On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 6:01 PM, David J Brooks <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks Frank. I am documenting rural Ontario you know.:-) > > I have mixed feelings on these smaller places. I think they do a good > job, for what they can with their own money and donations, but i would > like to see them in bigger areas for sure. They do look sad though. > On the positive, they have vet care and are well fed, but you can tell > a bored animal pretty quickly. Just north of Oshawa there's a sanctuary for rescued primates (of the non-human kind) that I went to a couple of years ago. It's not open to the public. Most of its inhabitants were research monkeys rescued from labs or were brought into the country illegally as exotic pets then abandoned when the jerks discovered that great apes don't make good housepets (duh!). I was talking with the owners about these little roadside zoos like you went to, and they said that in some cases these animals are being mistreated , but not always. These are animals that have been abandoned, injured, mistreated, and never should have been in captivity in the first place. However, once in captivity, they'd never survive in the wild, so such zoos are providing a service. If they didn't charge admission to passing motorists they'd never be able to afford to feed and house them. Most of them didn't start off with the idea that they'd have a zoo, they started by providing these animals a home and only started admitting the public to help defray their costs. In most cases the alternative to having these exotic animals in such places is euthanasia. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
