Can i be your partner in crime Phil
You sure can!
There's two ways of looking at zoos. They aren't all charnal houses. Many species would be in a lot more trouble than they are without zoos running breeding programs. e.g. the Tasmanian Devil. It would be history without the work done by zoos to quarantine and breed up the numbers from animals free of the virus that is killing all the wild ones. They've just released a pack of them onto an island to live wild again and hopefully avoid extinction. It is hoped that the virus will die out with the last wild ones on the mainland and then the healthier ones can be released back into their old stamping grounds and given a future. Orangutans are similar story.
Sometimes history is just what
should happen, without the interference of Man doing "good". Besides, what you're talking about is entirley different than what this so-called "zoo" did.
Peta and frothing animal rights activists aren't doing that for them, zoos and groups with the facilities to house them are.
Two different organizations, two different charters.
There are always aholes in any industry but it isn't fair to label all zoos the same. An animal that lives in the wild eating whatever it can find and sleeping it off isn't necessarily worse off in an enclosure where it isn't going to be preyed on and die of easily cured diseases as it will in the wild. It's all very 'human' to value freedom and vaunting living in nature as something wonderful but you won't find any old antelope on the veldt or old lions for that matter. You'll only find them in zoos.
That's because Nature has its own rhythm and rhyme. It did fine before Man came along and had that God-given will to exert his dominance over the beasts, then he got all intelligent and found ways to rationalize the imprisonment of his fellow beasties.
Maybe animals, like people, aren't MEANT to live that long, all Cenegenics discussions aside.
Do you want to be grabbed out of your house, shoved into a nursing home, be hooked up with meds and machines to artificially extend your life and have people paying to come in and poke sticks at you? All in the name of - what? The advancement of Man's knowledge? The protection of your species? Will there be a little sign over your bed that reads "
This is for her own good - we know best"?
Then one day when you've just finished a box of choccies, someone on staff decides that they have too many Diwundrin genes and gee, here comes the guys down the hall with the bolt gun ... I'll bet you'll wish that you were back in your "natural habitat" right about that time.
What is your answer for that problem of 'man' interfering with wildlife?
Stop doing it.
There is only so much land to go round. Is it crueller to use an acre of grass to feed a Wildebeest and let a village starve that could be fed by that acre? The same people who bleat about giving the earth back to wildlife are usually the same ones who donate to famine relief. Sorry, can't have it both ways folks. HTFU and decide. Which should we 'cull'??
The humans or the wildlife? Up to you.
Paper tiger.
94% of the land in the United States is undeveloped; Africa, the second-largest continent in both land-mass and population and accounting for 20% of the world's land-mass and one-seventh of the population, is also the MOST undeveloped area in the world. You Aussies - tell me you don't have a few spare kilometers of undeveloped land.
It's the same way in virtually every country in the world. There IS no shortage of land.
As for deciding whether to devote that land to animals or people, it's simple - if Man would stop lording it over the animals and instead learn to live in harmony with them there could be co-operative use of the land. But no - Man is too damned greedy; he wants his malls and his business centers and his parking lots; he labors under the delusion that he "owns" the land contained within his fence-line.
He doesn't. The land belongs to every human AND animal.
We as a species are a lot like the school bully - always coveting what we don't have and willing to destroy to get it.
If we would learn to consume less and become stewards of the land instead of its rapists, then maybe your question would fall into the oblivion it so richly deserves.
We CAN have it both ways - we just aren't
smart enough yet to figure out
how.
