13 June 2007

It's all happening at the zoo, ya hurrd?

First of all, I'll bite that tiger foot right off. Thanks to oskarn for the amazing pic. Anyway, I came across an interesting episode of NPR's Radio Lab available for download. It's a whole show about animals in zoos; they ask is there such thing as a good cage? "Happy gorillas, deft landscape architects, and neurologists show us that there just might be." They go back to the late 1970's to relive the moment when zoos began to change. Literally, the moment, that the modern zoo was born, as embodied by a few tentative steps of a gorilla named Kiki; a discussion of work done by neuroscientists who are looking into the brain to see the effects of living in a cage; also most carnivores in zoos find themselves being fed something more along the lines of a hamburger... or in zoo lingo "a meatsicle." And like in the movie "Supersize Me," the result of this diet is a bunch of overweight, lethargic, unhappy animals lying around in the zoo. So, a new wave of zoo reformers are suggesting that to make these caged carnivores happy we should be feeding them whole carcasses, or better yet, whole live animals. It's an interesting listen, so go grab it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i want that paw.