Boy, I suppose it takes an atrocity to get me off my butt these days and make a post.
I was very distressed to read an article in the Christian Science Monitor this morning on the recent deaths of animals at the Chicago Zoo.
I think my last visit to a zoo was the great London zoo in the late 1970s. Fascinating but ultimately depressing. I no longer go to zoos because I have too much empathy for the animals.
I see their value for conservation but I frequently think that the energy spent on funding zoos should be spend on preserving natural habitat. Those greatest of natural habitats, South America and Africa are being deforested as I write this. Yet unless it affects us -- global warming -- nobody seems to give much of a damn.
Having just returned from my college reunion I find myself missing those halcyon days when we could get really pissed off at the government's inadequacy and would rally to draw attention to it.
Posted by artandscience at June 9, 2005 06:07 AMI just began reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It begins with a man who finds a teacher, a teacher who promises to help him learn how to save the world. The teacher is a giant gorilla. Interesting book. Here's what the teacher had to say about captured animals living out their lives in zoos:
"In such places (he went on at last), where animals are simply penned up … even the dimmest of them cannot help bus sense that something is very wrong with this style of living. [T]he tiger you see madly pacing its cage is … preoccupied with something that a human would certainly recognize as a thought. And this thought is a question: “Why, why, why, why, why, why?” the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. [T]his question burns like an unquenchable flame in its mind, inflicting a searing pain that does not diminish until the creature lapses into a final lethargy that zookeepers recognize as an irreversible rejection of life."
Posted by: theCallowQueen at June 20, 2005 01:23 PM