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Samantha Terreault
Ronald Crudele
English Composition
12 November, 2014
Animals in Captivity
Typically when a person is kidnapped and stuck in a room and told what to eat, what to
do, and how to live life it is looked at as cruel and inhuman. However, this is not so much
thought as inhumane when it comes to animal testing and animal entertainment. Recently,
animal captivity has come to the forefront of peoples thoughts when it comes to how animals are
treated for entertainment and testing purposes. Animals in captivity do not have the ability to
experience what life would be like in their natural habitat. However, people do not think animals
know the difference as to whether they are captive or if they are in the wild. Nonetheless,
animals are not senseless and realize they are not in their natural settings.
Many wildlife animals are captured between the age of one and four for easier
transportation. A majority of the public does not understand the process that is taken while
capturing these animals and the effects that is carried with them for the rest of their lives. In the
book Zooland: the institution of captivity, author Irus Braverman studies the history of a gorilla
named Timmy and how he was captured and follows his life journey. During Braverman’s study
for the book, he talks about the capturing and delivering of gorillas. Braverman interviewed
former gorilla hunter Dr. Deets Pickett about his transfer of baby gorillas. Pickett states “I got
eight baby gorillas in Yaoundé, Cameroon –the youngest were grieving for their mothers –half-
dead from cold, respiratory ailments and lack of motherly love … At Douala on the seacoast –all
collapsed with heatstroke and one had died.” Since many of the animals are captured as young
babies at first they don’t seem to notice that they are not in the wild. However, many of these
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animals that are torn from their families, notice that they are put with unfamiliar faces and a
young one understands when they are taken from their mother and a mother knows when a
young one is taken from them. Most of our society does not believe that captivity of these
animals is all that bad because society believes that the knowledge obtained from captivity is
beneficial to mankind, either as a scientific aspect or for our pleasure. However, there are
aspects of animal captivity that need to be addressed.
Many of the animal attraction parks produce offspring from captive animals and
managements believe that child and mother become distracted and do not provide accurate
performance, this results in the park separating the mother and the offspring. Due to separation
of mother and child, animals become depressed and less cooperative. At SeaWorld parks, many
baby Orcas are removed from the mothers and transferred to another park. In the documentary
