and should be prohibited by law.  Does that mean chimps should never be kept in any sort of confinement? Probably not. Does that mean no animals should be kept in confinement? There are many gray areas to be sure, but the sooner we begin to focus on animal welfare and stop arguing animal rights, the sooner we will get to an acceptable answer.

Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, is a proponent of focusing on animal welfare rather than animal rights. “Animals are not persons,” he is quoted as saying in the article in sciencemag.org, “but that does not mean that abusing them is acceptable. Both humans and animals would be best served by placing a strong emphasis on human responsibility for humane treatment of animals rather than creating an artificial construct of animal personhood."

In an article for the Toledo Blade newspaper in 1997, syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell put it this way. “The mush-headedness of our times is nowhere better illustrated than in the ‘animal rights’ movement. Animals have no rights because they have no responsibilities and are not part of our legal system. Being against cruelty to animals is one thing, talking nonsense is another.”