I remember when I first came across my moms photo-book from when she visited the USSR. There was a photo of her, Pierce Brosnan, and another cousin of hers I forgot the name of. In the background, the ice-skating bears were playing HOCKEY. Two teams, red and blue, playing HOCKEY. First, I had no idea I was related to Peirce Brosnan in any way. Second, and most importantly, THOSE BEARS ARE PLAYING HOCKEY. I think I actually passed out from how confused and amazed I was.
I can't really think of how to word my argument here correctly but hopefully it will be somewhat understandable. Some people seem to think there's something inherently wrong with trying to tame a wild animal and I'm not sure I can understand this position. Presumably the same arguments against taking a bear out of the wild and expecting it not to maul you would apply to a wolf, but our ancestors did exactly that and now we have domesticated dogs. Now sure, it might be stupid today to take a wolf out and try and domesticate it but clearly people had to do that at some point or else dogs wouldn't exist. So if someone's taking a bear out of the wild, it might be dangerous to do today but maybe someday there could be a breed of bear that is domesticated enough that it would be similar to a dog. Does this make sense? What I'm trying to understand here is if you have a problem with taking a bear out of the wild and think it is inherently wrong, why is that? How is it different from people owning dogs? Is it just because our ancestors did all the dirty work? (Note: obviously I'm not supporting any of the mistreatment that it seems happens in these circuses and other venues; I'm just talking about taking an animal out of the wild in general.)
What makes wild bears so different from wild wolves? They could both pretty easily maul someone to death.
I'm pretty much with the rest of the hunters on this board. Animal cruelty and excessive pain is intolerable. However, I do think some of you are missing a few points here. #1 You are assuming that the bear was being treated poorly. There have been cases in the past where that was true, but this case could be different. There were no details to prove one way or the other. Like a previous poster said, he trained his dogs with praise and affection, who's to say that these bears don't just fucking love to skate on the ice and get food and praise from their trainers? #2 I think a few of you out there have this idea that animals are just like people, except they have 4 legs. You have completely humanized these animals, when I think you need to realize only one of about four things is going on inside their head. Does this hurt? Am I hungry? Do I fight or run? And for the previous poster who mentioned the kid in the zoo getting mauled by a cheetah or leopard, it was a tiger, and Katt Williams explains the incident better than anyone else.
Bears are HUGE! Not NFL Linesman huge but, medium size sedan huge. With teeth & claws. No shit, people haven't domesticated bears, or tigers or any number of fucking things. I imagine back when dogs were domesticated, they had their share of problems. BUT, the un-tame wolf didn't swat someones head off. I don't agree with the idea of zoos anymore. There isn't a need of the knowledge like there used to be. If you want to see an elephant, you type elephant into your computer box and it will tell and show you everything you ever wanted to know. Is there more that we can learn from studying animals? Sure. I'm pretty sure skates aren't gonna be needed.
There has been one recorded instance of a wolf killing a human, and that was an unattended infant. In the last 100 years there's been about 100 cases of death by bear. Wolves are much smaller than bears, and therefore easier to control. They're also more social, so if you get them young enough they can become accustomed to running with their human pack.
Agreed, wolves are certainly a pack animal and obviously better suited to be domesticated. I suppose my point was more that this idea of it being wrong to take animals out of the wild is wrong solely because of the fact that they are "wild animals" doesn't hold water. These other factors that people are pointing out are what prevents easy domestication in bears and whatnot, but it is not simply because they are "wild." That was my main point.
Case in point: fuck with bears and you die. Stephen Colbert and the asshole that died from Grizzly Man should have got the message across in the States. Just look at the shit brewing over in the U.K:
Well while we are at it, why don't we domesticate some white sharks and some makos, how about alligators? We don't because no matter what, they still have the ingrained wild animal instincts in them, same with bears. Sure maybe you have a sow you got when she was little you train her to be docile and you even find someone to artificially inseminate her, her first litter of little domesticated bears is going to throw a switch in her brain and the smart owner who has him some "domesticated" bears is going to get his ass handed to him. If your dog acts up you smack him in the face and he will settle down, if your bear acts up he smacks his lips after he eats you. If you think it is viable be my guest, I would probably start the those little pussy blackbears they are not quite as tough.
Dude you are still missing my main point. But aside from that, you seem to think that I'm implying it's a smart idea to take a bear out of the wild tomorrow and try and make it your pet, which it is certainly not. The same follows with an actual wolf; it would not be docile and still have those "animal instincts" you speak of. The reason dogs work so well with humans is because they have been bred over many many generations to exhibit only the traits we want, such as obedience. You don't think that over a couple thousand years some specie of bear could be selectively bred to be smaller and more docile? Sure they might not be completely safe but neither are dogs. They attack people all the time. I'm not saying that someone should just bring a bear cub into their house tomorrow and try and train it, but at some point if we did have a reason to try and selectively breed them to be domesticable that someone would have to take it out of the wild at some point. Anyway I'm done arguing this point because I really don't care (and it's skewing off-topic); I just thought it was interesting. Edit: To respond to this again: Wikipedia says you are completely wrong. Including a long list of fatal wolf attacks as well as saying bear attacks only killed about three people per year in the 90s, as opposed to 15 killed by dogs in the same period. Seriously, dogs killed more people than bears did. (I know this is because obviously people are around dogs a lot more than bears, but that also is of course why there are so few wolf deaths.)
Sorry, just looked at stats in the USA, and by wild wolves. My bad. Interesting thing: the Ainu people of Japan would capture bear cubs and raise them, and then kill them in a ritual. They would kill them before adulthood, despite part of the ritual being to eat the meat. Your bear attack claim that bear attacks only killed 3 people per year in the 1990s does not contradict my claim of 100 within a century. There was this bit in Guns, Germs, and Steel that basically broke down the different factors that make an animal domesticable. For example, although Cheetahs have been hunting tools for millennia, they've always been captured kittens, because cheetahs simply wouldn't fuck if someone was watching them. This is not the case with wolves. Zebras are frankly smarter than horses, and do things like move their head out of the way if they see a lariat coming their way. There's some other good examples, I suggest you read the book. Having a pet descended from a bear MIGHT be possible, especially if you don't wait for nature to take its course and fuck around with the genome of the critter, but bears are not well-suited for domestication.
All this story is missing is a Please Do Not Feed The Animals sign. Do I think it's wrong? Sure. Would I still go to a monkey knife fight if given the chance? Definitely.
Some people here might remember I work for a game developer, but I don't think I've ever said which one specifically. In any case, my company is the developer behind the Zoo Tycoon series as well as World of Zoo, which we just released. My company actually works very closely with the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, and since I started my job last year, I've learned a ton about the way zoos work and about animals in general. For example, very few zoos are self-reliant. Almost all zoos have an operating budget based entirely on subsidies from the local government and/or large donations from wealthy benefactors. Guest admission and donations from visitors have a very small impact on a zoo's ability to survive. Still, every little bit helps, and as the primary purpose of a zoo is research, conservation, and education, a zoo treating its animals poorly is actually detrimental to its goals. An animal that has not been cared for well will act abnormally and will not breed, which disturbs guests and obstructs both research and conservation efforts. Many animals will only breed if they are absolutely, without-a-doubt comfortable in their exhibit. (They're not like us, they don't fuck to relieve boredom.) Which is another reason why zoos advertise the shit out of any baby animals that are born; not only do visitors love to see babies, but it's a way to assure people that the zoo's animals are being treated well. You still occasionally see animals kept in those unfortunate concrete and steel cages, but that's as much due to lack of funding as anything else. Zoos with outdated facilities simply haven't had the means to replace them yet, and the animals rarely have anywhere else to go. Should a zoo have to close down, like the Franklin Park Zoo is in danger of doing, those animals don't go off to another happy home. A few might be able to fill a need in another zoo somewhere, some of the high-profile endangered species in particular, and of course any giant pandas are shipped back to China, but the majority are euthanized. A zoo closing is a very serious, and very sad event. Which is why zoos don't put fucking ice skates on bears. I didn't think it was possible to get a zoo and a circus mixed up, but somehow you're doing it. While my company's mission statement is to create games based on zoos and animals, the merest mention of a circus is strictly verboten in our games. When I was designing the achievements for World of Zoo, I named one of them "Ringmaster." My boss gave me a very serious talk about that one, and it was immediately changed. Circuses do exist entirely for-profit, and as such all that matters is how the animals behave once they're in the ring. Fear keeps them in line, which is why just about all "X animal snapped and killed someone" stories come out of circuses. Animal attacks in zoos are almost always the result of some retard deciding to jump in the exhibit and swim with the polar bears or some shit. As for zoos as a teaching tool, there absolutely is still a need.. Kids don't pop out of the womb these days with comprehensive knowledge of the entire fucking animal kingdom. Point of fact, our publisher on World of Zoo, THQ, performed a survey of British children's animal knowledge to advertise the game's release. It was meant to be a light-hearted survey. Instead, I'd say the results were terrifying: - One in eight kids could not correctly identify a gorilla. - One in seven didn't know the difference between a lion and a lioness. - 12% couldn't identify a chimpanzee. - 44% couldn't identify a leopard. - Over half didn't know what a crocodile was. This was just for British kids, but I can't imagine American results being that much different. It's no coincidence that almost a quarter of British kids have never been to a zoo. Look at those results and tell me again that there's not a need.
I don't know if they do or don't declaw them, but you do realize that a claw, unlike a nail, grows directly out of the bones in the paw. The way that vets declaw a cat is by literally surgically removing the last bone on the end of each digit. If they were to declaw a bear they'd have to do it the same way, it's how declawing works. No matter the animal its the same process. If I can make the assumption that the Focus is along the lines of animal cruelty here's a video of a guy who does video blogs from his motorcycle as he rides through various cities. In this one he's confronting a guy he witnessed savagely beating his dog in Taiwan.
This is the kind of American indignation that drives me fucking crazy. The Taiwanese guy should not be beating that dog, and came off like a fucking weasel, but it takes a special kind of douchebag to record himself whining into a camera about it, and then expect a police officer to give a shit. It's a shitty thing to do, to beat a dog, but this blogger comes off like he is way to pre-occuppied with getting these other people to accept his moralistic view of how dogs should be treated. I like dogs, but cultures treat different animals with varying levels of deference, and this guy comes off like one of those "dogs are sacred cause I have a border collie that sleeps at the end of my bed" people.
Amazing, considering he's a Scotch-Canadian. I see your point, though. For a guy who's fluent in Chinese, he's not exactly familiar with local custom. Taiwan only outlawed the sale of dog meat for human consumption in 2004, and it's not really enforced from what I understand.
So we're choosing to ignore the fact that the other aboriginal was equally upset with the dog abuser's actions? We're going to selectively ignore the actual opinion of the indigenous individual, and instead pretend that the one getting chastised by the local police is representative of the local custom? And we're going to treat the natives as poor and helpless and in need of our protection from the big bad white man? It's illegal to abuse dogs in Thailand, so he wasn't imposing his "White man will" on the Thai natives, he was imposing Thai law on the Thai natives. Your attitude belies that you believe the natives to be little more than children, unable to defend themselves against the well developed white man, and so you feel the need to defend them against that which you feel they cannot which reveals a deep seeded superiority complex within yourself, and a total lack of respect for the people you're claiming to protect. tl; dr: Go suck a cock.
You're making a mountain out of a fucking mole hill. "Little more than children"? "Deep seated superiority complex"? Where the fuck do you think you can draw that conclusion from this? Did you just print out your psychology degree from the University of Phoenix? I didn't say "white man will" anywhere in my post, but good job reading more into what I wrote in order to construct a straw man argument for yourself. I did not defend the dog beater. I am not commenting on the aboriginal, or the local municipality's view of beating a dog. I am commenting on the annoying tendency of wealthy, white, westerners, to get involved in other people's business (whether it is condo neighbors fighting over common space in a building, or tourists on parade in another country) and then go on a crusade about it in some form of publicly available media. He's reporting a crime, sure, good for him, but his methodology and viewpoint during the process is annoying and reeks of moral relativism. Did the guy accomplish anything? No. Did he admit to the cop that his complaint was pointless? Yes. Did he zoom around on his scooter back to the scene of the crime like a 10 year old calling the principal? Did he make flagrant comments about wanting to ASSAULT A HUMAN BEING and insinuate he would have KILLED ANOTHER PERSON over beating a dog if only there weren't witnesses in the river below? YES. What the fuck is that, if not a real world extension of internet muscles, self righteousness, and projecting his morality onto someone else? To what end? Nothing other than having a video of himself with his panties in a bunch trying to show his internet friends that he stood up for, in principle, a fucking dog. Don't try to make my argument about something you want it to be about, or thought about instead of reading what I actually wrote to just to have something confrontational to say. Argue on the merits of the actual argument.