Argumentative Essay: Animals Held In Captivity

Animals Held in Captivity

On PETA.org, Alice Walker, a Pulitzer Prize winning activist, writes “The animals of this world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans anymore than black people were made for whites.” Meaning, we should not remove them from their natural habitat and captivate them in zoos or hunt for the fun of it solely for the sake of our own entertainment. Although, some people believe animals should be held in captivity for various entertainment reasons, the reality is they shouldn’t be because it’s harmful to the animals.

Animals are being used for trophy hunting in Africa leading to a rapid decline in certain species of wild animals. In the Los Angeles Times article, Craig Packer says, “If you are shooting that many young males, it means you’ve shot all the big ones. It was incredibly poorly managed. It’s a very efficient way to promote the social instability that will cause a population to decline”. Packer is referring to the trophy hunting and how it is detrimental to their population, hunters are after the biggest and best lions and will stop at nothing to get the “trophy”. This is leading to a global population of 100,000 to about 30,000 in 1980. In Kenya the lion population dropped from 15,000 to about 2,000 in 15 years. If these numbers continue to drop, lions and leopards will soon become

According to PETA article, in many cases animals will develop neurotic and/or self harming behavior that are rarely seen in the wild. Some animals that do develop these problems may eat their feces and throw their vomit, pluck out their own feathers, sway back and forth, pace, or swim in endless figure eights. Zoos have tried to give animals pills to calm them down as opposed to changing their million dollar park structures. If they’d leave the animals in their natural habitats they wouldn’t need to worry about anything happening to the