The law of conservation of misery

Transcription

Born Free USA is a national animal advocacy and wildlife conservation organization and we have offices in California and DC and elsewhere we also operate a primate sanctuary down in Texas and our basic philosophy much like our partners in the UK at Born Free Foundation is to keep wildlife in the wild and it's a very simple message so that we're against the keeping of animals in captivity provided that it's not humane captivity it's kind of complicated because of course when we have a sanctuary for primates that's captivity but we try and give them as naturalistic an environment as possible so that they can live out the remainder of their days in peace with limited human interference in a natural surrounding juxtaposed against treatment of animals in circuses or when they're caught for their fur or when they're killed in the wild for their parts I want to talk a little bit about zoos and circuses and your position on that and ask you whether animals can really be kept humanely and safely in those conditions well I think under certain circumstances you might be able to I mean the bottom line is that the way I see the modern zoo is that it's more for the human visitor than it is for the animals and as long as it's created that way and run that way it's not going to be a humane enterprise and so we really have to I think break the entire zoo mold and start over again what I could see is that zoos eventually evolve into sanctuaries where they're not breeding animals they're not importing them into the from the wild but they're actually serving as rescue facilities so that when so that when someone is caught with tigers in their backyard and they're confiscated they hhave a place to put that animal that can better attend to their needs than what they had before or if a bear cub for example is orphaned in the wild there's a place for that animal to go when that is the most humane alternative tell me about Born Free's position on the tiger problem here in the United States well it feeds right into everything I've been talking about in terms of keeping wildlife in the wild I mean obviously when people are keeping tigers in captivity these are apex predators and you can't sort of breed that or take that out of the animal so no matter what construct you put a tiger into when that tiger is in captivity and mor importantly when that tiger is in captivity around humans it's a recipe for disaster yeah and so part of our situation is trying to keep them protected in the wild but also out of human hands here in the United States and so we fight against the exotic pet trade where people have tigers in their back yards their apartments their living rooms literally because we know the human interactions that that causes and the fatalities and other injuries that come as a result I'm a lawyer and I happen to know that what animals are kept in somebody's home or in their yard is a matter of state law it does seem incredulous that somebody would think it would be okay to keep a tiger in their backyard but I understand that that's a great problem here in the United States that in certain states that have no regulations to prohibit it people keep tigers as pets yeah that's right in fact it's popularly known thought but we think it's fairly certain that there are more tigers in captivity in human hands in the United States then there are left in the wild which for us is an alarming statistic to think about you know when you have maybe three thousand tigers left in the wild where they belong it it really is alarming and concerning for us and the other problem is that some states are particularly problematic and in fact Texas where there's a proliferation of Tigers in captivity there may be more tigers in captivity in Texas then there are in India which is the one remaining stronghold of the wild population of tigers so it really is incongruous to me how A people could want to keep these dangerous animals and B that states would allow these animals to be kept but why of that why would you want a tiger in your backyard kept in a little tiny enclosure why would you want to do that well I think I can kind of understand that part of it and it goes like this either it's because you want to have the biggest baddest animal on the block and it used to be the Doberman and then it was the Rottweiler and now it's the lion cub or the tiger cub and that eventually grows into a pretty large and domineering animal but on the other hand as a parent I can sort of understand too when you see a cub a tiger cub that is a cute and cuddly animal it is incredibly affable gregarious playful the problem is that when the person acquires that animal they don't realize that eventually that animal is going to become a three hundred four hundred pound monster right and then it becomes dangerous and that's where you have animals that are either released into the wild of this country so that they're roaming around the streets of Birmingham or they end up being the humane society's problem or dumped on a local facility or they're taken out into public on a leash and actually bite people so that's really where the problem comes in so I can see the desire to acquire the animal that for soem people like me there's not the separation there where they say okay that's a cute animal but I wouldn't want to own one or have my child around one and for some people that that uh leap doesn't ever get bridged This excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts School of Law