Protection or Cruelty...can we iForgive?

Education is a fabulous thing. Not a day goes by when we on the iForgiven cloud do not learn something new. But how far should we go to educate ourselves?

Today, the Sun newspaper reports that:

"Animals at one of Britain's biggest drive-through zoos are kept in over-crowded and unsafe enclosures that leave some half-blind, a Government report reveals. Woburn Safari Park - owned by the Duke of Bedford - says its wildlife enjoy living in a "natural environment, but Defra inspectors found lions and tigers caged for hours in "unsafe" pens, turtles left for months in temporary tanks and sea lions kept in chlorinated water that caused eye ulcers and blindness."

We believe it's incredibly important to educate ourselves on the the World in which we live and the creatures, fauna and flora that this World is bursting with, but is it acceptable to keep animals in this way?

As children, we used to love visits to farms, zoos, aquariums and safari or wildlife parks, but we certainly didn't walk around and view the true lives that the animals had. Lions in giant glass viewing enclosures, thousands of fish in huge column tanks, monkeys swinging on car tyres...is this right and moral? There are two thoughts schools of thought here.

The first thought is that most of the animals in this environment have been bread in captivity and not taken from the wild as they were years ago. They have never known anything different from this environment and they couldn't be reintroduced to the wild for this reason. From these animals, we learn behaviour, we can study their biology and can use this knowledge to help those in the wild.

The second thought is why are these animals being bread in captivity - why are they being allowed to procreate, leaving many others facing the same existence. Surely their natural behaviour is altered in many ways as they are not in their natural environment. Those who are predators cannot hunt and kill, they are fed from the hand of the keeper.

Darwinism tells us of survival of the fittest, yet we see examples such as Niko, the Silverback Gorilla at Longleat Animal Park. Nico is a 48 year old (96 in human years - the average life span for a Gorilla in the wild is 30+ years) Silverback Western Lowland Gorilla. He now lives alone as his female companion died recently. Gorillas are not solitary animals and Silverbacks are the strong, dominant troop leaders. Each typically leads a troop (group size ranges from 5 to 30) and is in the center of the troop's attention, making all the decisions, mediating conflicts, determining the movements of the group, leading the others to feeding sites and taking responsibility for the safety and well-being of the troop. So what kind of live is Nico actually living?

The keepers at Longleat work incredibly hard to care for their animals and give them as much of a varied life as possible, but is this enough? Nico has recently been given a TV with Sky +. Words escape us. What are we turning these animals in to? The story on the Longleat website reads:

"Lord Bath, owner and resident of Longleat House and nearest neighbour to Nico, installed Sky+ HD in early 2008 and Nico’s keepers thought it was about time that Nico followed suit and joined the high def era."

Nico joined the high def era??? Surely we didn't just read that?

There are further examples of captive animals regularly in the press: Orca whales killing their keepers and being kept in tanks that they cannot even turn around in and Lions pacing through mental illness as they don't have enough stimulation.

Can we iForgive the keeping of animals so that we can educate and entertain ourselves? We don't doubt that it's wonderful and exhilerating for all of us to have an opportunity to see and learn about these magnificent creatures, but at what expense?

Full story here