You would need to spend a lifetime, and several fortunes, travelling the world just to see the animals that you can see in one day at a typical city zoo. roobee; if my admittedly abrasive answer to your earlier post offended you then I apologise. I can tell by your earlier posts that you have the welfare of animals at heart and I applaud that; it's just that I believe that much is made of the alleged "suffering" of zoo animals, when in reality they have it a whole lot better than most farm stock. I also don't accept the argument put forward by some anti-zoo people that wild animals should have more "rights" than domestic animals. That is really another way of admitting that it is acceptable to treat domestic animals less considerately than wild animals. ALL animals, be they tigers and elephants or pigs and poultry, should be well treated.
What has always struck me as being hypocritical is the lack of effort by animal rights activists (and RSPCA) into pushing for controlled breeding and better accomodation for man's so-called 'best friends' (cats and dogs). It is far easier to attack the more visible zoos, because elephants and big cats should be 'safely' in the wild.
Well, here in california, the gobernor was about to sign a new law that required all cats and dogs to be spayed or neutered, but I don't know what happened with that. I haven't heard anything of late. The big problem was that feral cats are eating endangered birds and reptiles all over California.
You need to look at this in the right perspective. The animal welfare groups [and the animal rights propagandists] all need MONEY. In an ideal world, the monitoring of true animal welfare would be done by non-aligned, properly trained pros. Unfortunately we do not live in an ideal world, governments have traditionally shirked their responsibility to animals, and so an animal welfare/rights "industry" has flourished. It has flourished to the point that there are now so many of these organisations competing for financial handouts that they have to be increasingly more strident in their claims in order to get publicity. Even the RSPCA has been forced to go down this track. I vividly remember a State director of the RSPCA telling me that if he could get a good anti-circus story on the TV evening news it would be worth $5000 at least in donations to his Society. Some years ago, Lady Molly Askin [widow of a former NSW Premier] died and left over $1 million to any animal charity that could demonstrate that it was "active" in looking after animals. You should have seen the "activity" levels rise then as they all vied to get the cash! Of course it is much easier to raise your public profile if you are making outlandish claims about high profile animals - such as our zoo animals. Unfortunately, the public are so used to stray dogs and cats that they don't raise much interest - "the poor will always be with us" mentality. Yet, as tetrapod has pointed out, that is where the real animal welfare tragedy exists in this day and age.
So true. Funnily enough though, back when I was working in a zoo, we had a complaint about an animal seen pacing in its enclosure from the carpark, and they had informed the RSPCA. The inspector was perfectly happy with the explanation that it was a relatively new animal that was still getting used to the enclosure, and was also probably waiting for its dinner. Unfortunately for him he had to check out every case, even if he knew it would be a waste of time. So the RSPCA (inspectors at least) aren't all that bad, just wish they would back off zoos as a policy.
The reason I come on to this forum is to communicate with people whose views on zoos are positive (whilst realising that not everything in the garden smells of roses). If I wanted all this claptrap about "you could see them in the wild" I could get it elsewhere, frankly. Your call for the "open range type of zoo" reminds me of those who claim "I don't like zoos but I like wildlife parks" - give something a big field to live in, and all is well.
I believe what I said was with the way travel has opened up these days, people can go to the places if they want to. Also, there are so many good docos on TV or available on DVD, if people want to learn about exotic animals.[/QUOTE] Zoos these days play a very important role in conserving some rare and endangered animal species with some species alive today because of zoos keeping and breeding them even to the point of reintroducing some species back into the wild , Also there are people who can not travel to see animals in other places due to costs they can not afford or heath reasons they may have, having seen many docos and DVDs about animals over many years I would not compare seeing real animals in the flesh to seeing them on TV its no where near the same
