Well, at least let’s start 2024 with something lighthearted. And here, in a 30-minute video, are 100 humorous scenes involving animals of all stripes—and some with no stripes . Enjoy.
The only bits I’m ambivalent about are the animals in zoos (i.e., animal prisons). My feelings about zoos was best expressed by H. L. Mencken in this piece. The only valid reason to put wild animals on display in captivity is to breed them to bring them back in the wild if they’re threatened or endangers, or if for some reason an individual couldn’t survive in the wild. There may be others, but I can’t think of them at the moment.
An excerpt. Nobody writes like this any more, and only Mencken ever could have (note ethnic slur in second para.: there’s no doubt the man was bigoted):
One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen they support) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of instruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never been able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational than so many firemen’s parades or displays of sky-rockets, and that all they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to Congress or a state legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats smell worse than Greek ‘bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon (who was unheard of by the Romans) is Procyon lotor. For the dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying of eggs.But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals them-selves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear
As the Wild Kratts say, creatures should be “living free and in the wild.” (Presumably, domesticated creatures are the exception.)
https://pbskids.org/wildkratts
We’re big friends of the Wild Kratts; my 4-year old granddaughter really enjoys them. She loves to pretend to be the animals that they profile, such as cheetahs, caracals, anteaters, and basilisk lizards. Oh, and chameleons…
My last visit to a zoo was here in Tucson in the early 90s. I left in tears completely ruining the “zoo experience” for my then boyfriend. There was an elephant there that had gone mad. Though she had “plenty of space” (by zoo standards), she remained in one spot repeatedly swinging her trunk from side to side, period. That is all she did. All day. Her suffering was palpable. It reminded me of the scene from that Turkish prison movie where all the inmates walked in circles. Remember the protagonist came in and began circling in the opposite direction? It made me sick. Thinking back, I wish I’d inquired about her past but, at the time, it was all I could do to get the hell out of there.
I can’t bear zoos. They are much better than they used to be with more natural environments and moving the mission to conservation. Some animals were rescued and may have died if not taken in by the zoo. They still disturb me greatly. Those tiny animal roadside attractions where some random guy keeps big cats in cages ought to be outlawed. Yes it is amazing to get a close up look at animals that are not native to the area, but I feel sorry for the creatures. So I don’t go.
I’m not defending zoos in general, but there are some which serve a good purpose.
We have a local zoo that I have donated milk to for many years. They only take in animals that are native to the area and that cannot be rereleased due to injury or because they were taken as “pets” and were acclimated to humans. They also serve as a temporary stopover for predators that have to be relocated because they have become a danger to people. A few years back they housed a bear for a few weeks before he could be moved to a very remote area about 200 miles away.
The only times the animals are caged are when they are either being treated for injuries or illness, or for an hour or so while their grottos are being cleaned. The rest of the time they are in habitats which are large and which mimic natural settings.
Many of the animals there would have had to have been euthanized. The few that could be rereleased have been.
Outlawing all zoos would throw the baby out with the bath.
L
There are animal sanctuaries that do the type of work you discuss here that don’t refer to themselves as zoos. Some don’t allow visitors, so the animals are not an “attraction.” I can understand that some do allow visitors as a way to help offset the costs of caring for the animals.
OK. I watched the entire crazy thing. Why not? It’s New Year’s Day!
I was a volunteer at the National Zoo, Department of Invertebrates in Washington D.C. I felt that these animals(corals, sea stars, cockroaches, leafcutter ants, spiders) were less likely maybe to resent their imprisonment. Less likely than the charismatic mega-vetebrates. (Not so sure about the Giant Pacific Octopus, which are pretty intelligent.) The staff were always trying to increase “animal enrichment” vs the visitor experience. And visitor education was a big thing and might help the public appreciate the rest of the world.
I think it should be said that large modern zoos are indeed engaged in excellent research programs that are of both purely scientific and practical interest, useful for conservation as well as husbandry.
I am directly familiar with the efforts of the National/Smithsonian and San Diego zoos on behalf of the endangered desert tortoise.