Hi，everyone. Finally I am back. It’s been a long time I haven’t continued writing my topical blog. This is because I need to review my midterm recently, and I finally finished this suck stuff. Today I want to show you what I am thinking about these days. Even though I think that keeping animals in the zoo are not so bad as people surmise, I want to be not so subjective and try to find more to convince others.
Recently JJP founders had a private meeting, and they discussed about what dilemma the animals are facing. They don’t believe that the zoos and animal captivities today are really caring about animal welfare. They are initially designed for profits. Moreover, the laws are not seriously enforced.
Most of the zoos and captivities are not meeting their so-called purpose: “an important lifeline for vanishing species threatened with extinction” by breeding programs and conservation studies. The truth is, many zoos are actually failing to prepare basic needs of life for animals! For example, some of the zoo do not provide diary on time, some of the zoo do not clean the nest everyday, and some of the zoo do not help the mammal animals giving birth to their baby. Plus, the security system or the supervising systems are not very safe. I remember that when I was young I went to zoo, and I saw a monkey sitting outside the cage and eat the food thrown by travelers. Guess what? Some of the guests threw crisps for them. Beside, some of them even threw beef to monkey！The monkey just ate all of them without any warn of the zookeepers. It must be very harm to their health since they ate a lot of fat.
The group co-workers mentioned a new point of view today.
There is a foundation called the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation, spending huge amount of money, training Keiko to adapt to the wild from the captivity. They taught Keiko to catch live fish, reintegrated Keiko with a pod of wild killer whales, and eventually aiming for sending them back to the ocean again. This has been the thing I wanted to do for my whole life: training animals in captivities and entertainment back to wild.
However, the things turned out to be out of my imagination.
In July 2002, Keiko was released from Iceland, but he swam straight for human companionship. He even became an attraction there, and tourists were actually sitting on Keiko’s back and taking photos! During Keiko’s life, he never seemed to be willing to go back to the free ocean. He loved the feeling of staying with human. I saw a picture on the other’s blog. Keiko smiled and “took a nice posture”, trying to taking picture with human beings.
Just imagine, if animals in captivities and entertainment are born and adapted to the life with human, will going back to wild be a good choice?
Considering about the elephant saving program. Treating elephant is a cruel practice where they are treated badly during their childhood. It is definite to say that this practice should be stopped, but after JJp’s rescue, it now confuses me: where should they go? I previously decided to put them into our Going-Back-to-Wild Program, but now I hesitate. What will happen if they just don’t adapt the live without human intervene?
To free or not to free now traps me in a dilemma, and we need to figure out more about what to do. What do you think about? If you are interested in JJP’s or other projects, follow www.worldanimalprotection.org to find more. Let’s providing the best for those animals!
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