Taking Breaths to Stay

A lot of the momentum against zoos comes from decades past when, not to put too fine a point in it, they sucked.

Even now, you do want to take a quick look to make sure a zoo or wildlife park or whatever is part of a GOOD accreditation body, like AZA, or in the case of smaller ones that may not have the finances for accreditation, details like who works there, what their goals are, and so on. And if you’re in a country or region with few regulatory structures, you’ll want to look into any given zoo yourself.

But that image of zoos as terrible places when animals are tormented for amusement comes out of the past, and no longer represents at all what zoos do.

In North America for example “zookeeper” is a degree-career, usually with post-graduation courses that amount to another degree. Etc.

The animals in zoos long term aren’t and almost certainly never were releasable; and zookeepers get SO FUCKING EXCITED when animals they’ve been involved with are part of a release program.

(although this data is arguable)

orcas also do very poorly in captivity

(although notably they are typically kept by marine parks, not zoos)

Quite - the one keeper’s comment about “what dataset is this using?” is EXTREMELY germane, as if you’re comparing the life expectancy in, say, a rigorously protected sanctuary park to zoo life expectancy that includes numbers from the 70s and even 80s, you’re going to get some wonky ass numbers.

There’s also the fact that a large number of animals who are in captivity NOW are genuinely unreleasable even in a sanctuary context - so even if we never ADD another animal of their kind to the captive population, we still have a duty of care to the ones we have.

At this point there is no accredited aquarium that keeps orcas, period. And that is indeed because you just can’t care for them in facilities the size of what anyone can creature or afford. Now the downside of this is that for instance when a calf was recently found to be separated from its pod in my region, what we could do about it was SEVERELY limited; she may have been lucky (there’s some sighting evidence from July) but as far as we know she hasn’t made it back to her pod yet and her future prognosis is really, really guarded.

RIP Matthew Perry

Bro is eepy

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1. Elon Musk buys Twitter

2. Elon Musk unbans Andrew Tate

3. Andrew Tate picks a fight with Greta Thunberg

4. Greta Thunberg ratios the shit out him

5. He gets mad and posts a video response

6. There's a Romanian pizza box in the video which twigs Romanian police of his location

7. He is raided and arrested for human trafficking