Zoos: a problem at the top of the food chain

Well, yesterday the fam and I blew through Epcot Center; today we drove to Tampa to continue our partaking of commercial culture disguised as good clean family fun at Busch Gardens.

The park combines your typical amusement park fare- roller coasters, over priced crap in ubiquitous gift shops, the most inoffensive food they can muster- with animal habitats here and there, like a zoo. When I was a kid, I loved the zoo, but it did always gnaw at me to see tigers pacing in their tiny cages (it took a while to dawn on me (with some external prompting, of course) that the very concept of The Zoo represents a big, fat animal rights conflict). The animals we saw today- orangutans, tigers, gorillas, and chimps- lived in these expansive, complex habitats, and they didn't seem too bothered. We also went on this behind the scenes tour (I... yeah, I know, I have no room to talk. It wasn't my idea, alright?) where the animal handlers/ trainers/ keepers told us that the tigers had some say in what was done to them. For example, vets draw blood from them roughly every day to make sure things are in check. The tiger knows the command for 'lay down, have some meat substance, and prepare to have your tail pricked.' Most of the time, the tigers are cool with this, since the meat substance in exchange for anything is a pretty sweet deal, but if they are adamant about not doing it, the vet just leaves it and tries again the next day. Now this, I thought, is pretty cool.

The situation then can be summed up as follows. On one hand, you do have animals in captivity that don't get to choose what, when, or where to eat, when to go out, all that stuff- yeah, this is not optimal. But on the other hand, if what this keeper said was true, they at least have some sort of room for making their own calls in their day to day existence. Additionally (and I'll grant even this is up to debate), living in comfort and ease tops becoming some poacher's living room rug or a similar fate determined by some despicable character with opposable thumbs and no tail. And the same kind of situations exists for the big primates, other big cats, pandas, exotic birds and reptiles, it keeps going. I suppose it comes down a question of keeping the ideal of Wild Animal intact versus doing what's best for the animal in the world as it is. It seems so cut and dry with that phrasing, but I think it's really more complicated than that; both sides of the argument deserve recognition and validation.

I think of this conflict in terms of two friends of mine (cue safari music) (just kidding). One thinks that animals should be independent of human care/ ownership/ control. This means that no domestic cats or dogs should be inside only pets and owning an animal on Manhattan should be a veritable felony. The other subscribes to a school of thought that says there IS no "natural state," in so far as "natural" means "wild;" all animals are adaptive beings and adapting to live comfortably in your environment is a natural, as in innate, process, whether that environment is on the Serengeti or in a fish bowl. If you don't adapt to whatever your environment becomes, you opt out of nature, that is, you die. Like I said, both of these points of view are credible, and I have no answers here. But (cue comforting, fatherly music), the best questions don't lead to answers.