On the transition from the Silicon to the Tanana Valley, from urban to rural life, and from working in industry to being a full-time student to working in academia. If you see your name or photo on this blog and want it removed, please let me know and I will do so!
We saw a couple of belugas at Sea World when we were down in San Diego. I felt pretty bad for them as their enclosure was big by our standards but miniscule by a whale's standards. The docent I talked to said that they had lived their whole lives in captivity as the Navy used whales for research - they trained them to investigate deep-sea wrecks and other problem areas and they trained them to work with Navy seal divers.
Zoos and the like make me sad. :( But on the other hand, if there is no other way to ensure an endangered species' survival, don't they still contribute something? On the third hand, if the only living examples of a species are all in zoos and other artificial situations, they aren't in the food chain and are already effectively extinct, aren't they? But on the fourth hand, isn't it better to try to preserve what little we have, than not? And on the fifth hand, zoos certainly strive to be much healthier environments than they have in the past.
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We saw a couple of belugas at Sea World when we were down in San Diego. I felt pretty bad for them as their enclosure was big by our standards but miniscule by a whale's standards. The docent I talked to said that they had lived their whole lives in captivity as the Navy used whales for research - they trained them to investigate deep-sea wrecks and other problem areas and they trained them to work with Navy seal divers.
Zoos and the like make me sad. :( But on the other hand, if there is no other way to ensure an endangered species' survival, don't they still contribute something? On the third hand, if the only living examples of a species are all in zoos and other artificial situations, they aren't in the food chain and are already effectively extinct, aren't they? But on the fourth hand, isn't it better to try to preserve what little we have, than not? And on the fifth hand, zoos certainly strive to be much healthier environments than they have in the past.
I don't know. :/
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