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The Rise of Pinjrapoles and the Fall.... : 45
inhabiting it spend more time swaying back and forth stereotypically than anything else. Similarly, two elephants at the Bronx Zoo sway back and forth in similar fashion, though their chains have long been removed. A third elephant at the Zoo lives out her days in solitary confinement inside as the two on the outside have been made so psychotic that they killed her mate.
Though we talked about the pleasures and pains of nonhumans in the wild in the previous section, notice how much suffering is here in comparison. When one weighs all of the health benefits of keeping animals in zoos against all of the harms that arise from keeping animals in zoos, the "keep animals in zoos to protect them from diseases" argument is rendered misguided at its most innocent.
The assertion that keeping animals in zoos protects them from poachers and others with ill will is also not as true as it seems.
In the context of India, just this past year a six year old tigress was killed by poachers inside the Itanagar Zoo and in 2006, three tigers and a leopard were poisoned in the same zoo. Even more recently, just this January, a poacher was nabbed next to the rhino enclosure inside the Guwahati zoo in possession of a .303 rifle, cartridges and an axe.In 2000, a young tigress was killed in Hyderabad zoo and its jugular vein slashed to collect blood for a Durgāştami ritual and in neighbouring Bangladesh, four tigers were poisoned over three days by their keepers at the Dhaka zoo in 1996. Additionally, eight rare Brazilian marmosets were stolen from the Calcutta zoo in 2009 and the thief later confessed to stealing military macaws from Ahmedabad's Kankaria zoo and other wildlife from different zoos in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.16 This is also not a problem unique to India. In 2009, poachers killed and skinned an endangered Sumatran tiger named Sheila at the Jambi Zoo in Indonesia while in 2010 four endangered cotton-top tamarins named Mitu, Bella, Rico and Toro, and four pygmy marmosets named Milagro, Thiago, Alonso and Che were stolen from the Symbio Wildlife Park in Australia." As recently as 2011, a marmoset was stolen from the St. Maarten Zoo in the Caribbean and in 2000 two koalas were stolen from the AZA-accredited San Francisco Zoo. (Stolen San Francisco Koalas Found, 2000) As a zoo-goer myself, I can also attest to the fact that stealing an animal from many AZA Zoos would not be an incredible feat for even a novice thief, with staff at some zoos, such as the Queens Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo and Trevor Zoo, almost nonexistent. At the Queens Zoo and Prospect Park Zoo, even the vendors have become machines and when I visited the Trevor Zoo, I could not even find someone to take my money, instead putting it in a box posted for donations. Considering the fact that I could reach in and grab turtles and iguanas at the Trevor Zoo if I so chose, even those zoos accredited as the best zoos in the most advanced country zoologically, cannot claim their animals are truly safe from wanting hands.
What is even worse is thatAnimal Underworld: America's Black Market for Rare and Exotic Species reveals that rather than keeping their animals out of the hands of shady characters, many AZA-accredited zoos actually support an underground market of animal dealers through unloading their unwanted and overly bred surplus animals in sales resources like The Animal
