Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Bostock foregrounds the vagueness of the term “wild.” He questions the assumptions
that zoos keep wild animals (since in modern zoos most animals are already born in
captivity). He then broaches a detailed and informed examination whether wild anim-
als are better off in the wild.
Bostock points out that zoos provide animals with a longer life, one that benefits
from veterinary care. He qualifies this evaluation by pointing out various ailments and
diseases that zoos may be inducing in their underexercised inmates. Bostock maintains
that on the whole, the rule should be that a wild animal is better off left in the wild
(75). His conclusion is mild: sometimes this latter rule does not apply; for some an-
imals the benefits of captivity make for a beneficial trade-off. Since everything turns
on what “promotion” of welfare could plausibly mean, Bostock focuses on various
competing criteria that could substantiate assumptions regarding what counts as advan-
cing (or demoting) an animal's welfare. For him, the most defensible criteria are an
amalgam of several considerations, the main ones being health (longevity, physical
and mental well-being), breeding, and preserving natural behavior (along with a cor-
responding lack of abnormal behavior).
Bostock believes in animal rights. It is therefore fair to challenge his position
through counterexamples invoking the analogy to other right-possessing entities,
namely, human beings. Reasonable as Bostock's welfare criteria are, humans incarcer-
ated in prisons may comply with all of them, exhibiting longevity, medical treatment,
lack of signs of abnormal behavior, and preservation of reproductive capacity. Yet
these signs emphatically do not prove that a life in a prison is not a severe com-
promise of one's welfare. Even if zoos could be shown to
improve
, rather than
merely maintain, the animal's welfare, this boon would not manage to dissipate a
sense of moral dubiousness brought out when one mulls over the viability of utilizing
this excuse for other right-possessing beings. The high child mortality rates in some
parts of the world justify no one in transporting these children to captivity com-
pensated by longevity and medical treatment.
Bostock is obliged to back up his contention that furthering interests morally valid-
ates the trumping of freedom. He does this in a surprising manner: undermining the
assumption that captivity is a form of cruelty. He argues for this conclusion by distin-
guishing between various forms of cruelty, refusing to regard captivity as constituting
any of them. This (in-triguing) result is achieved through limiting the relevant forms
of cruelty either to unjustifiably causing suffering or to taking pleasure in doing so
(56). For Bostock, captivity does not fall under gratuitous or sadistic creation of pain,
ergo, it does not constitute cruelty.
Yet why restrict the scope of cruelty in this way? How about actions such as a
systematic thwarting of an entity's potential, or a frustration of its broader instincts?