Don't Let Zoos Breed Animals Solely for Barter
- by: Susan V
- recipient: USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
Wild animals have never belonged in zoos. But that hasn’t stopped some zoos from not only taking wild animals from their natural habitats but breeding them for profit.
Even buying and selling endangered animals, which requires a special permit, has a loophole - bartering.
This is how aquariums and zoos get species or animals they don’t have but want, but aren’t supposed to buy and sell. For example, Boston’s New England Aquarium made a deal with one in Japan for a species it needed for a trade with one it wanted from a North Carolina aquarium. Using the barter system is the way the same Boston aquarium got Puffins, which no amount of money could buy.
Zoos, on the other hand, will give away animals for public relations that lead to them getting gifts of other desirable animals. But they also breed them for the crowd-pleasing cute babies that later become unwanted adults that sometimes get traded into deplorable conditions.
In effect, what has turned out to be a form of “currency” for Zoos and Aquariums is really a continuation of what Peta calls “pitiful prisons” for animals whose care is often improperly overseen by the USDA’s animal inspection service.
Tell APHIS to allow trading of animals ONLY when it’s in the animals’ best interest.
We, the undersigned, agree with Peta that its time to think beyond zoos. At the very least, the exploitation the barter systems allows, in some cases, should be banned.
Peta cites the example of a chimpanzee baby, called Edith to explain how cute babies bred for crowd draw can end up living miserable lives as adults.
Born in the 1960s at the Saint Louis Zoo, Edith was surely a big draw for visitors. But just after her third birthday, she was taken from her family and passed around to at least five different facilities, finally landing at a Texas roadside zoo called the Amarillo Wildlife Refuge (AWR). During an undercover investigation of AWR, PETA found Edith in a filthy, barren concrete pit. She was hairless and had been living on rotten produce and dog food.
Another problem is that Zoos continue to capture animals from the wild and , according to Peta, are currently pushing for weakening the Endangered Species Act to make capturing and importing wild animals easier.
Even though Zoos claim to preserve species from extinction, they really favor exotic crowd pleasers over local endangered wildlife, and most animals in zoos are not endangered.
Instead of patronizing Zoos and exploiting animals for entertainment, Peta says the government and the public should support groups that actually work to preserve animal habitats, such as International Primate Protection League, the Born Free Foundation, Earth Island Institute and theGlobal Federation of Animal Sanctuaries and others that rescue and care for animals without breeding or selling them. or breeding them
In the meantime we ask that APHIS take steps to make sure animals are not being bred as a form of currency for zoos to profit at the expense of the animals‘ quality of life.
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