Whither Animals?

I’ve spoken many times on this blog of my love of animals and my opinions on ”pets.” But lately I’ve started to think about a trend that is happening in our society.

When I was young, I went to countless zoos, and circuses, and animal parks, and aquariums, and marine mammal shows.  Much of what I knew and learned about animals, I learned from those experiences: sometimes directly, sometimes because I was inspired to seek out knowledge after seeing some animal or other in person.  I would never trade away those memories.

However, it’s completely fair to point out that many of the animals I took such pleasure in watching and learning about were miserable.  Today, the circuses are completely gone,^* thanks to numerous articles; marine mammal shows will soon disappear for good, thanks to documentaries such as Blackfish; and societal changes mean that even zoos are on the decline, according to many sources.  And I’m not saying any of these things are bad.  Certainly the terrible treatment of animals in circuses and marine mammals in parks such as SeaWorld makes me believe that such places do more harm than good.  I’m sure all those marshmallows we fed the hippo in Homosassa Springs weren’t very good for his digestion (although, miraculously, he appears to still be alive as I write this).  As for zoos ...

When I was young, there was a book at my grandparents’ house called How the Animals Get to the Zoo.  Published a few years before I was born, I assume it was bought for me, though I can’t remember specifically being given it as a gift.  I do remember that, even as a child, I was more horrified than fascinated at the examples given in this book, which ranged from throwing nets on zebras from a helicopter to taking ostriches down with bolas.  Also plenty of spring traps and tranquilizer darts and other very disturbing imagery.  So I am not insensitive to the idea that zoos are not always good for animals.

Still ...

My youngest child has never seen a circus, and she almost certainly never will.  She’s never seen a marine mammal show, and, while it’s possible that she might one day, it’s pretty unlikely (certainly it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll ever take her to one).  She’s been to a few zoos and aquariums, and maybe an animal park or two (or maybe not; I can’t think of a specific visit), but there’s no doubt that she has far less real-life experience of animals than I did.  Of course, there’s more instantly availble video of animals than I could have ever dreamed of as a child; YouTube alone allows me to show her any animal I happen to mention within minutes, if not seconds; if we ever idly wonder “what sounds does a <fill in animal here> make?” then it’s a simple Google search to turn up a soundfile or video that will settle the question.  But is it the same?  I can’t help but wonder.

PETA in particular is very much opposed to any sort of system where animals are kept for the entertainment of humans.  But, if humans never experience animals in any other context than as images on a screen, will they care about preserving them?  Sometimes I think that PETA is going to end up causing the eventual extinction of many species just because people won’t recognize them well enough to give a shit when they’re endangered.  There are always unintended consequences.

In fact, studying the Wikipedia page for “unintended consequnces” is quite instructive.  In China in the late 50s, sparrows were identified as pests who ate 4kg of rice grains per year—each.  So the government put sparrows in their “Four Pests” campaign, and millions of them were killed.  Of course, sparrows eat insects too.  By the 60s, “with no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned” ... and guess what locusts eat?  “The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.” As for the “Four Pests,” sparrows were replaced with bedbugs: yet another insect that, as it turns out, the sparrows were keeping under control, until their near-extinction.

Then there’s the Great Plague of London.  “The means of transmission of the disease were not known but thinking they might be linked to the animals, the City Corporation ordered a cull of dogs and cats.  This decision may have affected the length of the epidemic since those animals could have helped keep in check the rat population carrying the fleas which transmitted the disease.” And then of course there are the classic biocontrol-gone-awry stories, such as the Australian cane toad, which was supposed to control the grey-backed cane beetle, and ended up killing countless pets and endangering anywhere from 70 to 100 other species.

I miss some of these methods of exhibiting animals, even as I feel glad that fewer animals are suffering because of their decline.  But those unintended consequences are always impossible to identify, except in hindsight.  Will my children even have the chance to fall in love with animals in the way I did?  I can’t say.  I do what I can—taking them to whatever places are left that I believe are treating their animals in an ethical manner, watching nature documentaries with them, introducing obscure animals into games of “20 Questions,” and never failing to stop what I’m doing to bring up a video on YouTube if I think it can add to a conversation—but I never know if it will be enough.  And I think it will be important for this next generation: important for them to think of animals as awe-inspiring, as fascinating, as worthy of preservation, just as I always have.  If they don’t, if animals are just “ho-hum” or “yeah, I guess they’re okay” or “I suppose they’re fine, but they don’t really impact me” ... if they don’t realize how interconnected everything is, and how those unintended consequences can start falling like dominoes, then it might be too late to change course by the time someone realizes things have gone too far.

So, maybe it’s better that we have fewer zoos, and circuses, and all that.  Maybe animals are better off.  But wouldn’t it be a strange twist of fate if animals ended up suffering more because we are systematically removing all the places where people who live in the city and the suburbs used to interact with them?  I hope that’s not what ends up happening.  But I don’t know.  And I think maybe I’m happy I wasn’t born 40 years later than I was.

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* Unless you count things like Cirque du Soleil.  Which, you know, I don’t.