It doesn't matter whether Tatiana, the tiger who attacked three people and killed one at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas Day, was being teased or taunted. It doesn't matter because zoo animals shouldn't be able to escape from their enclosures no matter how rude people are to them. It also doesn't matter because even if the young men were doing nothing, or were making gestures of homage and respect, Tatiana had years of reasons to be in a bad mood.
Tigers are among zoo visitors' favorite animals. They're also one reason many people hate zoos. Saddened by the picture of misery presented by the tiger who repetitively paces back and forth, back and forth, some people never go back.
"Tigers simply don't belong in the zoo," says Adam Roberts, senior vice president of the animal advocacy organization Born Free USA. "Tigers don't belong on concrete, tigers don't belong behind bars, and frankly, tigers don't belong near people."
Life in a zoo isn't necessarily oppressive for all animals. Most animals didn't evolve to explore as much space as tigers. But tigers in most zoos are like people spending their lives locked in an empty living room. They are confined to tiny spaces, with nothing to do. Life is intensely boring, year after year. Some animal observers say zoo life may also be stressful. Tigers, who like to lurk, skulk and hide, are on display, with groups of strangers staring at them. Freedom is absent, and so are choice and control.
The San Francisco Zoo is among the many older U.S. zoos saddled with the physical legacy of tiny, inhumane cells. Instead of replacing them all, zoos build a gorilla habitat here, a giraffe palace there, while other animals languish in the old cages. In the past decade, San Francisco Zoo has sought to shed its infamy. In 2002, it unveiled the Lemur Forest, a delight to behold, with five species of lemurs trooping over a large island and clambering through tall trees and climbing structures. In 2004, it opened the expansive African Savanna, where visitors walk along an pathway, observing giraffes, zebras and oryx rambling through open grounds. And it used the rescue of two young grizzly bears from Montana to help raise funds for a new bear exhibit bigger than all its previous bear grottoes combined.
Yet the grotto in which Tatiana and the zoo's three other Siberian tigers lived was barely upgraded from 1940, when the zoo's grottoes were built as part of the Works Project Administration. It was small, dull and, as we now know, not completely tiger-proof. In December 2006, Tatiana mauled and nearly tore off the arm of keeper Lori Komejan inside the feeding cages. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the state's workplace safety agency, Cal/OSHA, blamed the zoo, citing defects that the zoo knew about but hadn't fixed, and imposed an $18,000 penalty.
Whatever problems one zoo may have, conservationists argue that keeping tigers in zoos is a means to preserve a species in terrible danger. After all, wild tigers are losing ground fast. Assaulted by poaching and loss of habitat, populations are sinking. A hundred years ago there were probably 100,000 tigers. Now there are about 3,000.
Today, zoos are active in breeding programs to preserve tigers. Under the Species Survival Plan, only about 20 tiger breedings a year take place, planned to maximize genetic diversity. "The whole philosophy that I have lived by is that tigers in zoos are a genetic insurance policy," says Ron Tilson, the director of conservation at the Minnesota Zoo and a respected tiger expert who directs the Species Survival Plan at accredited U.S. zoos. "There are the same number of Amur [Siberian] tigers in captivity as in the wild, and there's greater genetic diversity in captive tigers." If a virus like distemper or feline leukemia devastated the wild population, he adds, it could be rebuilt from the genes of captive tigers.
Even Peter Knights, executive director of the conservation organization WildAid, which strives to preserve threatened animals, including tigers, worldwide, acknowledges that zoos are valuable. "Zoos play a positive role in sensitizing people to conservation," he says. "Tigers are in an ambassadorial role. The actual experience of seeing a physical animal is nothing like seeing it on a TV screen."
Knights, however, is skeptical about ever reintroducing tigers, even if it could be done in a large protected area. Predation isn't an easy trade to pick up, and wild cubs stay with their mothers for two years learning how it's done, being supported while they learn. "We haven't worked out how to reintroduce tigers into the wild yet," he says. At the same time, various projects with other big cats suggest that while the first generation will starve if they're not provisioned by humans, the second generation does fine. But it's true: tigers can't be reintroduced now. It's not safe for them out there.
Roberts of Born Free USA has no patience with the defense of zoos, either for their genetic storage programs or their ambassador roles. "The tiger is a perfect example of the way that zoos are missing the point about conservation," he says. Money spent on zoo tigers should be spent on protecting habitat for wild tigers. "There's an expenditure of millions if not tens of millions of dollars on captive tigers. If we really want tigers and not just a shell of the beast we call the tiger, the real emphasis needs to be first and foremost in the field."
Currently, despite the best efforts of groups like Born Free USA and WildAid, the outlook for tigers in the wild remains dim. The only place where wild tigers are doing well is eastern Siberia, which is also the only tiger habitat sparsely inhabited by people. "Everywhere else, everything is failing," says Tilson. "It doesn't matter how much money there is. It doesn't matter how good the recovery team is. It comes down to: Is there a will from the government to put resources into it, to create laws, and to enforce those laws? For a real failure, go look at India." There, prosecutions for poaching don't stick; the Sariska Tiger Preserve has had every single tiger killed; and the Tribal Rights Bill now in Parliament would allow hundreds of thousands of people and their cattle to live in national parks.
The ideal situation for tigers would be the protection their wild habitat. Until that comes to pass, zoos will continue to serve a purpose for helping to preserve the species. But the new safety barriers the San Francisco Zoo has installed on its tiger enclosures shouldn't be where we stop. We should also look seriously at how to make tigers happy. So why don't we do some happiness research?
Setting aside the solipsistic notion that we can never know what's in the heart of another, there are in fact multiple ways of getting at what tigers like. We could put on white coats and measure corticosteroids, stress hormones. We could find out if it's true that active tigers live longer. We could then design zoo habitats better. After all, we should treat our captives well and intelligently. If they must be in prison, why can't it be one of those country club prisons we keep hearing about?
There are encouraging signs in that direction. In recent years, zoos have constructed new tiger exhibits with big enclosures and greenery. There's usually a pond, maybe even a waterfall. Zoos have also signed on to the concept of "enrichment." They're giving animals things to play with, things to destroy, things to take apart in search of snacks.
In the Bronx Zoo, keepers spray odd scents like cinnamon or musk around the enclosure to make things more interesting for the cats. At the Minnesota Zoo, tigers get a fake carcass. It's a fake moose stuffed with meat, and the tigers have to wrestle with a long strip of rawhide to get to the meat. "The tigers really love this," says Tilson.
In fact, Tilson assures me that zoo tigers are content. Of visitors saddened by the sight of zoo tigers, he says, "It may be a look of boredom they're picking up on, but [the tigers] are not unhappy." They live longer than wild tigers. They're well-fed and safe from enemies. Tilson thinks all zoo tigers should have enrichment programs. He speaks well of the tigers-and-water shows at a few facilities, including an aquarium in Denver and an unaccredited wildlife theme park in Arizona. "As long as it's done safely, it's good for the animals," he says.
Zookeepers also tell us that tigers are cats, happy just to eat and sleep. But zookeepers so badly want their tigers to be happy that they may not be the best judges.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of "The Tribe of Tiger," argues that circus tigers are happier than zoo tigers because their lives are active and interesting. She cites an observation of Tilson's from when the Minnesota Zoo was doing endocrine studies on tigers. The tigers were in small cages in a laboratory, and had blood samples taken several times a week -- and they looked great. They were relaxed and bright-eyed, and their corticosteroid levels were far below those of the tigers on display. Apparently they liked being able to observe the activity in the lab, and they liked the regular, friendly interaction with the researchers.
If the horrible incident at the San Francisco Zoo makes people pay attention to conditions for tigers in zoos, maybe some good will come from it. It's the least we can do for the tigers while our species continues to eat up their native homes.
How the World Works does not always thrill to the sight of lawyers representing dead writers in the act of enforcing intellectual property laws beyond the grave, but in the case of Dr. Seuss versus a coal-gasification startup with the effrontery to call itself "LoraxAg," I will make an exception.
The New York Times' Green Inc. blog has an update:
Colin Miner reports:
The company that protects the copyrights on the works of Theodor Geisel, better known as the children's book author Dr. Seuss, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Massachusetts company looking to get into the coal business under the name Lorax -- the title character of a story published in 1971.
"There's no reason for them to use the term," said Karl ZoBell, the longtime lawyer for Dr. Seuss Enterprises, "except to purloin the good will attached to the book and use it for a company that appears to be the opposite of everything the book is about."
Miner does a good job of summarizing the story, but leaves out one key point. The first publication to report on LoraxAg's existence was Massachusetts High Tech, back last November. But according to Wonk Room's Brad Johnson, who who posted about the sacrilege last week, Dr. Seuss Enterprises did not have any idea LoraxAg even existed until Johnson called them up. Thus the cease-and-desist letter.
Give a hard-working blogger some credit, Mr. Paper-Of-Record!
(Thanks to reader Katherine Harrison for bringing the Green Inc. item to my attention.)
Invasive species are not, by any means, a new problem on American soil. From zebra mussels to boa constrictors, they've been pushing out indigenous animals for centuries. Louisiana chef Philippe Parola, however, has an unusual strategy to get rid of them: putting them in our stomachs. (His oh-so-subtle eating philosophy: "You’ve got to have balls.")
In 1998, the flamboyant Parola was involved in the notorious (and unsuccessful) attempt to make the nutria, a large aquatic rodent pest, into a nationally popular meat. (It probably didn't help that the animal looks like that giant rat from your childhood nightmares.) Now he’s turned his attention to another invasive species, the Asian carp. The large fish, which can reach up to 30 pounds, has muscled out indigenous fish in American waterways, including the Mississippi, and has the dangerous habit of jumping out of the water near moving boats (to see them in terrifying YouTube action click here). Now, working with the state of Louisiana, Parola is hoping to curb its numbers by marketing the fish as a menu item. As part of his outreach, Parola will be promoting the fish to the 1,500 members of the annual National Grocer’s Association convention in Las Vegas.
Salon spoke to the energetic Parola over the phone about America’s conservative eating habits, his name-change marketing campaign, and why it’s so hard to get people to eat a giant rat.
How did you get involved in this effort to turn Asian carp into a menu item?
I was riding on my boat, going fishing, when these two fish literally jumped into my boat and landed on my feet. I’m a chef and I love exploring new avenues for new food, so when I saw them I decided to bleed them, bring them to my restaurant and fillet them. I found it was a delicious white meat. Then I called the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and let them know that this fish needs to have a marketing campaign.
Why haven’t people been eating this fish the whole time?
It was classified as a trash fish -- destroying nets, killing people [by knocking them out of boats], wiping out the native fish species by eating their food source. But there were two reasons we weren’t eating them: If you don’t bleed the fish, the meat is grayish-looking without much flavor, and there’s a lot of bones in this fish. Those were two things that nobody could overcome. I overcame them by bleeding the fish and steaming the meat so I could remove the bone.
Why are you so passionate about getting people to eat Asian carp?
I believe that if you kill, you eat it. The No. 1 goal is to resolve this ecological problem. The second goal is to create jobs. The third thing is for consumers, who have the most to gain. This fish is extremely healthy. It’s rich in omega 3 and there is no mercury because the silverfin is a filter feeder.
The silverfin? Is this your new name for the Asian carp?
Some clown from the USDA classified it as a carp. Carps are a bottom feeders and this is a filter feeder. The shape of the fish, the way it grows, the color: Literally there is no similarity to the carp. There’s no other species named the silverfin, so what’s the problem?
Well, off the top of my head, shouldn’t it be up to scientists to name the fish?
But what I’m saying to you -- very loudly -- is that this fish doesn’t have any similarity with the carp. I want somebody out there to redo that research and help us out.
You were part of an initiative to get people to start eating nutria, which is a rodent commonly found in Louisiana. It didn’t get a lot of national traction. What happened?
It was successful until the government went in and stopped it. The FDA wouldn’t allow us to use the FDA stamp because the nutria needed to be killed in a slaughterhouse. The idea was to hunt them in the wild, but nobody would buy something without the FDA approval. I’m very proud I was involved with that. To quote one of our presidents, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
To be fair, it was also pretty hard to imagine people eating an animal that looks like a giant rat.
Yes. That was the biggest difficulty to overcome. I did a promotion with alligator meat, and that went fine, but with nutria, the fact that it’s classified as a rodent, and that cops were shooting nutria in the gutters kind of killed it. At least this fish doesn’t have a rat tail.
Why do you think Americans are so reluctant to eat unconventional animals?
America has been spoiled in many ways. People can get boneless fillet of fish, and consumers got used to that. Any other country in the world you will eat a fish with a head and bone and tail on -- which tastes better.
Are there any other maligned animals that you’re going to try to turn into food?
You can tell people that if they send one to me, I guarantee that I’ll find a way to sell it. If it flies, crawls or swims we can eat it. I recently got a call from Australia about a carp there that nobody’s eating. I said, hey, send it to me. I’ll give it a try.
The key is to be smart about it. When I was doing nutria promotion, there was guy on a radio station who asked me, Why should I eat nutria when I can have chicken every day? I wanted to tell him, listen dumbass, this animal is invading your city, that’s why you want to eat it.
Is there some kind of law mandating that science dissertations be named as boringly as possible? I'd like to blame the stultifying sledgehammer title of Dan Wilhemsson's "Aspects of offshore renewable energy and the alterations of marine habitats" on a bad translation from the original Swedish, but somehow, I expect that the original sounds just as dull.
Which is too bad, because as Susan Kraemer explains at CleanTechnica (found via a tweet from Steve Silberman) Wilhemsson's research is the definition of neato.
A Swedish scientist at the Stockholm University's Zoology Department studying the effects of off-shore wind turbines discovered that marine life has become more abundant and diverse near the foundations. Dan Wilhelmsson found that offshore wind turbines constitute habitats for fish, crabs, mussels, lobsters and plants.
With some extra tweaks, such as drilling additional holes in the foundation to create inviting environments for crabs and other marine life forms, we may be able to create thriving underwater ecologies.
So even as ocean acidification driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere kills off coral reefs, we will build new artificial reefs around fields of off-shore wind turbines. Presumably, one could then nurture a thriving tourism business around the operations -- imagine scuba diving in a sea of windmills!. Win-win-win.
The U.S. Coast Guard is responding to a report that an underground diesel tank on Alaska's Adak Island has leaked fuel.
Adak Petroleum personnel said Monday night that a tank containing about 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel had reportedly released an unknown amount into Sweeper Cove. The workers reported that the fuel is contained within the cove, and they are using recovery equipment to clean it up.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Charly Hengen says Coast Guard personnel and Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation workers are making plans to fly to Adak on Tuesday to assess the size of the spill and monitor cleanup.
Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation.
He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps.
Benedict has been dubbed the "green pope" for his increasingly vocal concern about the need to protect the environment. Under his watch, the Vatican has installed photovoltaic cells on its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions.
For the pontiff, it's a moral issue: Church teaching holds that man must respect creation because it's destined for the benefit of humanity's future.
In his speech, the pontiff criticized the "economic and political resistance" to fighting environmental degradation and creating a new climate treaty at last month's negotiations in Copenhagen.
Officials from 193 countries met at the summit, which ended Dec. 19 having failed to produce a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It produced instead a non-biding accord that included few concrete steps to combat global warming.
The Copenhagen summit did set up the first significant program of ensuring aid to help poorer nations cope with the effects of a changing climate. But while the accord urged deeper cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, it did nothing to demand them.
"I trust that in the course of this year ... it will be possible to reach an agreement for effectively dealing with this question," Benedict said.
He said the issue was particularly critical for island nations and in places like Africa, where the battle for resources, increased desertification and over-exploitation of land has resulted in wars.
"To cultivate peace, one must protect creation!" Benedict told the ambassadors, many of whom wore their national dress or medal-draped formal attire for the audience in the frescoed Sala Regia of the Vatican's apostolic palace.
The pontiff said the same "self-centered and materialistic" way of thinking that sparked the worldwide financial meltdown was also endangering creation. To combat it will require a new way of thinking and a new lifestyle -- and an acknowledgment that the question is a moral one, he said.
"The protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, inasmuch as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and which comes from God," he said.
To illustrate his point, the German-born pope pointed to the experiences of eastern Europe under the "materialistic and atheistic regimes" of the former Soviet bloc.
"Was it not easy to see the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water and air?" he asked.
"The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation."
A conservation group's boat had its bow sheared off and was taking on water Wednesday after it was struck by a Japanese whaling ship in the frigid waters of Antarctica, the group said.
The boat's six crew members were safely transferred to another of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's vessels, the newly commissioned Bob Barker. The boat is named for the American game show host who donated $5 million to buy it.
The clash was the most serious in the past several years, during which the Sea Shepherd has sent vessels into far-southern waters to try to harass the Japanese fleet into ceasing its annual whale hunt.
Clashes using hand-thrown stink bombs, ropes meant to tangle propellers and high-tech sound equipment have been common in recent years, and crashes between ships have sometimes occurred.
The society said its vessel Ady Gil -- a high-tech speedboat that resembles a stealth bomber -- was hit by the Japanese ship the Shonan Maru near Commonwealth Bay and had about 10 feet (three meters) of its bow knocked off.
Locky Maclean, the first mate of the society's lead ship, said one crewman from New Zealand appeared to have suffered two cracked ribs, but the others were uninjured. The crew members were safely transferred to the group's third vessel, though the Ady Gil's captain remained on board to see what could be salvaged, he said.
"The original prognostic was that it was sinking, but at this point it is flooded with water but it seems to still have a bit of buoyancy," Maclean told The Associated Press by satellite phone from the ship, the Steve Irwin.
The group accused the Japanese ship of deliberately ramming the Ady Gil.
"They were stopped dead in the water when the incident occurred," Maclean said of the Ady Gil. "When they realized that the Shonan Maru was aiming right for them, they tried to go into reverse to get the bow out of the way but it was too late. The Shonan Maru made a course correction and plowed directly into the front end of the boat."
Glenn Inwood, a New Zealand-based spokesman for the Institute of Cetacean Research, the Japanese government-linked body that carries out the hunt, disputed Sea Shepherd's account, saying video shot from the whaler showed the conservationists' boat moving toward the whaler just before the collision.
"The Shonan Maru steams to port to avoid a collision. I guess they, the Ady Gil, miscalculated," Inwood told The Associated Press. "Sea Shepherd claims that the Shonan Maru has rammed the Ady Gil and cut it in half -- its claim is just not vindicated by the video."
Japan's Fisheries Agency said it was still checking details about the clash. Spokesman Toshinori Uoya said there were no injuries on the Japanese side.
Sea Shepherd sends boats to Antarctic waters each southern summer to try to stop the Japanese whaling fleet from killing whales under what it calls a scientific whaling program. Conservationists and many countries say the program is a front for commercial whaling.
Each side routinely accuses the other of dangerous activity during what has become a cat-and-mouse chase in one of the world's most remote regions.
Australia and New Zealand -- which both have Antarctic territories and are among the closest nations to the waters where the hunt goes on -- have urged both sides to show restraint, warning that they are far away from rescue if anything goes wrong.
"Our strongest condemnation applies to any violent or dangerous activity that takes place in these remote and inhospitable waters," Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett said Wednesday. He said he could confirm the collision, but that details were still unclear.
Wednesday's confrontation with whalers marked the first for the 1,200-ton Bob Barker, which rescued the crew. Sea Shepherd only recently bought the ship after its namesake, the former host of the "The Price Is Right" game show and a longtime animal rights acitvist, donated the money. Barker met Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson through a fellow activist and said he was instantly impressed.
"He said he thought he could put the Japanese whaling fleet out of business if he had $5 million," Barker recalled. "I said, 'I think you do have the skills to do that, and I have $5 million, so let's get it on,' so that's what we did."
Barker, 86, said he was "genuinely proud" to be associated with Sea Shepherd.
The Ady Gil, meanwhile, clashed earlier Wednesday with another Japanese ship, the whaling fleet's mothership, the Nisshin Maru.
The Institute of Cetacean Research said the Ady Gil came "within collision distance" of the Nisshin Maru's bow and repeatedly dangled a rope in the water that could have entangled the ship's rudder and propeller.
The Ady Gil's crew lobbed small projectiles designed to release a foul smell, and the whalers responded by firing high-powered hoses to keep the Sea Shepherd vessels away, the institute said in a statement.
"The obstructionist activities of the Sea Shepherd threaten the lives and property of those involved in our research, are very dangerous and cannot be forgiven," it said.
Maclean confirmed the earlier clash.
Japan's whaling fleet left in November for its annual hunt in Antarctic waters. Uoya said that for security reasons, details of the fleet's composition, the number of whales it hopes to take and the number of crew members are not being released to the public.
The Ady Gil is a 78-foot (24-meter) black-painted trimaran made of carbon fiber and Kevlar in a design meant to pierce waves. It was built to challenge the record for the quickest circumnavigation of the globe and can travel faster than 46 mph (75 kph).
Sea Shepherd unveiled the Ady Gil last October saying a California millionaire with the same name had donated most of the money for it. At the time, the group said the boat would be used to intercept and physically block Japanese harpoon vessels.
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Associated Press writers Eric Talmadge in Tokyo, Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, and Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
Obama's "Ice Cream Is Tasty" Resolution Fails In Senate.
How Apple Tablet can Change the World
"UnParenting", like girls soccer, isn't for sissies.
Project Runway Week 2: