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46: Śramaņa, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013
Finders Guide. Here, their unwanted animals are sold to animal dealers with histories of abuse and citations who in turn sell them as pets and objects for canned hunting, among other nefarious uses. Perhaps here more than anywhere else, parigraha is present, with jīvas being bought, sold and used for sport asif they were materials to be owned and done with as one pleases. Though the only expose' on the subject has been written in relation to America, this problem again is not limited to one country but is rampant among zoos around the world. Its root problem, unrestricted breeding, is particularly evident in Indian zoos, despite the Central Government's ruling that, "To safeguard against uncontrolled growth in the population of prolifically breeding animals, every zoo shall implement appropriate population control measures like separation of sexes, sterilization, vasectomy, tubectomyand implanting of pallets etc." In fact, as a part of Zoo Check Canada's "Indian Zoo Inquiry," inspectors Shubhobroto Ghosh and Sanjib Sasmal found 26 of the 27 Indian zoos they inspected to have surplus animal problems, recommending for 14 of them to halt all breeding and stop acquiring new animals immediately while recommending the remainder either halt all breeding and acquisition of particular species or severely decelerate any such initiatives." Even if we ignore zoos' support of the exotic animal trade and put the poaching of nonhuman animals from captivity all around the world aide, taking animals from the wild in order to protect them is still not a viable solution to protecting animals from poachers. As Snyder et al. (1996) has written, all this does is give us a “false impression that a species is safe so that destruction of habitat and wild populations can proceed."The only way to stop poaching is to stop poachers through in situ conservation efforts, such as education and law enforcement. If zoos truly were looking to protect nonhumans from poachers, they would focus their attentions on these efforts rather than taking the animals for themselves, making them in many ways no better than the poachers they are claiming to be defending these animals from.
Using Animals for Entertainment Another common justification proposed for keeping nonhuman animals in zoos is that zoos are great sources of entertainment for humans. After all, this is certainly the reason behind hundreds of millions of people flocking to zoos annually with their friends and families and it definitely explains the spike in zoos' attendance following the births of baby animals and the capture of an endangered species. What it doesn't explain, however, is why we should put our non-vital interest in entertainment above the vital interests of captive animals, treating them as possessions rather than as jīvas themselves. Those that argue for humans to do this argue from a speciesist standpoint rather than the Jaina perspective, suffering a prejudice described by Richard Ryder in 1970 and condemned even earlier by Mahāvīra himself.
Obviously, people can be entertained in ways that do not involve depriving animals of their most innate and natural interests, (e.g., playing basketball, reading books, watching television). so even if entertainment was a vital interest of humans, this could not possibly be a proper justification for keeping animals in zoos. That being said, a love and appreciation of nonhuman jīvas is to be applauded, but there are other ways to act on this much more responsibly, such as
