Captive Breeding

I just had to answer this article about captive breeding.

Breeding of animals is not rocket science. The only way to fail at it is to never attempt it. Usually the problem is how to deal with an embarrassment of riches. I personally would rather have a few too many dogs, cats, or tigers than none at all. Captive breeding is in no way an "extreme tactic", it's a perfectly ordinary thing that billions of people have done.

The World Wildlife Fund uses one simple technique to persuade people that it is wrong to breed animals in captivity. I sometimes call it the "You'll shoot your eye out!" technique. They tell the reader or the listener to think only of all the things that can go wrong if someone tries to breed a rare animal. They might even admit that thousands have successfully bred those animals, but it's still "think of all the things that can go wrong." Why would anyone even listen to these people? All that they want you to do is stop doing what you think is right and obey them.

Think of all the things that can go right. Where there were no tigers there can be hundreds or thousands depending on the resources a group has. You might have mixed breeds but all of the animals whose genes went into the mix have many descendants and the more the merrier for genetic variety. The more genetic variety the better. Can you believe that so-called conservationists actually argue for "subspecies purity"? That's a lot like saying that a dog that is half Great Dane and half Saint Bernard is no good. When they say that Siberian/Bengal tiger mixes are no good for a species survival program, that's so wrong. They are the same species and genes from both populations are preserved. What they mean is that they want their programs to go their way, like an obsessive-compulsive thing.

They argue that there are "many difficulties" associated with captive breeding. So? We do it not because it is easy but because it is hard. They try to paralyze our thinking by talking about the dangers, and now the difficulties. Think of the reward: Most humans love animals. We get to keep them with us and take them into the future with us. A truly "natural" lifestyle includes as many plants and animals as we can have around us.

A species does not become uniform when humans take charge of its breeding. Look at the differences between the poodle, the dachshund, the border collie, the great dane, the pariah dog, the dingo, and all other dog breeds. Their genetic variety has obviously increased. This goes for horses, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and everything else. There are known and well-established methods for multiplying the number of "subspecies" of any animal, plant, or even bacteria. The only animals that have limited gene pools are the ones that people have been forcibly prevented from using in captive breeding programs, like the ocelot and the cheetah. Both of those species would number in the millions and they would be quite varied by now.

There are a lot of failures but that is the price of success. When they breed "naturally" in the wild every species loses a lot of its young. Fewer are lost in captive breeding. There is inbreeding in the wild, always. Lions are known for mating with their daughters. So are stallions. Those are just two species that live in family groups and the dominant males drive out their male progeny, or kill them, and mate with the females that stay. Outbreeding is actually alien to them.

The hopefully large number of tigers and lions in captivity in the United States reflect the success of an informal grassroots breeding program. Some say that there are as many as 25,000 tigers in the U.S. and I could only wish. No one ever seems to estimate the number of lions but it would seem that there would be more because even fewer of them kill their owners than tigers do and they like to live in family groups. Any true conservationist would congratulate the private owner on the success of breeding thousands of species individuals of endangered and threatened animals. A really good conservationist finds ways to help them and make it legal to breed the really endangered animals.

Were I to be in charge of a conservation program I would do this: Live-capture orphaned cubs from the wild and hand-raise them as pets. Take advantage of the large body of knowledge from successful private owners, and their enthusiasm, and their money and time and energy, and use them to raise the next generation of that endangered animal. Let's not kid ourselves. The wild is disappearing. People are living there. A war to move those people would destroy the habitat and kill a lot of humans. So let's put the animals on the dole and do it right. They'll be living better than they do in the wild. Humans will be a happier and calmer species. Everyone benefits.

Why Risk Your Life for a Chimpanzee or a Tiger?

Extremely few humans are killed by captive-bred exotics. It's reasonable to take some risks for a measurable gain. In some way or another these animals are worth a lot of risk to some humans. Environmentalists insist that tigers, lions, chimpanzees, and other animals that can kill humans be allowed to run free in their native habitat which also happens to be the native habitat of humans. That's a lot easier to sell to people who are willing to let Africans deal with lions and chimpanzees in their backyards, and East Indians and Chinese deal with tigers in their backyards. Any English-speaking culture tightly controls its predators, using lethal means, and calls that "conservation."

Myself, just in the interest of fairness, I believe that the risks that a person or group takes should be similar to those that we ask of others. The question of whether this kind of risk should be taken has already been settled in the minds of animal rights activists and environmentalists who advocate the sharp culling of the human race or its total extinction. That bit of information doesn't really process. It's hard to take in. Add in the contradiction when they scream at us that we just can't keep exotic animals as pets because it's "too dangerous." Sort of causes a brain seizure, doesn't it? That's why adults make their own decisions.

Everyone wants the animals to be saved and everyone wants someone to take some risks and spend some money to do it. Most people don't want it in their backyard and some of us find out the hard way that they think that my backyard is their backyard. Once the fear button is pushed they don't want it near them, they don't want to process it in their minds, but they still want someone else to do it and will pay them to do it. That's how we get "sanctuaries" that promise to keep the allegedly dangerous animals on small reservations. Just send them the money and they will put them on display and only breed what the government says that they can breed, and they can explain why it's best for the animals too, even if it contradicts established science and experience.

Why take the risks at all? It is because there is an ethical sense that most people have that says that we don't have to make extinct the creatures that sometimes inconvenience us and even kill us. We think that fair is fair. We also like the creatures and benefit from their company even when we don't use their physical carcasses for food and useful materials. For their benefit, humans can farm tigers and just about anything else so that their numbers remain stable or even grow. On at least some of China's farms the tigers die of old age before they are used for materials. The market for tiger parts is just going to have to do without wild-caught tigers. Not that the wild is going to exist much further. Americans seem to demand a buffer zone between us and the wild animals that's larger than some countries, so you can't even count most of what's outside of city limits. Other countries are growing even faster. We either find a way to breed in captivity or we lose them as resources and we lose their ability to live for their own sakes.

One side of this controversy produces large numbers of new animals who are quite fit to carry on the species. The other side, the animal rights/conservation side, does what it can to gather up those captive-breds and eliminate them. Which side do you think has the greater ability to preserve non-human life?

HSUS Terrorism Connection

In my opinion this information is enough to justify legally dissolving the Humane Society of the United States, under terrorist and RICO acts. John P. Goodwin is a former member of the terrorist group called the Animal Liberation Front, and that is his only qualification for his job as a vice president at the HSUS. This is blatant support of terrorism and blatant support after the fact of organized crime.

At best the HSUS should never be permitted to be a complaining witness for a puppy mill raid or anything else. Their integrity is not in doubt, it simply does not exist.

Excerpt:

HSUS and Animal Liberation Front Connection (link)

One of HSUS’s supposed ‘subject experts’ on animal cruelty is John Paul “JP” Goodwin, better known for his ties to the Animal Liberation Front, ALF, which FBI considers to be a terrorist group.

In his February 12, 2002 Congressional Testimony James F. Jarboe, Domestic Terrorism Section Chief, Counterterrorism Division, FBI, said: “During the past several years, special interest extremism, as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), has emerged as a serious terrorist threat.”

What are we supposed to think?

When the HSUS hired John P. Goodwin that proved to the world that animal rights terrorism gets you a cushy job and even an artificial reputation backed by the wealthiest animal rights organization in the world. This is in direct contradiction to the HSUS's declarations that violence is not a means to an end. Even if the pretense of renunciation of violence were real, which Goodwin's posting disproves quite thoroughly, the violence that goes on creates a chilling effect on freedom of speech and participation in the democratic process.