Zoos Enrich Our Lives but Cost Animals Their Dignity, Says Bill Nye | Big Think

Zoos Enrich Our Lives but Cost Animals Their Dignity, Says Bill Nye

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Recent spectacle surrounded a young boy, three years old, who climbed into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo only to be grabbed by a 450-pound male gorilla. Working against time, and the gorilla’s temperament — the crowd’s panic spurred the gorilla on — the zoo’s animal felt the only way to keep the young boy safe was to shoot the gorilla.

"There’s no good thing about this." Says Bill Nye. "With that said, my life was certainly enriched by going to zoos."

Nye debates what is ethical about zoos. He describes Ivan, a famous gorilla that was first raised with a family in Tacoma, Washington, and "hung out" at the dinner table until he got too big. From there, he was transferred to a concrete enclosure in a mall, which wasn’t a healthy environment for him. After his transfer to the Atlanta Zoo, it was visible how much happier the great ape seemed.

"He had it going on. He had a big enclosure, he had girl gorillas. And you could just tell by the way he was walking around, this does not suck. This is cool. That was my interpretations of Ivan’s emotions," Nye describes.

Perhaps it was because Ivan was raised in a human environment. As a result, he was more accepting of humans, being around humans, and coexisting with humans. By comparison, other gorillas, like Vip of the Woodland Park Zoo, weren’t raised this way. They might consider the enclosures as being ‘stuck.’

"If we had a way to interact with these creatures without causing them hardship, it would be cool. And I will say as a kid, my life was enriched by visiting zoos. People have got to think this through."

Nye is for humane enclosures, where we as people could interact with the animals, and the risk of predatory attacks are low to none. We can learn so much from zoos, and they help educate children. Nye hopes everyone can learn from an incident like this, about how to make the enclosures, and the ethics of the enclosures themselves.

Zoos are important, both in helping preserve the endangered animals, and hopefully, getting them back to their deserved ecosystems. One day gorillas such as Vip could go back to their habitats, or the future offspring, if we play the cards right, and could educate us about their lives there.

Nye also describes the most useful role of zoos regarding the environment: repopulating static ecosystems to make them more diverse. Rangers at Yellowstone Park, for example, once noticed there were no saplings growing along the banks. After reintroducing wolves to the area, the young trees began to grow again because the wolves hunted the elk that were eating the saplings.

"It is reasonable to me that zoos have a role in reintroducing megafauna," says Nye.

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BILL NYE, THE SCIENCE GUY:

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life. In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle's home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live." This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®" was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle's NBC affiliate. While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children's books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye's Great Big Book of Tiny Germs." Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries" airs on the Science Channel.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Bill Nye: So recently a four-year-old kid got into a gorilla enclosure in a zoo and the zoo officials decided in the safety of the kid they had to kill the gorilla. So here was an animal that was in his natural habitat in Africa doing his gorillatical thing. And he got captured and ended up in a zoo. And then the guy got shot because some kid crawled into his enclosure. .....

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