Two bloggers offered up these comments is my "zoo" posting:...I am in the middle of ethical/moral quandaries about keeping animals in display facilities...
...my ethical boundaries about keeping highly intelligent animals in captivity...
I'm not calling them out, just pointing something out for the sake of discussion where they and I may not be seeing eye to eye.
I'm not sure what the measured intelligence level of a bonobo is, but if it's less than that of a six-year old, and such a level would be deemed quite high for an animal, then I don't get what the big deal is about keeping them captive.
We don't let our six-year olds run free, to live as they choose without limitations, do we? No, we don't, and there's nothing wrong with that. We keep our children captive, of course, and for good reason.
And these captive six year olds don't seem to be any worse for wear as a result of it, either.
And same goes for my cat (and the dog I refuse claim ownership of).
I believe that any critter, large or small, kept in appropriate captivity suffers from nothing. They are not like us.
These are still animals. A lower life form. If left to their own devices they will continue to do what they have always done: crap where they want, lay in that crap, enjoy the smell, and even eat,breed and raise their young right there, within nose shot of their last crap...
And if you find what animal researchers consider to be a smart one, 'smart' meaning: able to grab a stick and knock fruit out of a tree, or something else equally inane... keep in mind, if that fruit lands in their crap, they will still eat it.
Captivity, with room to do what they like to do (such as: drop crap where ever they feel like), does them no harm.
And the steady food supply we offer is probably a net benefit.
Therefore, I see no ethical quandaries. None.
10 comments:
Read Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal. (Bonobos are basically an offshoot of chimps.) You'll see ample evidence of very sophisticated social intelligence (hierarchy, coalitions, and the ability to weigh the future consequences of present actions.) Also, it's a good book...probably the only one assigned to me in college that I actually read from cover to cover.
As to the ethics of keeping them in captivity...I certainly stop short of saying that it's wrong in every case (and since I do animal research for a living, would be hypocrite if I did.) I do think that there is a net benefit to the species of well-maintained zoological parks...both in terms of rehabilitating animals that would not survive in the wild and breeding threatened/endangered species. Also, the opportunity to educate the public about how intelligent they really are isn't trivial (in fact, the chimps that de Waal writes about are in captivity.)
i've read a little bit (not book form) about the bonos, and do find them fascinating, and at the same time, strangely perverse creatures.
but, i see high complexity in the social interaction of cats (albeit,to a lesser extent) and crows (i've had crows). if crows had opposable digits, they would make bonos look like morons.
i'm tempted to believe we see what we want to se in bonos because they resemble ourselves. its familiar to us.
i dont think they are alone in complexity. they are just familiar enuf for us to rocognise.
that's funny, I was going to mention crows (I guess we're not so far apart as we both thought ;) ) ... did you see the article about three months(?) back about crow researchers who can't walk across their college campuses anymore because the crows they have captured, tested (apparently to no great permanent harm) and released, remember them and pester them whenever they step outside? I thought this was rather fabulous, actually. The article was "about" how crows can recognize individual humans by face (they've tested them, now ;) ), but we are very nearly hopeless trying to recognize individual crows (even the researchers in question can't).
Of course you know I am currently involved in a movie about an intelligent animal. There are some animals which I think it could be reasonable to say they are of equal but different intelligence than us (I suspect the more intelligent apes and probably several types of cetacean)--yeah, they don't think like we do, but we can't think like they do either (eg., echolocation is a pretty big brain-power activity, and blowholes aren't involuntary muscles--which is, as an aside, why captive dolphins can commit suicide by choosing to drown themselves).
For everyone except the most extreme activists, for whom no captivity is acceptable, the most common line on captivity seems to be drawn in one of two places: at self-awareness, or at intelligence.
Interestingly, I think self-awareness makes me *less* worried about keeping an individual animal in a reasonably capacious captivity situation--a self-aware animal can learn to appreciate or take advantage of the situation. Or at least develop psychological self-preservation techniques, like the ape in a European zoo who last year Shocked Science by showing that he was planning ahead for emotions he was not right then experiencing--because he was stockpiling rocks to throw at viewers, even when he wasn't actively irritated by viewers ;).
(Apparently this was the first time rational planning ahead had been observed in "the animal kingdom." Goofy scientists. I am continually amazed, for a group of people who publicly aver to being entirely against Creationism and an "irrational" reliance on a belief in God, how "scientists" are surprised to find human-like abilities and behaviors in OTHER ANIMALS. So much for human-centric thinking disappearing with the Copernican revolution! Ah, the beautiful descent into pre-Christian paganism that is the modern scientific irrational deification of humanity ... sigh.)
Intelligence, I would figure is merely a game card in how to keep the animals, if you want them to appear happy enough to keep people coming to your zoo.
What I think is the deal breaker is space needs. Animals used to roaming habitats of thousands of miles (land or water) simply cannot be reasonably held in human-sized display facilities. Animals used to sticking to a square mile, highly territorial--well, they probably can handle better the trapped-in-their-own-shit problem, since most of them use it for marking anyhow, ja? Animals that roam do NOT stick around to watch their droppings turn to dirt, and their bodies get cramped and damaged when they can't move freely. Our zoo's elephants are apparently suffering hugely from enclosure-induced physical damage--aggravated by the bizarrely-old age veterinary care can enable.
Myself, chimps and bonobos make me antsy ... the whole "we share 98%(?) DNA thing" is a bit disturbing in how little it seems to me like we "should" be different and yet how plainly hugely we *are* different.
And in the end, I fall heavily into the category of people who is sure if a terrifying alien race ever descends from the sky and wipes us out through superior 'intelligence,' it will be giant hive-minded insectoids. (And, having spent the other night Wiki-ing arthropods, I now know that deep in our evolutionary history there were exoskeletal bugs bigger than modern humans. ACK.)
Anyhow, having strayed far afield, I said I am in the middle of ethical quandaries because like Brian I see the value to the species in careful captivity--not the least of which is that humans become sympathetic to a wider variety of life forms. However, there are many captive animals for whom, as individuals, being captive SUCKS, and can never realistically do much else.
And enviro-tourism, while arguably less horrible to individuals, stresses the whole local species (though not as much as trophy hunting or zoo capture operations, of course). In the case of the orcas in Puget Sound, the fish they don't catch because they are reacting to tourboats and the extra calories they use up, seem to be aggravating their already precarious (because of pollution and prey population loss) survival situation.
It's a complicated set of problems. But I eat (conscientiously raised) meat (and worry about the treatment of the animals who have to be culled from the organic foodline). I have a cat. We had dogs (not oversized for our house and yard), guinea pigs, hamsters, and a couple of parakeets (no clipped wings, they flew free in the house pretty frequently) while I was growing up. I wear leather shoes. I eat (organic cooperative farms) dairy and eggs.
So ... we're not all *that* different, you and I ;).
Sounds like a major difference is that I see WAY less inherent value difference between people and other animals. I do think we have souls and they don't ... but I also see how closely related we *are* and that the golden rule reasonably therefore extends, at least partially.
"Who is your neighbor?"
I'll crank it up a notch.
I not only support having animals in captivity; I support medical research on those animals. They are expendable.
i will be studying animals very soon, and will try my damnedest to tag one of them.
for study purposes, of course.
As long as you eat it ;). You'll note that I specifically said, trophy hunting. As an omnivore, I am not against killing prey animals which have sustainable populations, as long as a minimum of cruelty is involved. It is my general impression that you try to shoot well ;), so I'm not worried about that.
K-Rod, I'm generally not. Which I'm sure is no surprise.
kr: there is very little pure trophy hunting goin on in this country anyway.
all critters taken are eaten, ception being the mountain lion, which is hunted in very limited numbers, and serves to teach them a fear of man when overpopulation brings into too much human contact, leading to hippies getting eaten on their nature hikes.
Nature hikes, nothing. A mountain lion ate my neighbor's cat when I lived in Tucson...many miles w/in the city limits...
brian: wow!
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