The effects of human population growth on animals
The world population is growing rapidly from 750 million in 1750 to 6,500 million in 2005. Respond to this evidence, people naturally enlarge their land for housing, food, and the need of resources such as oil, wood, and metal. Day by day, people damage the environment which contains a lot of living life, especially, wild animals. This caused many groups of animals to decline and even extinct. Perhaps to redeem this hideous mistake, people built more places, which are called zoos, to keep and protect wild animals. Zoos are probably the most complex forms of animal keeping in the world. Many animals from many areas over the world are kept together in a small region. People may think that zoos are good place for keeping wild animal, but in fact, it is not, and it also is unethical to capture wild animals and put them into the zoo.
Most wild animals are living in dense forest, mountains, or woods, where people do not easy access. Their lives are very isolated with the modern human’s life. They scared of people, guns, and the noise of metal of our developed industry. The more people open their land, the additional wild animal lose their territories, and so must move away. There is no such wild animal who dare to live near people. It seems very rare when people see a wild animal coming near their land. As Ursula K. Le Guin shows in May’s Lion, “there were plenty of deer in the Valley in the forties, but no mountain lion had been seen for decades anywhere near where people lived.” And if any, it should have the reason. In fact, May’s lion is too old and sick.
Most animals are very social by nature such as monkeys, wolves, elephants, tigers, etc. It has been shown that animals used to live in the same places in which they could easy share the food. They love their life as well as their freedom. They just want to live in peace among their family and friends. It is cruel to remove them away from their family, friends. In The Antlers, Suzie indicates that “cattle are like city people, cattle expect even deserve, what they’ve got coming. But wild animals are different. Wild animals enjoy life. They live in the woods on purpose.” Clearly, wild animals are different from cattle. They need to be free and live in the woods where considered as their country. Animals are not willing to leave their place to come to a new place such as a zoo.
Zoos are the place where living animals are exhibited in captivity. The most traditional form of maintaining wild animals in captivity is keeping them in cages constructed of concrete or metal, in aviaries, or fenced paddocks. Living in those places, animals do not behave like their wild counterparts. For example, a lion is given food in the mean time whereas they have to lie still and wait for prey and hunt for hours in their Africa home. Similarly, the Wolves, Leopards, Tigers, Elephants, etc are often confined in cages where they lack exercise and stimulation. Those animals will lose their hunting skills and soon become pets such as dogs or cats. In Rainer Maria Rilke’ poem, The Panther, he feels for the wild animal in this situation: “As he paces in cramped circle, over and over/ the movement of his powerful soft strides is/ like a ritual dance around a center/ in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.”
Zoos are just another word of animal prison. It provides plenty of cages which are constructed by concrete and steel. It limits the movement as well as the freedom of wild animals. When an animal is sent to the zoo, more likely, it will spend the rest of its life in cage. The animal has no choice but to be in the zoo and it held there. Zoos steal the freedom and provide unusual life to wild animals. Many animals develop unnatural habits such as pacing back and forth or swaying from side to side in their cages. Polar bears, for example, are given about 30 feet of walking space, whereas in their Arctic home they could roam freely for hundreds of miles.
The zoo is an unnatural environment that exposes animals to numerous dangers. Animals which would naturally live in very different parts of the world are brought together in the natural habitat of humans. Diseases often spread between species that would never live together naturally. Furthermore, zoo animals are often exposed to chemicals, solvents and other toxic substances. That is not natural for wild animals.
Most zoos have commercial and entertainment purpose in mind as well as financial profit. Animal from many areas of the world are brought together and put on display for the benefit of humans’ enjoyment. It is very common for visitors to tease and provoke caged animals.
Supporters of zoos argue that they help to conserve endangered species, but in fact they are not very good at this. Breeding programmers provide zoos with good publicity, but in fact most of them are failures. The world famous panda breeding program was a big example for this. This program is very costly but it is unsuccessful. Also zoo life does not prepare animals for the challenges of life in the wild. Many animals were died after they came back to the wild. For example, two rare lynxes released into the wild in Colorado died from starvation even though the area was full of hares, which are a lynx’s natural prey.
The best zoos argue that education is one of their most important features. That is using the zoo to teach people to respect the natural world, to show them what can be learned from the lives of the animals in captivity and to appreciate what conservation means. One of the major problems they face, however, is that the animals on display are both individuals and representatives of their species. So is not true to say that zoos are educational or that they help to protect endangered species. In reality, they only teach us how wild animals behave when they confined in small spaces.
Today, many modern zoos do not enclose animals in small cages but they are provided with habitats, modeled after their nature habitats. The aim for many zoos is to exhibit their animals in enclosures in which the setting is as natural as possible or at least looks as natural as possible. But it seems that they cannot easily move away from the image of being places of entertainment which is more closely to the circus and amusement park than to museums and education.
Wild animals are not like cattle, they don’t want to live near people, and especially, in zoos. It is cruel to remove wild animals away from their place. Furthermore, zoos are unsuitable environment for wild animals. It keeps animal in small area compare to the vast natural habitat, and also, zoo exposed too many diseases and dangers to wild animal. In the wild, animals live their lives for their own benefit; but in the zoo, they have to live their lives for the benefit of human. And since zoos are less successful in breeding programs and far from education purpose, zoos must be abolished. People should stop capture wild animals and put them into zoos.
