Zoos are really quite cruel.
Most zoos nowadays are important research centers.
Besides that, they have an important educational component that surely contributes politically for conservation efforts.
Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#22I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans. This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lo…
The internet in general finds the black in the rainbow, Hacker News is typically better in quality of argument as it tends to attract a more intellectual crowd, but the overall tendency is the same.
Additionally, most of us are taught "hurting things is bad" as children and many adults have a hard time reconciling that we have to intentionally hurt at least some living things to live, hurt an even greater amount of living things to flourish, and at a certain point decreasing suffering in one dimension increases it in another.
For those who haven't developed a more mature framework, they tend to revert to the childhood "hurting things is bad" lesson, and an alternative framework based on nuance and context around suffering is too emotionally painful for them to accept, even if they can intellectually admit to the logic.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#23I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans. This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lo…
Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all t…
I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#24Zoos are really quite cruel.
Most zoos nowadays are important research centers. Besides that, they have an important educational component that surely contributes politically for conservation efforts.
Big Zoos, yes. And they do some great research, as well as preservation and rehabilitation. But I've also been to a few small zoos in rural America that are essentially someone's private animal collection that they charge you a fee to see. I think those are less common than they used to be, but they do exist.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zoos are a lesser evil argument, locally they are not the best for the animals but they provide globally long-term benefits for humans and nature as well.
What’s the alternative? The implied greater evil? A world with no zoos and less appreciation and consideration for nature as well as the long term necessity of caring for it? I’m wondering about creating more nature parks instead of zoos. Of course not as accessible for people in cities, but could be a much better compromise. In general, we should avoid putting animals in small cages as much as possible.
Speaking of nature parks instead of zoos, the San Diego Wild Safari Park is just that. Very large enclosed pastures with multiple species living alongside each other.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being cared for by conscientious humans, providing enrichment and variety, can be better than living in the wild. For any animal, living in the wild, life span tends to be short, and life tends to be brutal. Prey animals are hunted, and they scrounge for food; finding a steady, reliable, nutritious, and tasty source of food in the wild is vanishingly rare. Dealing with parasites, illness, injury, predation, and all t…
I was commenting to my wife the other day... it seems to me that there are very few wild animals that just die from being too old. Not an expert, but it seems to me that most animals in the wild live until they are brutally ripped apart and eaten alive by another animal, and it's only a matter of time -- very rarely reaching an age old enough to just die.
The interesting thing is predator and prey both die when they get too slow. Not sure which side has a worse ending there! Then there's disease or even a simple scratch getting infected.
The world's a brutal place, probably all worlds. Because the very nature of evolution means species that exploit the most thrive the most. The obvious exception of things like a solar feeding plant isn't even an exception. The great oxidation event caused one of the greatest mass extinctions on the planet - we evolved to thrive on oxygen but for most of the other life alive at the time it'd be like if plants today produced cyanide gas.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#27I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans. This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lo…
Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.
This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.
People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#28An alternative last resort could have been to let small groups of real people in to see the sunfish during renovations. It could even be a PR thing with a lottery or something for the lucky sunfish companions.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#29I'm surprised to see so many comments solely about how aquariums/zoos are cruel and feeling sorry for this particular fish, when it's a species that is regularly hunted. I wouldn't want to be locked in a cage/tank either, but by ending up in a well run aquarium this sunfish is doing better than 99.999% of sunfish that have encountered humans. This isn't a screed against eating fish or meat; I eat both. There are a lo…
The issue is about whether the animal is forced to endure pain, not weather we eat it or not. The same is true for how we keep the animals we eat, and why people are rightfully upset about how some cows and chickens and the like are kept during their short lives before slaughter.
Essentially, having the animal be free before we catch and immediately and hopefully quickly kill it for food is fine. Keeping it in a zoo where it's not suffering is fine.
Keeping it in poor conditions before we kill and eat it is not fine. Keeping it in poor conditions in a zoo is not fine.
This story is interesting in that it gives insight into the mental state of these zoo animals, something that is often hard for the public to see and understand. It should make you pause to consider if we're really keeping these animals in humane conditions, given that apparently even fish have possibly more complex internal mental states than we assume.
Re: Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure if it applies with all birds, but many seem to become fixated on humans. This can happen if you care for very young, sick or injured birds. My wife cares for various sad cases and if she isn’t careful they stay with with us. We have 4 pigeons at the moment, with various issues. I call them our rehoming pigeons. Do you want a pigeon?
Funny enough, my late father was a veterinarian and we had a pigeon that we raised from a chick (we weren't sure what this thoroughly ugly bird was and it turned out it was a pigeon). It was very tame and lived in a hutch on the back porch, and would watch for us to come back from the electric pole out the front. Unfortunately its knowledge of cats was limited to our extremely lazy ones and one day it disappeared; we…
We treated a pigeon back to health from a failed cat attack - healthy enough to eat and walk, but not fly. It took a while but she eventually fully regained her ability to fly.
She had some rather distinct markings and would hang around the house pretty regularly after that. Then one day outside she was getting seriously groomed by a larger pigeon and wow is that where that term comes from?
Anyhow yeah she returned the grooming (which I'd later look up was her way of saying 'yeah I'm down - let's go') and I never saw her, or him, again.
So yeah - there could've been a happier ending there, especially because when a cat does eat a pigeon there tends to be evidence left.