Do you want to make sure that people are indifferent towards nature? Go to the zoo!
It seems like everyone is speaking today about the environment, nature, and our perspectives of living on Earth in the future. And mentioning the nature I don’t mean just the condition of the ecology or the freshness of the air. Animals are the same inhabitants of the Earth as we are and I think they probably don’t feel great living here last… 300 years at least.
Today there are a lot of great shows from the BBC, Discovery and even Netflix, telling not just about the beauties of our world but also the threats to lose it all. Of course, photos with killed animals are not the reasons for pride anymore (I hope), but hunting is still a thing. So is killing animals, and especially rare animals for food. But besides these active evil actions, there are also passive ones: using more and more soil for agriculture or waste wood and water.
I was shocked when, reading Hemingway’s biography, found out that people so not long ago really had fun killing animals. I’m glad that they finally understood that it’s an evil thing and almost stopped doing that. Unfortunately, there is some evil even among the good.
My girlfriend likes zoos a lot. I think we go to a zoo in every second city we visit. I won’t discuss here the problem of zoos. I’m almost sure that animals will feel better outside. But I can’t be sure about that after all the people did to planet and nature. Maybe sometimes in the long term, it’s really better for some of them to stay under surveillance.
But another fact bothers me. Did you see those warning: “Please, don’t feed animals”? Of course, you did. They are everywhere.
And why do you think they are hanging there? Because it’s really important. This is a basic rule — the same like washing your hands returning home, eating healthy food or drinking a lot of fresh water. Did you smile? Do you think that all those rules aren’t required? Yes, the latter is really not required. Don’t follow them and you’ll just make harm to yourself. But feeding a bear with cabbage from your fridge or throwing a lion those cutlets, that you don’t want anymore, and you hurt an innocent animal. Maybe you wanted to do the best. But such obvious things are not obvious when dealing with something live. You should be more confident in what you’re doing.
As I’ve said my girlfriend likes animals a lot. We were in zoos of Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Visiting my first zoos in a conscious age I thought that people might be just ignorant or inattentive. One sign “Please, don’t feed animals” on a large cage with an animal attracting a lot of attention might go unnoticed. But zoos are developing because If I bother about the problems visitors create for animals, we can only imagine what the administration thinks.
So it’s more and more often I can see a lot of signs, from 3 to 5, on one aviary, that says not the common “Please, don’t feed animals” but quite aggressive, pretending like on behalf of an animal: “Please, don’t feed me or I can die”. It’s actually scary. Who, being sane, would do things that can actually kill animals? Yeah, it’s happening all over the world, but I mean places, people pay to come to and probably not to kill.
The last situation was in the Kyiv Zoo “12 Months”. They have a booth selling feed for animals. You can pay and get a small portion of delicacy for your favorite animal. Precisely for that animal. When we were in a shed with the giraffe we saw one girl was trying to feed the animal with the carrots.
Happily, there was a worker of the zoo, who actually shouted at the girl.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“Is it forbidden?” the girl asked standing right in front of the sign with the message “Please, don’t feed me or I may die”.
“You have a feed”, the woman said. “Whom is it intended to?”
The girl actually read in loud “Bears”.
There can be three situations:
1. She wanted to kill the giraffe
2. She thought her action was minor and wouldn’t make harm
3. She was too dumb
And I’m not sure what’s worse for our nature.
