Don’t blame fireworks for baby panda’s death: blame zoos

Should red pandas be kept in zoos in the first place?

November 16, 2024 11:00 am

Fireworks cause so much misery to animals that future generations surely won’t believe we ever used them.

It’s well known that fireworks scare pets (62 percent of dogs show signs of distress during shows), but they bring with them suffering and death for many other animals too.

hedgehogs rest on bonfires while they are built and then be burned alive on November 5. The horses are scared by the blows, run out of their fields and are hit by cars. Farm animals abort and birds crash into buildings. Firework debris falls into rivers, where it can slowly poison fish, ducks and swans.

The suffering does not end there. Edinburgh Zoo’s baby red panda died from stress caused by fireworks on Bonfire Night. As fireworks went off across the city, three-month-old Roxie was terrified and choked on her own vomit. Her mother, Ginger, had died unexpectedly five days earlier and veterinarians say her death could also be related to the noise of the fireworks.

Less than a third of Britons enjoy fireworks “a lot”, a government study found, and most of us enjoy fireworks only “a little,” “not as much,” or “not at all.” Fireworks cause so much death and suffering to animals and so little human joy. It doesn’t seem fair at all.

But should red pandas, native to the eastern Himalayas and southwestern China, be kept in zoos in the first place? Many of us loved going to zoos as children, but they were impacting us more than we could have imagined at the time.

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Countless studies have discovered suffering and cruelty in zoos. In May, British zoos were among dozens in Europe accused of “gross negligence” after an 18-month investigation across Europe uncovered thousands of apparent breaches of animal welfare rules.

Previous studies found that enclosures in UK zoos and safari parks are on average 100 times smaller than the minimum home range for animals in their natural habitats and in 2012, a study More than three quarters of British zoos were found to have failed to meet all minimum animal welfare standards.

People are starting to wake up. In August, a Banksy artwork appeared on the shutters of London Zoo, showing a gorilla opening the wall to let imprisoned animals run free. The powerful message was clear, but the zoo’s public relations team tried to soften it by saying they were “delighted” that the world-famous graffiti artist had chosen the location.

People who are totally opposed to zoos would accept that some are crueler than others. But even the best ones promote something called speciesism: the idea that the lives of members of one species are more morally important than those of members of another species.

This is a dominant philosophy in the West due to conditioning: you were not born believing that dogs and cats deserve to be hugged, but cows and pigs deserve to be killed. People made you think that way.

Whether they like it or not, zoos play a considerable role in this. Many of us were taken to a zoo as children. We fell in love with the elephants, giraffes and flamingos, but then we went to the zoo cafeteria, where we ate the charred and tortured remains of cows, pigs or chickens that were enslaved and killed for us.

So no matter how careful or committed to conservation a zoo is, as long as it confuses and conditions the public in this way, it will always have blood on its hands from the 90 billion animals that are killed for their meat each year. year.

My dream is that one day all the slaughterhouses in the world will be closed, except one in each country, which will be kept as a museum, for future generations to visit and shake their heads at how cruel we were to animals.