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The dark truth behind wildlife tourism
- neonate 7y agohttps://outline.com/jjGgwW https://outline.com/jjGgwW
- fqw3b58w4n6 7y agoGo Vegan. If you already believe animal cruelty is wrong, you already believe in veganism.
- Swenrekcah 7y agoI believe animal cruelty is wrong and I respect people who commit to vegeterianism/veganism, but I’ll keep eating meat until it’s economically unviable.
- devin 7y agoFrom which angle? I can't cite figures off the top of my head, but my understanding is that it's well established that eating meat is economically unviable in numerous ways.
- Causality1 7y agoUnviable for him personally, not in a general planetary sense.
- vinay427 7y agoJust to add a few thoughts to this for those who believe in animal welfare: If you think it's too hard or impractical, assuming you live in a developed country it's almost certainly quite feasible and can be very cheap. If you think it's too radical, it probably shouldn't seem any different than any of the other moral conundrums we abstain from. Is it radical to not kill, assault, or rob people? Of course, the context of social acceptance matters, but to illustrate why this (in my opinion) isn't always appropriate, something more comparable: would you consider it radical to not enslave people if you lived in the US during the era of slavery and had the choice to do so but thought it morally wrong?
- harimau777 7y agoI've tried to eat at least more vegan and found it quite difficult. I can put some chicken, refried beans, cheese, and a tortilla in the microwave and have a satisfying, high calorie meal in five minutes. I haven't found a vegan equivalent yet.
- googlemike 7y agoI am vegetarian - I find it a nice balance between the two. In your example, drop the chicken, add some salsa and another kind of bean (whole black?). For extra fun, replace the chicken prep with mushrooms or tofu.
- blacksmith_tb 7y agoIt isn't satisfying without the chicken? The 'high calorie' aspect won't change too much... There are quite a few fake-meat takes on chicken out there, I don't miss meat so I tend to avoid them, but they exist.
- ebg13 7y agoThat's not really true, though, because killing something and being cruel to something aren't the same thing.
- Causality1 7y agoNobody could argue that factory-farmed chicken and pork isn't evil, but there are ways to eat meat without cruelty. Steers raised for meat are not miserable, nor are deer I (try) to shoot every winter.
- phil248 7y agoHow about instead of Go Vegan.... Go eat how you think you should eat. Maybe that includes insects. Maybe that includes steak once a month. Maybe it includes eggs but not milk. Make up your own mind and don't feel limited by the tiny number of established labels. They each come with their own complicated caveats and connotations. And they each demand, by virtue of their established labels, strict adherence to someone else's ideology. Go make up your own ideology.
- everybodyknows 7y agoThe label itself is a lie -- those animals aren't wildlife any more. They're captives in most brutal imprisonment.
- scythe 7y agoWhen I initially clicked the link, I expected to hear about some bad things that happen when lots of tourists go somewhere to look at wildlife. Wildlife, to me, means animals which are not captive to humans. But the majority of animals described in this article -- tame elephants, dancing bears, trained monkeys and so forth -- are born, raised and abused in captivity. Now if you told me that animal performance attractions are typically cruel, that would be a much less surprising headline -- the sordid history of circus animals is a long-told story. I guess the Amazon river dolphins are wildlife, but if the punchline of the story were "dolphins hurt each other fighting for bait", I don't think it would arouse quite as much pity in the audience. And I wouldn't be nearly as surprised to hear that there is a "dark secret" lurking behind "exotic animal encounter" tourism. So I feel a little disappointed in the title.
- itronitron 7y agoYes, but a lot of these experiences for tourists are offered in a way that conceals the 'performance' aspect in such a way that people feel they are having a wildlife experience.
- belorn 7y agoThe story about dolphins makes me wonder why domestic horses are viewed as normal. When I compare them to dolphins the same boxes pops up. Horses have evolved to run great distances and live in larger social groups. The area which horses are kept is comparable very small compared to their wild counterpart. Horses are usually kept with only one or a few other horses, but the law do allow them to be isolated. There isn't much strict law dictating how much space they must have.
- devoply 7y agoComments like your's makes me wonder why humans have been turned into zombies sitting in front of a desk most of their lives. Humans also did not evolve for the environment that they have created for themselves with their technology. They evolved as hunter gatherers that often traveled large distances chasing their food source. What they created for themselves in their sedentary lifestyles in no way resembles that.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoHumans have a choice. Captive animals don't.
- maxxxxx 7y agoCaptive have no choice but most humans don’t really have one either.
- mgolawala 7y agoPerhaps we don’t anymore? Not for most of us anyway. In a sense we too are domesticated and brought up in captivity. Even if we knew how to survive. Between private property, most wildlife being eradicated, the rest being protected, loss of natural ecosystems to farmland (private property) and ranch land (private property), commercial fishing reducing the abundance of fish available, other areas being protected from fishing, rivers being dammed up or polluted, water tables dropping due to the pumping of ground water, and our sheer numbers. Perhaps Living like hunter gatherers is no longer a choice available to us. It is either live as we do now, or perish. I know that is how it would be for me. It's a sobering thought.