Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Exotic Pets?

This article is a little long so I'll summarize the general ideas.

Author Lauren Slater questions the ethics and morals involved with keeping exotic animals as pets. She states in the beginning that this debate is not a black or white issue, but something broad that may have different answers to different circumstances. She also examines the definition of 'exotic' and 'dangerous' animals.

Slater looks at this from many perspectives to gain a wide understanding of the matter. Some exotic pet owners state that the animals simply understand them better than humans do, other keep them as a collection or as a symbol of power/status, and there are even those who keep those animals out of kindness and determination to help endangered species. Slater also looks into the darker side of exotic pets, highlighting an incident that occurred in Ohio in which a man let out more than 50 exotic animals before killing himself. The Ohio police was forced to kill all the escaped animals because they were left running around in public and jumping over cars.

By looking at the issue of exotic animal ownership from many different perspectives, Slater concludes that whether or not owning exotic animals is ethical/moral is not the issue we should be looking into. Instead, we should be more aware of our own actions and responsibilities when it comes to our interactions with the animal kingdom.

The perilous attraction of owning exotic pets

2 comments:

  1. good grief. They killed all the animals?

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    1. Unfortunately yes. They killed 49 out of the 56 exotic animals he owned, the rest were sent to zoos. Some of them were potentially dangerous animals like tigers and bears, so the police didn't take chances.

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