Rhea

[guppiecat]

While I would prefer that wild animals not have to live in captivity, I support zoos because, first there’s not a lot of wild left and second, this bird would not survive in the wild.

You can make an argument that this bird shouldn’t survive and that evolution punishes accident-prone individuals in the same way it does genetics that don’t fit the environment. However, you can also make an argument that humans are altering the environment more quickly that evolutionary processes can adapt and that without a compensating mechanism, we will lose the majority of our biodiversity.

Both arguments are true. Only one applies to our lives and the lives of those we care about.

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.

Comments

[dreamshark]

Rheas may be adapting better than you think. When I visited family in northern Germany on the way home from Helsinki I was enchanted to learn that there is a well-established population of feral rheas (or nandu, as the Germans call them) galloping around the countryside near Lubeck.

https://www.thelocal.de/20150407/unusual-refugees-flee-to-east-germany

The locals aren't really as disgruntled about it as this article suggests. Local farmers are probably annoyed, but there is a lot of abandoned farmland around the former East German border, which is what is really sustaining the population. From what I saw when I was there, far more abandoned farms than working ones. One of my nephews proudly showed me a photo he had taken of a nandu herd streaking across an empty meadow near where they live.

[tigertoy]

My personal argument for zoos is that the animals in the wild have no hope if the people in the West don't care about them, and I think being able to see them in person does more for having them care than just seeing them on TV. If they never have a chance of seeing a tiger with their own eyes, is it any more real to an ordinary person, on an emotional level, than a unicorn?