Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/22/you-could-own-this-zoo-complet.html
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If I had 14.2 million dollars…
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York is “accessible” Maine and there’s lots of money going there.
Do Zoos make money?
I’ve been to this place with the kids. It was a little sad. I hope someone buys it and releases the animals to kindly retirement homes.
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Someone call Matt Damon!
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Don’t like zoos. I hate to see animals in cages. It’s cruel.
As a first year student that was way too young to be at school, somebody in the dorm came across a print notice in the back of a trade magazine or newspaper (back in the early days of the Internet when people still weren’t sure how to spell email and there was a guy who produced a print book called the Internet Yellow Pages). A zoo was going under and it was selling it animals. They had a price list next to many of the animals, but not all. I not quite sure, I have some memory of some being labeled “call to inquire”, as though it was a cheesy mail order catalog. One of the animals was a giant anteater, and it wasn’t too expensive. We could afford it if we pooled our money or perhaps we looked at the monthly dorm “lack of damage” refund used to encourage proper behavior and thought it was doable. I remember standing around on the tiny end of hall balcony sipping coffee discussing how neat it would be to have a dorm pet and we could earn money using it as an environmentally friendly pest control. It was a comical idea for a time.
Fast forward at another school. I mentioned the story to a professor who said, “and you thought that was funny”, in that challenging profesoral way that I denotes dissapointment. He then explained how terrible it was when a zoo, aquarium, circus or animal collector/hoarder goes belly up and how difficult it is to find homes for a lot rare and exotic animals, many with expensive veterinary issues. He also explained that there was likely little if any vetting of buyers if their check cleared. The younger me took note, and I learned to be a lot more critical in my thinking, and to extend compassion more broadly.
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I was originally going to be kidding about the title of the piece – “zoo with menagerie” seemed redundant, but there is nothing to kid. I went to the dictionary and found that the menagerie is a collection of animals, while the zoo is where you go to see them. (Glad I looked that up before I made some mildly snarky comment)
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Serious zoos are more than entertainment venues. What the public doesn’t get is that in real zoos (The Smithsonian, San Diego etc.) that there are numerous PhD ecologists on staff that are involved in conservation and breeding programs so that endangered species don’t go extinct.
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