The enclosure was home to four bobcat kittens. They were about the size of your housecat and with the temperament of your typical semi-domestic apprehensive kitty.
This annoyed me, hopefully for obvious reasons. As far as I know, there has never even been a bobcat attack on a human being in the wild. Even in captivity I've never heard of a bobcat trying to eat a person, and sure as hell never a kitten. But here are these so-called professionals tip-toeing around these babies as though they were afraid of waking up fully grown lions.
The same people go on to say that the most tragic thing about the refuge is that all the animals were once kept as pets. I can agree with this to some extent, but to me, it's equally tragic that you, dear hostess, seem so fond of drawing such stark lines: if it's wild, it must be wild, and it's therefore so much more dangerous than anything manmade.
That's when the real problem arises. We have such a divide from nature, and these folks see themselves as naturalists when all they are actually doing is pushing our species further and further away from considering itself a part of the natural world, and therefore devaluing what we see as the natural world - or in this case, perpetuating fear of it. No one considers that puppy and kitty are descendants of wolves and wildcats that were adopted thousands of years ago by loons like me.
The tragedy expressed should be that there are people in the world who think it's perfectly OK to keep a leopard in their basement, or a hippo in their backyard. Unlike our nomadic ancestors, we do not always have the luxury of space and ready-made habitat for our wild animal companions. According to this show host, I imagine, this marks an impossibility, but clearly it is not: some of us do in fact have large tracts of property where certain animals that require a lot of land can be kept. Some of us have the inclination to devote great amounts of time and money to those animals.
We see examples of this in the media, and it's not even hard to meet such people online: those who give their animals a lot of space, care for them, and have a very happy and healthy critter who adores them. Smartly, these individuals do not tend to call their animals "pets" and advise others that just because they are doing it doesn't mean any joe can fork over a couple thousand dollars and stick a wolf in his living room.
Does it remain a bad thing simply because, as this hostess put it, it is "unnatural"? As prone as I am to falling back to it, we know that this is a logical fallacy, so let's examine it more closely. The main issue seems to be that there are a lot of people out there who are complete imbeciles and either don't know or don't care to know how to take care of a non-domesticated animal. They are the problem. Suppose the individual in question does know and happily applies their knowledge. The animal is as happy and healthy as their domesticated counterparts, and likely much more so than their wild counterparts: we know that, while many animals are not naturally social, just from experience that even they do much better when they do have some mode of socialization. Speaking with someone who raises leopards, he said to me that it is actually better to have two rather than one for just this reason. They will also be more healthy, since they have a regular source of food, hopefully still of exercise (again, this comes down to knowing how to care for the animal), and have someone to care for them if they fall ill.
So if anything, there is an upside to these few individuals existing who have the capacity, both in terms of property and finances and in knowledge, as well as in inclination, to care for non-domestic animals: the animals are safer, better cared for, and happy. The humans... well, we get one of the few life-lines we have to the natural world: something that says hey, wait a minute, just because it hasn't been hacked together using opposable thumbs doesn't mean it is strange and dangerous and must be avoided at all costs. There are things we can learn from them, things we can learn about them in order to not only gain a better understanding of the animal but also of ourselves: where we come from, and where we fit in. There is so much ignorance out there: I have even met a veterinarian that believes most mammals do not have a clitoris, because clearly God made man and gave him sexual pleasure, but not to other animals - process of sexual differentiation from clitoris to penis be damned. (Don't ask how we got to that conversation; it's not what you think.) And now I have come across someone who runs an animal refuge who thinks bobcat kittens are highly dangerous. Let's get off of our high horse, people, and out from under our bedsheets and strive instead for a little more understanding here, shall we?
Argh, I was going to respond to this the day or day after it was posted, and then I got onto some other things and it entirely slipped my mind. Oh well. I'm here now. XD
ReplyDeleteI can relate to your feelings quite well, on both major topics you touched on (the danger of wild animals, and those who keep 'wild' animals in improper conditions). I'll touch on the latter first.
When I was little, I wanted a pet wolf. After some time that turned to pet tiger, until my dreams became a tad more realistic and I just wanted a big cat of sorts. Of course when I was little, I didn't think of space, money, special food, or other such things. I just assumed one somehow went about purchasing the animal, and everything after that was no more difficult than a dog or cat, mostly.
When I got a bit older, I realized that I met very little of the criteria, and more or less gave up, and put the notion on the back burner. Looking at the situation I'm in now (ignoring, for now, that I'll be heading to college very soon), I actually do meet some of those criteria. My family has space and money aplenty to care for a larger, "wild" animal. Perhaps not a tiger, or lion; but a wolf, or cougar? Definitely possible. As far as the knowledge and inclination to raise a wild animal, I have little of either right now. If someday everything but these two things was there, and I found the inclination, I would see to it I did my research on raising such animals.
Unfortunately, I feel like many people are sort of stuck in that stage I was at when I was 4-5 years old; where all there is to do is buy the animal, get some food, and take it to the vet now and again. It happens with everything from larger cats, to wolves, to exotic fish.
As for the "wild" animals, I feel your annoyance perfectly. Except instead of bobcat kittens, it was sharks. And instead of folks on TV, it was my family and sort of extended family (god-parents and they're family, if it matters).
While visiting with these lovely and awesome people at my grandparent's cabin, we would watch TV at night before bed, and occasionally in the early morning. As it so happened, it was the start of Shark Week. As we watch the various shows about sharks on and off, I became increasingly annoyed when every. Single. Time. A trained expert or scientist of some sort put his hand in the water, or dived in amidst the groups of sharks, my mom, or godmother, or one of my "god-brothers" (as I call them) would say some variation of, "What an idiot!".
Being shark week, this order of events happened many, many times. Each time, I tried to explain calmly that the people were really at very little risk, as sharks don't often attack people for no reason. (And the people jumping in certainly weren't provoking them, in any sense.) Each time, whoever made the comment would say something along the lines of, "Well that's still so stupid!". There was even a brief discussion of how, "They probably aren't showing all the injuries and lost limbs that happened while they tried filming this."
Eventually I just gave up. I didn't feel like annoying them and then having to spend several days with them all, so I let it go. But it really shows how a single instance, real (ie, Bethany Hamilton) or fake, (Jaws) depicting an animal or creature as violent can be blown out of proportion, to be believed as the normal behavior by the majority of people, despite what I consider to be common statistics and facts.
It's funny you should mention sharks, because I remember a Mythbusters episode where Jamie Heineman reported on how his experiences with sharks changed him: essentially, he found that they're not bloodthirsty monsters, that shark attacks are actually incredibly rare, and meanwhile we're demonizing them and killing millions of them every year for ridiculous reasons. This is another problem that arises from that initial problem of fear and misunderstanding: if we think that these carnivorous animals are all out to get us, we have no problem with butchering them, even ending an entire species in an area as occurred with wolf species in Europe and parts of North America.
DeleteIt's really too bad that people have this so deeply ingrained into their head, that wild carnivorous animals are invariably sinister, but you talk to people who live with these animals and form a bond with them as any keeper should, and they tell you that they trust this wild creature more deeply than they would trust the family dog. And that really is the best way to get knowledge, whether you want to raise such an animal or you just want to better get to know the ethology of the species, is to interact with them and their few responsible keepers.