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Sample Essay on Wild Animals: Do People Have to Keep Them in Captivity?

zooThis is a sample essay on wild animals on whether it is okay to have them caged in zoos or not. If you’re required to deliver a paper on a matter such as this, you can rely on the points mentioned below to structure your paper.

Wild animals fascinate humans and that is why people make arrangements to go and see them when they are not busy with other life commitments. Kids are thrilled by them and parents looking to provide their children with the best will make efforts to take them to view the animals. This has created a booming business where people ‘capture’ wild animals and put them on display for visitors to enjoy the spectacle. Visitors pay huge sums to view the animals with the prices hiked for those with kids. From the activities at the zoo, the operators are able to make good money, and the visitors go home happy. This appears like a good arrangement, but is that really the case? The zoo operators and the visitors may be happy at the end of the day, but there is another party to the proceedings that are not always pleased with this arrangement and these are the wild animals.

The supporters of keeping wild animals in a zoo argue that zoos usually provide animals with the best living conditions by providing them with enough food, water, and a place to live. They would go ahead and say that life in the wild can be harsh on animals since climatic conditions such as drought may deny the animals enough food and water to drink, and this would endanger them. They would claim that the animals are safe as well in the zoos since poachers cannot access and kill them.

Keeping wild animals in cages, however, is very bad since it denies them the movement that they need to enjoy their surroundings. The fact that such animals are wild means that they thrive better in unstructured and unregulated environments such as those found in wildlife parks. They also require a lot of space to move about and having them in a cage restricts their movements and this makes them restless and unhappy. A restless animal is not happy, and it may take it out on the visitors or the attendants when they are trying to feed them.

It also limits the animals’ interactions since their procreation mates are limited to the wild animals in the zoo. If the animal is a rare species, this may lead to its extinction since a lack of enough mates is one of the factors that lead to the elimination of an animal species.

Wild animals should be left free in the wild where they can go about their activities in peace. Locking them up in a cage for people’s pleasure is wrong since it denies them the chance to be wild and free. It is actually equivalent to slavery since the animals are forced to do the stuff against their will.

References:

  1. Armstrong, S. J., & Botzler, R. G. (Eds.). (2016). The animal ethics reader. Taylor & Francis.
  2. Fisher, D. N., James, A., Rodríguez-Muñoz, R., & Tregenza, T. (2015, June). Behaviour in captivity predicts some aspects of natural behaviour, but not others, in a wild cricket population. In Proc. R. Soc. B (Vol. 282, No. 1809, p. 20150708). The Royal Society.
  3. Hediger, H. (2013). Wild animals in captivity. Butterworth-Heinemann.
  4. Melson, G. F. (2013). Children and wild animals. The rediscovery of the wild, 93-118.
  5. Snak, A., Garcia, F. G., da Silveira Delgado, L. E., & Osaki, S. C. (2015). Occurrence of Cryptosporidium spp. in wild animals living in the Cascavel city park, Paraná, Brazil. Semina: Ciências Agrárias, 36(2).
  6. Sudan, V., Verma, A. K., & Jaiswal, A. K. (2017). Trypanosomosis of wild animals with emphasis on Indian scenario. Veterinary Parasitology: Regional Studies and Reports, 10, 25-28.
  7. Thawait, V. K., Maiti, S. K., & Dixit, A. A. (2014). Prevalence of gastro-intestinal parasites in captive wild animals of Nandan Van Zoo, Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Veterinary World, 7(7), 448-451.

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