It's been a while since I last posted anything here. But no worries, I'm back for my break and I feel I need to write and tell the world (or whoever is reading this) a little something about wildlife. If you've read one of my previous posts, I've mentioned that I was going on a student internship at a wildlife center. Well, that was a few months back at Matang Wildlife Center (MWC), Kuching, a well-known rehabilitation center for Orangutans.
Now, to be honest, before I worked at MWC, I expected to be able to interact closely with the wild animals there. To be able to hold and to pet them as seen on so-called wildlife programs you see on the TV. But what I learned while working with those animals really opened my eyes and changed my views about animals in captivity.
What most people don't know is that, there is a HUGE difference between a zoo and a wildlife rehabilitation center. A zoo keeps wild animals in captivity (cages, aquariums, enclosures etc.) and feed and care for them, just to make money off tourists who would pay to see these wild animals in... well, not in the wild. A wildlife rehabilitation center, on the other hand, is a center that cares for injured or captured animals in enclosures as natural as possible to train these animals to survive and eventually be released back into the wild. Rehab centers do not capture wild animals and keep them in captivity just for the fun of it. They do it with purpose, which is to conserve, to rehabilitate. They save animals from illegal captivity. Once they believe these animals are well capable of foraging for food, of survival, they release these animals back into their natural habitat, the forests.
When I was working at MWC, I wasn't allowed to touch these animals or even hand-feed them. I needed to keep my distance, to minimize contact with these animals. The most important thing when it comes to rehabilitation was that; to minimize human-animal contact. Animals are a lot like children, they get attached to the people who care for them. But animals, especially wild animals, they need to learn to care for themselves, they need to survive in their own natural ways, not the human way. So the less contact we make with them, the more successful their rehabilitation becomes, the higher their chances are of surviving in their natural habitat.
Zoos don't do that. Once the wild animals are chosen to live in captivity, they will live and die in captivity. Be it in steel cages, in concrete enclosures, in glass aquariums, in plastic tanks, that will be their "home" for life. Yes, it is not natural. And yes, it does affect these animals. Can you imagine being ripped and separated from your family, at a very young age, to live in tanks over your real home, the ocean? You would be traumatized! That's exactly what's happening to these animals in captivity. They are traumatized. But unlike humans, animals aren't able to think for themselves, they're unable to fight for their rights. So they live in depression, they are forced to behave a certain way, trained to do tricks on queue, to draw with their trunks, certainly not how they were created by God to live. And once they become useless to their human "owners", they are left to waste away and die, still in captivity.
Who is responsible for this, you ask? We all are. The money we pay to visit zoos, to visit oceanariums and for tickets to animal shows, to watch dolphins do tricks, to watch elephants and lions perform in a circuses, THAT is what's causing all this unnecessary animal captivity. Do you know what is happening in Taiji, Japan right now? Look it up. Dolphins and whales who swim around The Cove are trapped and captured to be shipped off to live in tanks and aquariums. Ones that are not in "perfect shape" are killed off. Japan isn't the only country doing this though, there are many others worldwide. Wild animals taken from their natural home for the sheer entertainment of us "higher beings".
So please, before you take your money out of your purses and wallets to pay for that ticket to go into a zoo or oceanarium or animal show, think about this, think about the animals. Are they doing what they do because it's natural? If no, then stop. Don't support the entertainment business that's killing these animals. Wild animals are exactly that; wild. Let them be wild and free, just as what they were created to be.