I know that
there are people out there who have moral objections to zoos. I think that they feel it is wrong to capture
animals and put them behind bars to be on display for people’s amusement. In an ideal world where habitat shrinkage is simply
a fantasy, where poaching is imaginary and where animals threatened with
extinction are part of a make-believe world, I would be with them. But this is far from an ideal world and this
world is not going to change in the foreseeable future.
I am not so naïve as to believe that all zoos
are benign and that all animals in zoos are treated well. But there are zoos that do treat animals well
and do important work in education and conservation. The zoo in Columbus, Ohio is one of them.
We have been
passing Columbus for many years on our way to and from visits to my family in
Southern Ohio. On this trip back to
Massachusetts, my daughter Carrie and I decided to stop.
Our first stop in the zoo was in the North
America region. There are three Polar
Bears living there. This is one of the two
zoo-born sisters, Aurora or Anana, who lives there. Her diving technique reminds me of watching
Carrie learn to dive back when she was a little kid.
She was diving in to grab what we were told was
frozen fruit juice. It looks to me like
she was pretty happy with her catch.
This little girl was fascinated watching the
Polar Bear swimming with the fish. Who
knows? Maybe this experience will spark
a love that will encourage her to become a conservationist or an
environmentalist in the future.
This is either Brutus or Buckeye, one of two Alaskan
Brown Bears orphaned outside of Anchorage, Alaska. I was impressed with the size of these bears. They can get to be 700 pounds of pure bear. It makes me wonder if I wasn’t born the wrong
species.
But if you want to talk about size, check this
guy out. Well, actually, I believe this is a girl because she has no antlers, but a Bull Moose can weigh up to
1,200 pounds. It is not outside the
realm of possibility for us to run across a moose here in Massachusetts. As a matter of fact, they have been spotted
in our neighborhood a couple of times over the years we have lived here. But I have never had the luck to see one in
the wild. This particular moose is one
of three orphans rescued in Alaska and sent to the Columbus Zoo in 2011.
Next stop, a trip to the Shores and beyond…
