The New England Aquarium in Boston has a fantastic penguin habitat as one of the centerpieces to their exhibits. They have an led flashlight with a fish-shaped filter mounted on the side of one of their aquatic tanks. I’m not the only adult who waits his turn behind the kids playing with it. It’s exactly analogous to a laser pen and a cat.

1. Try all day to find food. If not successful, starve to death.

2. Try all day not to get eaten by something bigger. If not successful, get violently ripped apart and eaten.

As long as you’re keeping animals in a reasonably naturalistic environment, their lives are almost always better off in a zoo. Plus, there’s the species conservation and breeding work, and the outreach and education for the public.

What have you got against zoos, Xeni?

They’re not “flightless birds” – they just do their flying underwater.

The research is inherently flawed – no animal in captivity can behave like a free-living animal.

Further, they’ve evolved over millions of years to live in their environments, and are quite suited to it. It’s ludicrous to think that we’re providing something ‘better’ for them.

Most of these arguments were also used to justify human captivity. “It’s better for them.” “I’d rather be a slave in their position than blah blah blah.”

This all sidesteps the point: we aren’t them, and captivity does not trump freedom. We abolished human slavery for this reason, and hopefully one day this will occur for non-human animals.

Xeni has the right attitude, and we should be questioning the dominating attitudes that are so embedded in our psyches.

- Vegan Dave

Penguin = Linux-Logo.
Butterfly = Windows-Logo.

See for yourself:
http://is.gd/eugy7