Response Questions 3 -gr

1. What Sarah long means by "Noah got it all wrong" is that you need more than a couple or even a dozen members of a species to successfully save it in the long term. Zoos are developing mating programs to pair off animals in an effort to avoid inbreeding in the species. The pros are that you increase the variety of the species and give it a better chance to survive down the road. Unfortunately that means using contraceptives and euthanasia to phase out the offspring that aren't needed to maintain the diversity. Also, the breeding is still ultimately left up to the animals and in many cases they don't want to mate with their chosen pair, and sometimes that means keeping genders separated to increase the chances of mating occurring.

2. Some of the tension comes from the debate that some animals do better in mating circumstances in the wild, and what the animals need is space to roam, so the question becomes whether to fund these mating programs or to fund the efforts to preserve their habitat or give them more space to inhabit in captivity.

3. It's hard to say for sure whether I would care for these animals if I hadn't been exposed to them at the zoo, or if I had not been able to have pets when I was growing up, but my guess is that I wouldn't need that first-hand experience with them in order to realize that we need to work to conserve and protect endangered animals. I don't think other people need that connection either in order to develop that care for animals.

4. The European zoos in general prefer to use the euthanasia rather than contraceptive in order to not deprive the animals of the experience of giving birth and caring for their young. The European zoos have a point in that while it's more painful for us, it's more natural for them. Although, I wonder what the cost in resources is for raising the young in the zoos, just to have them killed, or if some of those animals that aren't of use to preserving the diversity should just be kept around til old age like the rest of the animals, with control over their mating.

-guillermo