...but PETA's e-mail notices have given me an entirely different view of them -- or at least the parts involving animals. Now, sometimes PETA's e-mails seem to go a bit too far regarding their various causes. For example, in a recent e-mail entitled "Most zoos are prisons for innocent animals," PETA writes:
There's a reason animals in most zoos look so sad. Few zoos can even begin to meet animals' complex needs. Animals in zoos are denied everything that is natural and important to them, and they're confined to enclosures that are infinitely smaller than the open spaces they would inhabit in their real homes in the wild.
And I'll agree, animals in zoos do have less "freedom" than their roaming wild counterparts, but they also don't have to hunt for their own food, get toys and tire swings and other nifty playthings, are safe from other animals that might prey upon them, have people tending to their medical needs, and so forth. So while I know they lack the ability to consent to any of this, it sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me and I'm not outraged about animals being kept in zoos. But I think I've mentioned it here before -- and I know I talked about it with Mickey during at least one discussion -- I think technology will eventually end up freeing animals anyway. Once virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and/or animatronics get up to speed, I submit that it will eventually be possible for people to have completely realistic zoo experiences without the need for animals. And with that being the case, it'll be much easier to simply do that and not have to pay for trainers and veterinarians and resources to keep the creatures healthy and alive (though there will be a need for software engineers, tech support, etc. to keep the virtual animals running properly).
Anyway, the science fiction projection was a digression -- my point was that, insofar as we assume that zookeepers are taking good care of their charges, most will not find the very idea of animals being kept in captivity to be particularly troubling. Nor will they be especially disturbed by PETA's screeds against the idea of animals performing because the tricks that they perform do not come naturally to them. In one e-mail, PETA decried the trick of having elephants stand on their hind legs -- not because this makes them much more likely to develop arthritis (though I think I did read that somewhere), but because they wouldn't normally do this in the wild. Um, yeah. I'm pretty sure Bacardi wouldn't normally roll around and slap people high fives in the wild either, but I hardly think that we're abusing him by having him do it. If circus animals were being abused, however, that would change everything.
But wait! They are being abused. Viciously. And that is why, despite my former love of the circus, I cannot bring myself to attend a show these days. Is there an all clown revue? Perhaps an animal-free show filled with gymnasts and sword-swallowers and performers like the lovely Lucifire? These are circuses I could visit without feeling (too) dirty.
