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Trippitorial - Zoos
When I was a kid, I went to see an African lion in its
natural habitat---the Bronx Zoo. I remember thinking that the Bronx was a weird
place to find an African lion, but hey, we all came from Africa, right? What
was I doing in the Bronx?
All those animals in all those cages---I wondered what
they did to wind up behind bars. Did the monkeys in the monkey house fail to
pay their taxes on all those bananas? Were the snakes in the snake house paying
for some sin of their fathers? Were the elephants in some kind of an ivory
smuggling ring? They must have done something.
Last week scientists found a rare white killer whale off
the coast of Russia. My question of course was, “But what can he do with a
beach ball?”
I feel bad for animals. They get captured and put in a
cage without ever being charged. Try to imagine if somebody did that to you and
shipped you off to some distant cage---say in Cuba. You wouldn’t like that
would you? Wild animals deserve habeas
corpus, even if people don’t. Bad people!
Zoos do a lousy job rehabilitating animals…if that’s even
what they’re trying to do. Most of them are no more domesticated by the time
they’ve served out their sentence, than when they began, but that doesn’t
really matter because they’re never getting out anyway. Bogus zoo parole board!
Still, you’re not gonna get rid of zoos. Zoos are an
entrenched interest. If they released all the animals, what would happen to the
Zookeepers? They’d be out of jobs. Maybe they could join the prison guard’s
union and start guarding human animals. Of course, they’re not as cute.
Even if the animals were liberated, most of them probably
wouldn’t be able to adjust to jungle society and they’d just end up right back
in a cage anyway.
Zoos are obsolete. We don’t have to put animals in cages
to see them. Most people have cable.
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