The Caged Bird Sings Because There Is Nothing Else to Do

The wild, cruel beast is not behind the bars of a cage. He is in front of them.
Axel Munthe

This is the first in a series of essays that I am writing that address the reasons (read: rationalizations) that people offer for continuing the practice of breeding and trading captive wild animals. They are in no particular order.

Reason #1: By keeping wild animals in captivity, we are protecting them from all of the hardships that come with life in the wild.

I have heard this common reason used time and again by people who breed, trade, and keep wild animals as pets. Because animals in the wild must contend with difficulties, such as potential food scarcity, confrontations and competition with other animals, natural disasters, disease, and fleas (to name a few), those who keep them in captivity claim that they are doing them a favor by releasing them from these burdens.

The most obvious hole in this argument is that wild animals have contended with, overcome, and survived such hardships in the wild for thousands of years without our assistance. In fact, the ability of a species to meet these challenges is precisely why they are still here; they are the very definition of the fittest. This is not just to say that they are physically fit, it is to say that they exist in their particular habitats because they are fit to meet its particular challenges.

Another hole in the argument is the flagrant neglect and abuse that takes place in far too many places that engage in animal trading, regardless of the outward promise of animal protection. Let's take a closer look at the word "trading." In economic terms, what is it that people trade? Commodities. We must face the fact that if we engage in trading living creatures, then we perceive them as commodities, no matter how much we may shout that we love them and are protecting them. This perception leads to the inevitable application of a fundamental principle that governs commodities trading, which is to keep the costs low and the profits high. It costs a great deal of money to meet the needs of captive wild animals, particularly large and dangerous animals like big cats. Therefore costs are kept at a minimum by neglecting the animals' needs. Cage sizes are minimized, and cages fall into disrepair for the lack of manpower and materials to maintain them; animals often live in their own waste because cleaning cages takes time and money; veterinary care is non-existent; and the quality of the food diminishes sometimes to level of dry dog food, completely unfit for an obligate carnivore. Dare to question people who keep animals in conditions like this and you may receive a sharp and patronizing response, "They don't get veterinary care in the wild!" But wait a minute, weren't you supposed to be protecting them from the cruel fate of the wild?

The corollary of course, to keeping the costs down is to maximize profit. And the reach for profit occurs in two primary ways. The first way is that the animal has to go to work. This means being dragged around to malls, fairs, carnivals, and street corners, posing for pictures, and learning undignified tricks at the hands of people who wouldn't dare even approach their kind in the wild, much less attempt to train them. It also means the separation of family units; babies are taken from their mothers at a very young age so that they will bond with humans instead of their own kind. When they are spent from the stress of these activities, the second primary reach for profit occurs. They are sold to the highest bidder, dead or alive. If alive it is, then little regard is given to where the animals that these people were "protecting" end up. To quote one breeder from Florida, "I know some of my cats went to bad places, but what could I do when they weren't making money for me anymore?" It is clear that animal protection is not the primary motivation here.

But in order to really understand the fallacy of this argument, let's look at it from another point of view. As Harper Lee said, you cannot understand a man (or an animal) until you walk a mile in his shoes. Let's side aside, for a moment, the issue of the conditions in which an animal lives in captivity. It is not rocket science to understand why it is unethical to cage an animal in deplorable living situations. But what about the ones who are well-cared for? The argument on the part of some universities that keep wild animals as team mascots goes something like this: "That tiger lives in a $3 million facility that was built just for him! Nothing is good enough for you people!"

Consider this: does a tiger understand a $3 million cage, or does it understand the forest? Does it understand the shouts of thousands of screaming fans in a stadium, or does it understand the rippling of water in a forest stream? Does it care about the skill of a quarterback, or does it care about the patience required to refrain from making a single sound in order to keep from tipping off its prey? Football, team spirit, and $3 million facilities are things that WE value, not things that caged animals value. (I could write an entire additional essay about the irony of the claim that animal rights activists should care more about people than about animals, all the while our institutions of higher education build $3 million facilities for sometimes only a single tiger. What about the people living in the streets? I guess homelessness is less of an immediate problem than quashing team spirit.)

Let's take this analogy a step further. Suppose someone came to you and said that they would build you a lovely compound, with a big house and a cozy bed and the best food and all of your needs met with no effort on your part. You could have whatever you wanted on the compound - a pool, a big-screen TV, a tennis court, whatever suits your fancy. But there is one caveat: YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. Ever. Still sound like a good idea? Here is the short list of places you will never get to go: the beach, a public park, an amusement park, the grocery store, church, the Louvre, the library, a friend's house, college, the theatre, a basketball game, a family reunion. Yes there are many things that could come to you from the TV or internet, but those would only make you long to go to the places you see via these technologies yet are forbidden to go. Why would you care? Why would you want to leave when you have everything you need right there on the compound? Because in truth you DON'T have everything you need on the compound. Why? Because you are an animal, and animals need to explore their world. Yes, I understand that wild animals do not want to go to the places I just mentioned, but that does not mean that they don't want to go anywhere at all. Some tigers have been tracked roaming as far as 1,000 miles in the wild. Perhaps if they find a place where food is abundant and they are getting their needs met, they would not travel that far from it, but in the wild that is THEIR choice, and choice is precisely what we robbed from them, the thing from which we presumably protect them, when we took them out of the wild and put them in cages to begin with.

Our own children face many difficulties and challenges when they move away from home, and indeed faced many challenges every time they left home while they were still living there. Does that mean we should lock them away in their rooms forever to protect them from hardship? Are we doing them a favor if we do this? If I live in perfect protection, I don't have to do the difficult things that are necessary to survive and flourish in this world, but it also means that I don't GET to do any of those things either. When we are protected from the hardships of life, we are also denied the rewards of meeting them.

Meeting those hardships is exactly what wild animals have been doing for thousands of years, and quite successfully. The tiger has perfected the art of the patient wait and the exuberant lunge towards its prey; and the prey animals have perfected the art of getting away well enough that 9 out of 10 of a predator's attempts to catch them fail. Their bodies, their efforts, their diversity, their commitment to survival, as well as an overarching drive in nature to achieve balance, have painted a natural landscape full of beauty, excitement, and surprises - a landscape which generations of wild animals have never known because we, collectively, removed them from it and put them to work for us. Protection, indeed. By caging, buying, selling, and trading them, we protect them from nothing but their own freedom and dignity.

They don't need protection from the places that they call home. The argument of protection deflates as soon as we recognize one thing: anything that lives in captivity can only be described as a captive. The caged bird may very well sing, but it is little consolation when what it really wants to do is fly.

Sharyn Beach