By Destiny Diggs

Have you ever thought about how we humans function? We feel strongly about protecting the right of animals, we are against animal cruelty, and we believe that animals should be allowed to be with their families and be happy and live as animals should. We say that, but then we as humans support some of the actions done by other humans; take for example, zoos. We say all animals should be  treated fairly and with dignity but we go to Africa, Brazil, China, Antarctica, and the Middle East and capture  animals to bring them back to the States to put them in cages for the rest of their lives. We take animals out of their natural habitat and make them live in cages were they aren’t allowed to roam free as they please and feed them dead animals from a bucket. Many humans come up to them to take picture and even get a show by watching some animal specialist do tricks. The same goes with aquariums. We take different fish and sea animals, put them in giant tanks, and feed them food out of a bucket.
 
It’s something to think about because we contradict ourselves. We do not allow normal citizens to own certain animals and keep them as pets becuase we say “It’s a wild animal” but we allow places like zoos and aquariums to exist? We call them wild animals, but some people who are wealthy are allowed to keep some of the most dangerous animals in their homes, like lions, tigers, and bears. But when an animal acts like in the wild and feels like they are being threatened or are irritated they may attack the owner and cause serious injuries. You would think this means that they should not be kept as pets, but instead we take that as they are a threat to society and we kill the animal instead of setting it free back into its home. These are natural instincts for some of these animals so they should not be punished for acting like what they are meant to be.

I won’t say that capturing animals or taking them out their home is always a bad thing. I think research is a good reason but I believe that they should be returned to the wild or scientists should study them in their natural habitat. I also think that taking them out and helping them get better if they are injured and returning them.  I noticed that we humans try to respond as quickly as possible when an animal goes endangered; we try to find the reason why it’s endangered, make a law against it, and hope the population numbers go up. If they don’t, we take matters into our own hands and try to save them. But humans are the reasons why some animals are endangered because we kill them off so much they aren’t able to reproduce their numbers. For example, we would kill elephants for their tusk, which contain ivory. We also hunt rhinos, tigers for their fur, pandas, and many more. We talk about how Mother Nature is a beautiful thing and we should take care of it and respect it. Animals are a part of Mother Nature and deserve to be in nature not in cages. They should be able to roam free with others and we should learn to respect them and not claim them as ours. We should be honored to have these creatures in our presence because some of these animal species have been around for thousands of years; some are walking history. We should try to take care of them.