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By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D
President Bill Clinton hunted on shooting preserves during his presidency. The Wildlife Protection Network says, "Two days after Christmas in 1993, President Clinton killed a captive bred mallard duck on a Maryland shooting preserve owned by lobbyist John W. Tieder, Jr. Tieder is the treasurer of DUCPAC, a pro-hunting political action committee that has given over $35,000 in campaign contributions to political candidates."
The "San Jose Mercury News," in a 1999 series of articles on surplus zoo animals, reported that the world famous San Diego Zoo has "sold, loaned, traded or donated 33 percent of its surplus animals to dealers, auctions, game or hunting ranches, unidentified private individuals or unaccredited zoos whose owners deal heavily in the exotic animal trade."
There may be no greater obstacle to reestablishing a connection with the natural world and eliminating our many social and environmental dysfunctions than the assumptions we make every day about how the world works. Zoos are not benign facilities providing educational viewing of animals in their natural habitats. They are businesses where animals are exploited yet again in our culture.
Sick animals are sometimes ignored to save money and zookeepers are often unskilled people who have worked their way up from jobs on the loading dock to supervisory positions managing the lives of exotic animals. The animals are on display in the most unnatural of conditions. How can an animal who is used to roaming an area of hundreds of square miles be content in a 200 foot long enclosure?
And as if the practices of zoos and animal exhibitors are not bad enough on their own, now we learn that they have been supplying the obscene canned hunt trade with surplus animals that your children may have laughed at just a few weeks ago.
Until we stop treating animals that have proven time and time again that they are thinking, feeling, reasoning beings as slaves and exhibits, we will have no chance of healing the isolation we feel from the world and from each other.
And until we end the brutal killing of animals for sport and stop these senseless canned hunts, there will be no question about who represents the lowest form of life on Earth.
RESOURCES
1. See a list of things you can do to end canned hunts from HSUS and keep track of current legislation at:
http://www.hsus.org/ace/12090
2. See more issues about zoos from HSUS at: http://www.hsus.org/ace/12095
3. Learn more about these obscene canned hunts at: http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/
CannedHunt/cannedhuntindex.html
4. See a Fund for Animals report on canned hunts at: http://fund.org/library/document
Viewer.asp?ID=338&table=documents
5. Read about case of illegal wildlife trade at the San Diego Zoo at:
http://www.bornfree.org.uk/news002.htm
6. See the Singapore Zoo website at: http://www.zoo.com.sg/openzoo/conser/
c-conser.htm
7. See some surplus animal lists from Australian, African, and Asian zoos at:
http://www.seaza.org/animal_exchange/
animal_exchange.htm
8. See the website of the National Organization to Abolish Zoos at:
http://www.noazark.org/Company/
philosphy.htm
See their list of Zoo Myths at: http://www.noazark.org/myths/Index.htm
9. Read an account of a canned hunt at: http://www.enkosini.com/Trophy
Hunting.htm
10. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Tell them that they must enact legislation banning canned hunts in all 50 states. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
ziptoit.html
11. Contact your state representatives and insist that they sponsor laws banning canned hunts.
{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found wondering what to tell his son when he is old enough to want to go to the zoo. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at:
jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at:
http://www.healingourworld.com}
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/mar2002/2002L
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