Animal rights and human wrongs: ignorance to animal welfare

I’m currently reading an old book by Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of the science of animal behaviour but I’m struggling with it. I’m not struggling with the content so much as I’m struggling to respect this great thinker due to what I suppose you could call ‘cultural differences’ or perhaps ‘ethical differences.’ You see, Lorenz kept a whole menagerie of animals in his house from song birds to lemurs and nowadays we would condemn such practise but in the 50’s issues of animal welfare were very much only beginning to be considered. In one chapter on pets he describes which birds are best bought from dealers or taken form nests to be kept as ‘interesting pets’. My edition of this book, printed in the 70s however, does contain a warning of the legality of the trade of some of the species he mentions. So it’s not all bad. At least in England anyway, we have same laws to protect our wildlife from the pet trade, however inadequate they maybe, it’s a start.

The sad thing is, 55 years after this book was written we still have a trade in exotic pets. Even Lorenz comments that with higher species the trade is ‘ethically dubious’ and since then the UK has introduced the Dangerous Wild Animals Act (1976). But since the introduction of the internet the trade has found new ways of doing business. Whilst browsing the other day I came across sites offering an array of animals for sale from sugar gliders to zebras, without so much as a disclaimer of the legality of the trade in certain species. Even the more well know sites such as eBay and youtube seem to have a rather laissez-faire attitude towards animal welfare laws with pelts and skins from cites listed species being advertised for sale on eBay and videos of pet tigers being taken for walks on youtube.

I wish I could end this rant on a lighter, positive note but I can’t. Even so called scientists aren’t doing us any favours. Recently a new pet cat called the ashera went on sale. The cat is a hybrid of the domestic cat and the serval. This dog sized cat is a beauty but how could any self respecting scientist believe it’s a good use of time and equipment to create a designer pet at the expense of genetic diversity of a rare cat? If only the time and research had been put into the conservation of this species instead of creating the feline equivalent of a prada bag.