By today’s environmental standards, a self-sustaining tiger population - based on 7,000 plus animals - would be considered a success story.  However, when those 7,000 tigers are found in captivity - living outside of our public zoo system – it is considered a travesty.  Why aren’t they in zoos?  Or better yet, why aren’t they in the wild where they belong?  The answer, as always, lies in their association with another inhabitant of earth… man.

 

Even though captivity has become a way of life for many species of animals, not all animals can, or should be domesticated - Great Cats being one of them.  For hundreds of years man has made a practice of capturing animals from the wild for use in captivity.  Early displays of captured wildlife were found to be fascinating, as they gave zoo-going onlookers an exciting glimpse of life from far-off places.  And so, for many years wildlife seemed destined to be captured and sent to an ever-growing number of zoos throughout the world.

 

Yet, by the mid-nineteen hundreds, the total number of public zoos began to stabilize and the number of animals needing to be caught from the wild began to reduce.  However, animal populations in captivity continued to grow as a result of management practices that many zoos had adopted (which were directly related to their desire for an increase in attendance).  Some zoos believed prolific breeding demonstrated the zoo’s success in captive wildlife management, while many others admittedly saw cute baby animals as a fool proof way to bolster public attendance.  In either case, captive populations grew to unsustainable levels, as size limitations and budget constraints shackled most zoos.  Continual births left zoos little choice but to surplus or euthanize animals of their own creation.

 

Surplus animals leaving the zoo system found their way into a number of private places throughout the world.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of these animals were transitioned with little, or no regard to their future well being.  By leaving the surplus animal’s destiny in the hands of animal traders (who saw nothing but profit in their excess) public zoos set the stage for what was to become a captive wildlife crisis over the next forty years.  By continually dumping surplus animals into the private sector, many zoos unwittingly planted thousands of seeds for captive wildlife breeding, commercialization and abuse.  Exotic animals such as lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars and a whole host of other species (many of which were threatened or endangered) began to permeate the backyards & basements of the world.  Exploited in every way - and bred by the thousands in exotic equivalents to “puppy mills” - their numbers grew exponentially. 

Captive Wildlife Crisis