A little something for y'all
Mar. 25th, 2007 01:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazliyaMoral question of the week:
Is it wrong of a zoo to save a baby polar bear whose mother neglected it?
Article can be found here.
Apparently, a lot of animal rights activists are calling the zoo out, saying that the natural law would have been to let the cub die. They claim that hand-rearing the cub will cripple its ability to interact socially with others of his kind.
My thoughts for:
- Polar Bears are solitary by nature. So my first thought is: what social interaction? He most likely will spend his life either alone completely or occasionally introduced to a female to mate. And it doesn't matter how long it's been in captivity, every creature retains the instinct to mate.
- Polar bears are endangered and difficult to breed in captivity as it is. To let an otherwise healthy cub die due to its mother's fault would be sacrificing valuable genetics that could be used to prevent inbreeding amongst zoos.
- Technically, he won't need any instincts he may lose being hand-reared. It's a male cub. He won't ever need to be a parent. All captive male polar bears do in regard to their own cubs is kill and/or eat them (in 90% of recorded cases) when present around the birth. He's going to live in a zoo. He doesn't need survival instincts, and being hand-reared will make him more accustomed to humans, and thus able to be cared for and studied more closely.
My thoughts against:
- In nature, the cub would have died. If the zoo really is trying to mimic nature to the best of their ability, the accurate thing to do would have been to let the cubs die and leave them for a bit so that the mother acknowledges the deaths, then take them away and not let her breed again.
- If the female polar bear that gave birth to the cubs was known to be an unsuitable mother (I don't know if this was her first) or was hand-reared and there was a chance she wouldn't know how to be a capable mother, then it was a bad call on the zoo's part to breed her.
- There are always the innumerable dangers of hand-rearing a cub. Expecially when he reaches maturity and will be a whopping 1200lbs when grown. That, combined with the possibility of the more violent instincts reemerging at a time when he's with humans that believe themselves to be safe because of his upbringing, leads to trouble. Along with the other dangers, which I'm not going to list. He's a wild animal. He will never be safe. Although I do give the keepers benefit of the doubt that since they are zookeepers, they know this already.
Those are just the first few things that come to mind. Also, one thing I noticed, the activists who called for the zoo to let the cub die are against euthanizing the cub now. So they have no solution to the problem, they're just complaining. Hrm.
What do you guys think? At all.
-Haz
Is it wrong of a zoo to save a baby polar bear whose mother neglected it?
Article can be found here.
Apparently, a lot of animal rights activists are calling the zoo out, saying that the natural law would have been to let the cub die. They claim that hand-rearing the cub will cripple its ability to interact socially with others of his kind.
My thoughts for:
- Polar Bears are solitary by nature. So my first thought is: what social interaction? He most likely will spend his life either alone completely or occasionally introduced to a female to mate. And it doesn't matter how long it's been in captivity, every creature retains the instinct to mate.
- Polar bears are endangered and difficult to breed in captivity as it is. To let an otherwise healthy cub die due to its mother's fault would be sacrificing valuable genetics that could be used to prevent inbreeding amongst zoos.
- Technically, he won't need any instincts he may lose being hand-reared. It's a male cub. He won't ever need to be a parent. All captive male polar bears do in regard to their own cubs is kill and/or eat them (in 90% of recorded cases) when present around the birth. He's going to live in a zoo. He doesn't need survival instincts, and being hand-reared will make him more accustomed to humans, and thus able to be cared for and studied more closely.
My thoughts against:
- In nature, the cub would have died. If the zoo really is trying to mimic nature to the best of their ability, the accurate thing to do would have been to let the cubs die and leave them for a bit so that the mother acknowledges the deaths, then take them away and not let her breed again.
- If the female polar bear that gave birth to the cubs was known to be an unsuitable mother (I don't know if this was her first) or was hand-reared and there was a chance she wouldn't know how to be a capable mother, then it was a bad call on the zoo's part to breed her.
- There are always the innumerable dangers of hand-rearing a cub. Expecially when he reaches maturity and will be a whopping 1200lbs when grown. That, combined with the possibility of the more violent instincts reemerging at a time when he's with humans that believe themselves to be safe because of his upbringing, leads to trouble. Along with the other dangers, which I'm not going to list. He's a wild animal. He will never be safe. Although I do give the keepers benefit of the doubt that since they are zookeepers, they know this already.
Those are just the first few things that come to mind. Also, one thing I noticed, the activists who called for the zoo to let the cub die are against euthanizing the cub now. So they have no solution to the problem, they're just complaining. Hrm.
What do you guys think? At all.
-Haz
