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Baseline Essay: Keeping Wild Animals

Prompt

This assignment will help your teacher better understand how to help you as a writer, so show what you know and don’t worry if your essay isn’t perfect.

Have you ever visited a zoo or an aquarium and wondered if the animals were happy?

Read the sources below. As you read, consider: Should wild animals ever be kept in captivity? Write an essay arguing your position, using evidence from the sources for support.

Your essay should include an introduction, 2-4 body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Click on the rubric tab above to review the rubric for this assignment.

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Sources

Zoo Complicated

Kathryn Hulick

Today, animals in zoos, aquariums, and theme parks are treated better than in the past—but are humans doing enough to keep captive animals happy? This article looks at how animal keepers and researchers try to make captivity comfortable.

A group of giraffes eating branches attached to a tall pole at a zoo. — Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz on Unsplash.

Have you ever waved to a giraffe, laughed at a chimpanzee, or gotten splashed by a killer whale? Chances are, you met the animal at a zoo, aquarium, or theme park.

Some animal rights activists believe that no animal—not even dogs and cats—should ever live in captivity, but this is an extreme view. At the other extreme are very early zookeeping practices. From the 1890s through the 1930s, zoo animals often lived alone in small cages with concrete floors. Today, treating an animal that way seems wrong. But how should we treat animals? What is OK, and what isn’t?

Why Zoos?
We keep animals in zoos or as pets for many reasons. Sometimes the motivation is to rescue an animal or a group of animals. Hawks that fly into windows, black bears that roam through human towns, and harbor seals that swim into propellers often end up in zoos. Other times a species, such as the Asian elephant, is endangered in the wild. Zoo populations help ensure that these rare animals survive. We also keep animals in captivity because we enjoy seeing them and spending time with them.

But do they enjoy spending time with us? Are they happy? Animals likely don’t experience emotions the same way we do. But if you have a pet dog at home, you know the difference between a tail-wagging “happy” dog, and a tail-between-the-legs “sad” dog. “Professional zookeepers know their animals as well as people at home know their dogs,” says Don Moore. He works at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. He feels that our moral responsibility is to give animals the best lives possible. At his zoo, they have programs to make sure each species gets the best and most natural food, water, shelter, and care possible. “We enrich their bodies and minds on a daily basis for all animals, from ants to zebras,” he says.

Conversations about the way animals should be treated are ongoing. Each of the following stories raises ethical questions. Read them and decide for yourself—did the people involved do the right thing?

Lucy
Lucy liked drinking tea and looking in the mirror. But she wasn’t human—she was a chimpanzee. Maurice and Jane Temerlin raised Lucy just like a human baby. The chimpanzee began her life with the Temerlins as the subject of research but soon became a daughter. Maurice, who was a psychotherapist, wanted to know how human Lucy would become. She learned sign language and seemed to truly care for her adoptive parents.

When Lucy grew up, though, life became difficult for the Temerlin family. An adult chimpanzee is about five times stronger than an adult human, and Lucy got into everything. What’s more, she could not live a full life in a human home. Eventually, the human “parents” decided to send Lucy to live with other chimps in the wild. They found a nature reserve in the Gambia, a country in western Africa. Janis Carter, a student who had been helping take care of Lucy, went along to help the chimp adjust.

But Lucy didn’t have a clue how to live in the wild, and her health suffered during the adjustment. Carter wound up staying with Lucy for years. She ate ants and leaves to show Lucy what to do. She even lived in a cage so Lucy and the other chimpanzees couldn’t reach the human objects that distracted them from normal activities like seeking food and shelter.

Eventually, Lucy did start finding her own food, and Carter moved a short distance away. One year, Lucy went missing. Carter returned from a visit to the United States to join the search. She and members of the reserve staff found Lucy’s body. The chimp had spent half her life in a human home and half in the wild.

Do you think it’s right or wrong for people to raise chimps in their homes?

Katina
Katina is a female killer whale, or orca, who lived in the ocean off the coast of Iceland until she was two years old. Now, she lives at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, where she regularly performs for huge crowds of excited onlookers. She’s easy to work with, knows many tricks, and has had seven calves. Her calf Kalina was the first healthy killer whale born in captivity. “[Katina] was one of the first animals I ever got in the water with,” says John Jett, currently a marine mammal scientist at Stetson University. For four years in the 1990s, he was a trainer at SeaWorld. Now, John Jett feels that it is morally wrong to keep killer whales in captivity. “It doesn’t work out for the animals and it’s never going to work out for the animals,” he says. “I think you can put all the money into bigger pools that you want but never recreate the ocean.”

Jett explains that killer whales in captivity tend to experience social problems and health problems. For example, captive whales often chew on the concrete edges of their pools or the steel bars that separate different areas. As a result, “most of their teeth are broken, missing, ground down, or drilled out,” says Jett. The whales may also float near the top of the pool for long periods. As a result, they may end up with a sunburn or a flopped-over dorsal fin—a common sight on captive male killer whales. Wild whales’ fins are almost always straight.

Of course, life in the wild isn’t perfect, either. In fact, a whale in captivity now has about the same chance of surviving the year as a whale in the wild. “Survival of killer whales in captivity has increased over the past 30 years,” says Doug DeMaster, Science and Research Director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. In addition, research with captive whales has added to our knowledge about their physiology and life history. On several occasions, scientists have used this knowledge to aid wild killer whales in trouble.

Jett concedes that parks such as SeaWorld have done some good for killer whales. “We no longer fear them,” he says. “People have come to appreciate the need to protect them.” However, he feels that the time has come to stop keeping Katina and other whales captive.

What do you think? Have you been to a show at SeaWorld or a similar park? Is there any way for these parks to make life more comfortable for killer whales?

Your Decision
Next time you’re at a zoo or aquarium, think about what life must be like for the animals there. Talk to your family and the zookeepers about the ethics of protecting animals both in the zoo and in the wild. Then make your own decisions. Right . . . or wrong?

Baseline Essay: Keeping Wild Animals

Prompt

Sources

Zoo Complicated

Zoos: Fighting to Save Endangered Species

Beastly Blahs

Wild Ones

Strong thesis statement

Strong evidence and argumentation

Effective organization

Effective introduction and conclusion

Conventions and style

Writing Area