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Flaco, Escaped Central Park Zoo Owl and Defier of Doubts, Is Dead
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Bird-Watching and Ornithology
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People really misunderstand zoos and animals.
I'm sure the vandals had good intentions, but fuck them they're ignorant assholes.
Zookeepers have a strong bond with the animals they keep, I'm sure that the keepers are absolutely devastated by this news. Animals raised in captivity have very little chance of survival in the wild, this one lasted one year, after 13 in captivity. Sure, it might have been a pretty swell one year but also may not have been. It likely had to learn how to hunt from scratch, so it probably went weeks or months at a time starving because it didn't know how to catch live prey.
At the same time if it had stayed at the zoo, maybe it didn't have miles to fly around in but it was kept fed and clean, with regular veterinarian checks to ensure it's health was okay . Letting it loose was similar to leaving a dog out in the forest to die a slow and painful death.
Don't get me wrong, there are terrible zoos out there which don't deserve to be called zoos, but any of them that are AZA certified are generally pretty darn well managed and care for their animal's welfare both physically and mentally.
Yeah, and prison wardens love their prisoners too.
Instead of blaming the vandal, maybe blame the zoo for having imprisoned the animal in the first place?
Zoos are sick, perverse places. It's not about saving animals or educating the public about animals - it's about salving our consciences for the ongoing destruction of our planet and environment by putting little bits of it in cages and telling ourselves that's enough. The number of wild animals in Latin America decreased by 94% since 1970, mostly through deforestation and farmland expansion. 94%. There were twenty times more animals in Latin America just fifty years ago. But we can see a jaguar in a zoo and the zookeepers make comforting noises about "saving the species" and so that's alright then.
And people have to pay to see the animals. So after killing nineteen out of every twenty we turn the last ones into capitalist commodities and tell ourselves we're doing the species a favor.
If you care about owls, stop cutting down their fucking trees. Don't shame good Samaritans for seeing a prisoner and wanting to free him.