Ethics of Exotic Animals in Captivity

Okay, so welcome to the panel on the ethics of exotic animals in captivity. There'll be three 15, one, two, three, three 15 minute talks and then a discussion because we really want to hear from you. So our first speaker is Dr. Laurie Gruen of Wesleyan University. She's the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University. And I was on her PhD committee, so don't hold that against her. Great. Laurie, where are you? Yeah. Oh, good. Hi, I'm really quite honored to be here and I actually have quite a bit to say but not a lot of time to say it in so I'm just going to jump right in. I just wanted to mention This volume that I published recently, The Ethics of Captivity, it turns out that three of the authors of chapters in the volume are actually here. And I think it's an interesting... Captors in the Volume raise an interesting set of issues, particularly about particular animals and also some of the philosophical or ethical questions. But I use this slide right now because I want to say a little bit about ethics and then a little bit about captivity before I get into some philosophical arguments that I want to present to you. So let's talk a little bit about ethics. And I'm going to just do this very, very quickly. As Mark just said, I'm a philosophy professor and I've... I've studied and taught ethics. My PhD was in ethics, and I've been doing that for probably longer than I want to share with you. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a meeting that included some primate researchers, and it became really vividly clear to me that it's not just my students who think ethics is just something people talk about, that it's not an area of study, that it doesn't have a long history, one of the longest histories of any academic discipline. And so I just want to, and I think... I found that when talking with these primate researchers, that they really just thought that what I was saying was my opinion about things, rather than sort of recognizing that this is an area of research that I've worked on for decades, but more importantly, many, many, many scholars have worked on for thousands of years. I think, too, that because People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is an advocacy organization, has the word ethical in its name, it makes it seem that when you you're talking about ethics and animals, that must mean you are aligned with people for the ethical treatment of animals. And I don't think that's necessarily true. Ethics is really about principles that help guide decisions about right and wrong actions. And one of the things that I often tell my students and people who are interested in thinking about these things is what we're trying to do is come up with right and wrong answers. We haven't maybe reached the right or wrong conclusions yet. We're not in . any way able to say, ah, this is absolutely right and this is absolutely wrong for many, many, many practical questions. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth pursuing ongoing, and this is the next sort of point, arguments which are based on sort of reasons that we might give to try to compel each other to think through what would be right and what would be wrong. It's not just about our opinions. Everyone's entitled to their opinions. Everyone's entitled to their opinions. And that's a great starting point for trying to argue about rightness and wrongness. But it's not the end point. So I just want to make really clear that ethics is fundamentally about talking together and working through arguments to try to make, ultimately, our relationships with one another and with the rest of the natural world better, as I think Mark was saying. So fundamentally, ethics is concerned about how we engage with... the other. And of course there's going to be lots of disagreements about who counts as the other, how much they should count. All of those kinds of arguments are very alive in our discussion of ethics. But I think it's really important to recognize that when we just have opinions about these things and we don't move to an area of argument, we can't actually ever come to agreement because our opinions are ours. We don't need to provide reasons for our opinions. and then we never really can come together to really think about how best to engage with the other. Okay, let me say a little bit about captivity, what I mean by it, how to think about it. One of the things I think is so important in thinking about captivity is that what's happening when we hold a being in captivity is that we're denying that being a variety of goods and frustrating her interests in a variety of ways. Now, sometimes... Thank Those frustrations and denials might be justified, but it's really important to recognize that they are a part of keeping another captive. The other thing I want to highlight about captivity is that although captive situations vary considerably, and I'll show you a particular case in a moment, they all amount to holding another in a condition in which they're confined and controlled, and, importantly, are reliant on those in control to satisfy their basic needs. That is, I think, a really important recognition, and I think, as Mark said a minute ago, we have that recognition with humans in captivity as well as with non-humans in captivity. One of the basic features of captivity is the individuals that are captive are not... free to satisfy their own needs themselves. And I think this is part of where some of us disagree with Ron about the penguins, because part of what makes for a meaningful life for many, not all, I don't want to overgeneralize, and it's hard in 15 minutes to be very specific, but the idea is that part of what makes a life a meaningful life is that one sets one's goals and works to try to satisfy those goals. So one of the things that is deeply frustrating about being captive is that one isn't in the position to satisfy their goals, those goals are often satisfied by those who are keeping the other confined and in control. Okay, so that's what ethics is in two seconds. That's what captivity is in another two seconds. Now, let's turn to thinking about why captivity really does focus our attention on others and what is at stake. One of the really important ethical questions, Mark alluded to it a moment ago, Jessica will speak to this in greater length, is that their freedom is denied. As an ethics professor, as somebody who's interested in thinking about ethics, it's not enough to say their freedom is denied. What we want to try to do is figure out why is the freedom important, what is the value of freedom, are there certain freedoms that are inevitably denied? We all have limitations on what we're free to do. What makes it so that captivity might put us over a line of how much freedom is being denied? And as I said, Jessica's going to focus on that in a few moments. There's an obvious question of suffering, and many of you have spent your entire lives dedicated to thinking hard about how to minimize suffering. Captive animals suffer, obviously, by experiencing physical pain, self-injury. Oftentimes, you know, routine physicals that involve anesthesia, surgery, recovery, all of that can lead to suffering. We've heard all too often, I think, about... animals not actually even recovering from regular physicals under anesthesia. There's also, and I think importantly, psychological suffering. And I think the psychological suffering is one of the things that's not attended to as much as it could be. Light, sound, boredom, frustration, lack of socialization or too much socialization, lack of enrichment, unhealthy relationships with conspecifics, unhealthy relationships with caregivers or keepers. These are all kinds of ways in which the psychological suffering of captives matters. Mark mentioned earlier that he's been working for about 15 years in a prison environment. I've also been working for about 10 years in a maximum security men's prison teaching philosophy there. And one of the things that I've learned and become really sensitive to is the ways in which noise and light and sound can really... really fundamentally alter the well-being of the captive. Really slight things that we might not have thought about in advance. One of the other ways I think that we see... I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this. I'll try. One of the other ways that I think we see psychological suffering is that, what I mentioned before, when animals are under our control, or when humans, for that matter, are under our control, there's a sense in which they lose a way of being themselves. And when you lose a way of being yourselves, that actually impacts maybe not your well-being so much as we normally understand it, but your flourishing. And so one of the ideas that I want to introduce is this notion of flourishing. Flourishing goes beyond the promotion of well-being. Flourishing is what you can achieve when you're able to, again, make your own mistakes and correct them. Set your own goals and decide whether those are actually the goals that you want to satisfy. Flourishing within the philosophical literature, going back to Aristotle actually, is this idea that somehow there's a way of being you, and that can be both species-typical way of being you and a way of being you based on your own personality. And if what we want to do is promote flourishing, this is an important consideration for thinking about... the justification, the ethical justification for any form of captivity. I want to give an example of why it might be important to think about flourishing as opposed to just thinking about well-being. So here's a case in which we have chimpanzees in captivity. I think this is right. Your upper left and lower right are zoo conditions, and the upper left and lower right are sanctuary conditions. These look really good. I mean, I hope you agree with me that these don't look like necessarily like there's something outrageous or problematic. These are captive conditions. That's certainly happening. It seems that even if we can imagine, and this sanctuary here is Chimp Haven, which I think is a pretty... ideal captive environment with habitats and enclosures that promote a great deal of well-being for the animals. And then I think in certain cases what we see here too is that there is a lot of choice in both of these instances as well. But I still think that there's more we can do in terms of promoting their flourishing. And the thing that I want to argue for, and this is actually inspired by some of Ron's idea, although what we're interested in might differ in a certain way, and that is adopting what I call a sanctuary ethos for zoos. So basically turning zoos into sanctuaries. Ron talked a lot, two slides with a lot of different ways that that's going to go. I don't have enough time to go through that. I'm going to try to keep my time to the three minutes I have left, which I believe is right. So basically I want to just say a little bit about what it would mean to make a zoo a sanctuary or to adopt a sanctuary ethos in the zoo. So sanctuary is more than a word. Ethos, of course, is the root of what ethics is. So sanctuary is about a set of attitudes for engaging with the others. Remember, that's what ethics is fundamentally about. So in addition to just thinking about well-being, which is definitely not, it's a part of it. I'm not suggesting we don't pay attention to well-being. Well-being is a part of it, but there's more that needs to be thought about, and this falls under the idea. of flourishing. One thing is we need to recognize that in these relationships with these other animals, particularly other captive animals, we need to develop relationships of respect. Now, respect is the kind of thing that's very difficult. It's tricky in the literature. It's very hard to figure out what it is to ultimately... respect another, there's disagreements. We could have a conversation, and I hope we will, but one of the things that I think... is extraordinarily important is that you don't respect another when you kill them for non-humane reasons, when you kill them for population reasons. That is not an act of respect. So calling an animal, even a surplus animal, and then killing that animal is not an act, I would argue, of respect. In addition, as I think Mark was suggesting as well, when we break up social groups and And we don't allow them to maintain the relationships that they've built on. When we do it when it's not in their own interests, of course there's some animals that obviously don't get along at all, that no need to force them to respect them in those instances. Might be not to have them having to interact with one another on a regular basis. But to respect that they have these relationships, they have these friendships, they have these connections and very complex sometimes relationships. So respecting an animal would mean that you don't transfer an animal to another environment, particularly for breeding purposes. Because when you put an animal into the category of someone who is a breeder that represents a wild population, what you're doing is not respecting them as the being that they are. And finally, I just want to say a little bit about dignity. We haven't really spoken much... about dignity, it's a seriously complicated notion. Some people think I'm a little wacko when I talk about animal dignity, but I think it's important to think about dignity in the case of non-human animals. That's not to say that we put human values onto non-human animals to try to make them dignified for our human society, but what it does mean is allow them, for example, the ability not to be seen if they don't want to be seen, that these are not beings that are there to enter. entertain or amuse us. We don't treat other animals with dignity when we see them in that way. And one of the senses that I think is really important is to think about the ways in which we move beyond well-being and think about how it might be that we could promote other animal flourishing by developing a sanctuary ethic or a sanctuary ethos and try to think harder together about what would constitute respecting other animals and protecting and preserving their dignity. And I'm up out of time. Thank you. Thank you, Lori. I'm sure there's lots that we will discuss at the end of this. So our next speaker is Jessica Pierce. She's a bioethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. And she pulls me to the left. She said I shouldn't say that, but anyway. Jessica. Thank you. Yes, Mark lies. And I apologize for looking at my screen a little bit. I very carefully got my lecture notes out of my bag this morning to look at them and then very carefully left them in the hotel. So my apologies for looking down. I want to start with a quote from Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist. He talks about freedom in nearly everything he writes, and he wrote in his book Rationality and Freedom, it's difficult to think about the excellence or limitations of a society or the rightness or wrongness of some people. social arrangements without invoking in one way or another freedoms of various kinds and their fulfillment and violation in the societies under scrutiny. Sen talks about freedom as what he calls a focal variable. in thinking about human social arrangements that most closely achieve a state in which humans can flourish. And I'd like to take freedom as my focal variable in talking about the ethics of zoos and ethics of captive animals in various venues because I think it helps crystallize some of the problems with zoos and helps identify opportunities for evolution into the future. So, like us, animals value their freedom. How do we know, other than common sense? First of all, the fact that there is an entire literature dedicated to so-called captivity effects should give us... some clue that captivity itself is a problem. The literature has enormous reach from behavioral problems observed in various species held in zoos and other captive venues to evidence from neurobiological and physiological... changes induced by captive conditions to the human psychology literature, including a robust data set on the harms of captivity to human prisoners of war and under conditions of incarceration. Captivity effects include long-term activation of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, changes to immune function, brain morphology, reproductive behaviors, circadian rhythms, and so on. and so on. And then preference testing, which is all the rage in animal welfare science circles these days. So we can elicit information about what animals value and what they want by asking them through experimental setups that offer choice and examine preferences and cognitive biases and so forth. And we can perform the most basic preference test of all, which is simply open the cages and see what happens. The basic moral principle we might draw from the empirical literature that we have on captivity is that it's prima facie unethical to hold animals in captivity because captivity imposes suffering and because it's wrong to impose suffering on sentient beings. And throwing in just a little bit of bioethics lingo here, the phrase prima facie is actually quite... important. What it means, if you're not familiar with it, is at first face, literally in Latin, and it's a tool that bioethicists use to suggest that, you know, moral values are like species. There's a lot of diversity. There are a lot of... of values that compete for our attention and no single value is absolute in all circumstances. So prima facie in a sense leaves the door ajar to extenuating circumstances. where a competing moral value might have a stronger pull. So, for example, animals who are currently in captivity who would perish were we simply to open the cage in them. and let them out. So I see efforts to evolve zoos in the future focusing on our focal variable of freedom as having twin goals. First to identify and reduce freedom inhibitors, both large scale, so maybe cage bars are a large scale freedom inhibitor, and small scale certain conditions of captivity that restrict normal behaviors, movement, and so forth. And then identifying and increasing freedom. increasing what you might call freedom enhancers, those things that we can do to meaningfully increase the freedom of animals. So the language of freedom has already been part of our conversation today. It's part of the welfare vocabulary. It has been for a long time. However, I think we need to think carefully and keep thinking carefully about what we mean when we use the language of freedom. And the five freedoms, I know these are being supplanted perhaps by five domains, but I think the essential core remains the same, and the history of the freedoms as freedoms is important. So just remember for a moment that the freedoms were conceptualized, and Mark made this point, as a reaction to or as offering animals some minimal degree of protection from conditions of captivity. So they're not really about freedom. They're about captivity. It's... It's about reducing where economically feasible and practically feasible the distress felt by animals as we subject them to uncomfortable things. And in fact, freedom is the one thing that the fire freedoms don't offer to animals. And I don't know why the language of freedom was chosen. It seems a bit of a cruel joke on animals, actually. In their early articulation by the Farm Animal Freedom, Farm Animal Welfare Council, it was made abundantly clear that the five freedoms are a sort of pie in the sky ideals and that we work toward them, but we're never actually going to achieve these things. And I think an important question here is why integrate failure into our working model. Businesses don't usually do this. I'm not sure why we should do this in animal welfare either. I think on the positive side, the five freedoms provide a really useful basis for thinking about what animals want and need. As long as we take freedom in a slightly more robust and meaningful way than sometimes happens. So what would a more, sorry, I'm talking at the speed of light so I can get through as much as possible. What would a more robust concept of freedom look like? I'd like to borrow again from Amartya Sen. He uses the phrase well-being freedom, which I really like. And he says, he defines well-being freedom as a person's capability to achieve functionings that he or she has reason to value. So freedom is the real opportunity to pursue well-being. And it's important to make a note here that real, and this is not, this is. sin, not me, that real freedom is differentiated from freedom that might exist on paper or in theory but isn't actually meaningful. For example, you could say women in X society have the freedom to pursue whatever kind of work they want, but these aren't meaningful freedoms if it's a society in which women don't have access to education or birth control. So, some meaningful freedoms where people can actually access well-being. So, how do we build robust freedoms for animals who are in captivity? And I think one way to do this, using, again, freedom as the focal variable for my brief talk, is to... work on including in our vocabulary as much as possible words of choice, control, empowerment, agency, autonomy, self-determination. And I know zoos are actively working on that. working on these things and I think it's exactly the right direction to go. One example of trying to think more robustly about freedoms, taking freedom from hunger as a simple basic example, you know, as you can imagine being simply provided with a meal every day, it's better than being hungry, but it's not really freedom. And there's a lot of evidence from animal studies in various different species that being given a choice between free food and the ability to work for food, animals choose to work for food. The same thing applies to humans. You know, it's people need meaningful work. People don't want a free food. free lunch. It doesn't do people any favors. So, and they also don't want to eat the same thing every day. So one way to think more robustly about the first freedom is not just freedom from hunger, but freedom to actually eat in interesting ways. and interesting things and zoos are a lot of zoos are trying to integrate these food enrichments which I think are a wonderful step in the right direction and solve the the free food problem in a meaningful meaningful way for animals Amartya Sen again, on choice. So, allowing animals a fuller range of choice in their lives. And again, meaningful choice. One example would be allowing animals to choose their own mates. That's hard if you don't have social groupings that are large enough, and it's also hard if you're trying to manipulate breeding. But one way to give more choice would be... That's pretty important to us, choosing our own mate. I wouldn't want to have that choice made for me. We can give animals control by, for example, teaching them to... to accept injections voluntarily. And, you know, you could say, well, an analogy is using prisoners in medical research. They can't really consent to interventions in that context. But, you know, I think some consent, some autonomy is better than none. And I want to skip ahead here really quickly because I want to talk just for my last three minutes on my particular area of passion, which is in... In bioethics, we use the phrase vulnerable populations, populations of people or animals who, for whatever reason, need special protection, and the vulnerable population of particular interest to me are elderly, geriatric, ill, and disabled animals. And I want to just give a plug for the organization that I'm very active with, the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care. One thing that happens for animals as they age... or when they get ill or disabled is that their freedoms are inhibited even more than already. And so one of the things that we can do to really benefit the welfare, well-being of animals is to pay special attention to the freedom needs of the elderly and the ill. Oops, let me go back here. So freedom from pain. Pain is a major freedom inhibitor. And you've probably all had a painful time. episode in your life at one time or another so you know it really it restricts how you feel it restricts how you act how you interact with others and pain is largely treatable by us we have a really good pain management toolbox and we have a strong responsibility to animals in captivity under our care to to take care of physical and psychological pain particularly important to pay attention to pain caused by chronic disease because it's a lot more insidious it's harder to recognize and it's harder to treat. And sometimes we don't even know that animals are suffering from it until necropsy and you're like, oh, whoops, could have done something about that. From the human literature, we also know that the experiential worlds of the elderly often constrict. When you begin to lose your sensory acuity, if you have, if you're hard of hearing or if you have a parent who is hard of hearing, you know how much their worlds can constrict. And loss of mobility, pain, which I just mentioned, compromised quality of life from nausea, from loss of balance. inappetence all of these things are freedom inhibitors and there are things that we can address in captivity quite effectively and a lot of zoos I know are paying attention to these things freedom enhancers in this context might include physical modification modifications to housing, extra attention to potential sources of anxiety. Anxiety is a huge problem for the elderly, not just elderly humans but also elderly animals. And physical therapy to maintain mobility and balance. And then finally, in allowing animals to express a full range of behavioral repertoire, I think one area that we haven't paid enough attention to yet is death-related behaviors. You know, we just, we have expediencies at the end of life that typically involve taking animals out of their enclosures when their quality of life is compromised or reaches a low point. And there isn't a lot of opportunities for animals to, and this is maybe sounds like sentimentalizing, but to mourn or say goodbye or understand loss. But I think it's an area we just don't have, there's not a robust empirical research. set yet on death-related behaviors, but I think it's something we need to be asking about. And, you know, do animals have important needs in this realm? I suspect the answer is yes, and maybe it's an area where we can do more to enhance freedoms and reduce the effects of captivity. Thank you. Thank you. And our last speaker is Cameron Kerr from the Taronga Conservation Society in Australia, and then afterwards we want to hear from you. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. Well, good morning. I'm going to give you a practitioner's perspective on our struggles and the challenges in running a zoo. A zoo organisation, we've got a couple of zoos, and the ethical frameworks that we're working our way through in making those decisions and working in that practical environment. So I guess it's been a long journey and one that's required a lot of thought and it's really stimulating to hear the speakers just before me as we've been tackling a lot of these same thoughts and ideas. And I think one of the things to look at, of course, is to recognise that intrinsically zoos are part of societies. And zoos bring together a very unique set of skills. disciplines I guess, conservation science, education, field programs and recreation and they're unique because they're all on the same campuses and they are all really tightly intertwined. One of the challenges to my colleagues when I first took over the role of CEO was do we really need zoos, where do we add value in society? There's universities and schools and others that do education, there's Jane Goodall Institute that does field work. There's other institutions that are good at research and education and there's theme parks that do that. So why in the 21st century would we even bother with zoos? And I'm sure there's a few people in the room that would be able to answer that for me and say, we don't. But we came to the conclusion that there is a role and it's bringing together those unique sets of skills. We rely on the goodwill of our communities, though, to survive. And contemporary zoos... modern zoos invest really heavily in trying to understand and work on the issues that have exactly been discussed by the presenters before me. Leading expertise in those fields and yet we still it's never enough and it never ever should be enough. We should be on a continuous learning journey but that means of course that ethics is also intrinsically a part of what a contemporary zoo leader needs to consider and think about. So that makes us ask the question, what ought we do? Because I think in ethics, as was said before, you know, there's different definitions for ethics. But underlying that, I guess our conclusion was that it's what ought we do? What sort of decisions should we make in the context as practitioners and circumstances that we're under? So we were compelled to ask ourselves those questions, but we need an ethical framework to do that in. So we've got to answer the questions well. When we've got decisions to make, how can we answer them well? How can we answer them consistently and make consistent judgements? We're an organisation of over 500 people on two different sites over 300 kilometres apart. How do we act in a manner that accords with our core values as an organisation and our principles? So Taronga's mission, the reason for being its raison d'etre, is to secure a shared future. and that word's really important, for wildlife and people. So it's acknowledging that we're going to have to have a future together. So our response to what ought we do means that we've got to consider wildlife as individuals, wildlife as a population, and humans in that. And that's complex, and it's very, very difficult to deal with. And to fully understand how we should act... we first need to also understand the environment that we're working in. And this is not news to anyone. But as someone said a bit earlier, we're actually in the Anthropocene era now, in geological time. That is the era of humans dominating this planet. We acknowledge that. And if you look at the last 80 years and the impact that's had on wildlife and the welfare of wildlife as individuals and as populations, there's some fairly shocking information there. and that's the data. So as our population grows we see wildlife extinction going through the roof. Our 21st century challenge of course is to maintain nature in all its forms and functions and create at the same time an equitable society for people with finite resources. This is getting complex isn't it? So what do contemporary zoos and ethics do? How are we socially responsive to this approach? So at Taronga, we recognise that we've got the public's trust and we value that greatly. So it creates a situation where we need to be really critically evaluating and consistently reflecting on our decisions because the information in our environments changes every year and we all know that and that's why we're here today. We need to have moral awareness. That's probably not something that was on the agenda of zoo leaders 20 years ago. We have to have moral judgment and we have to have ethical behavior as part of our culture when leaders of this room are shaping the staff decisions in their organizations. So we looked at three frameworks, three ethical frameworks. They're all normative, come from normative ethics. And I'm sure everyone here is familiar with them. I'm not going to go through them in detail. But in essence, the way we interpret those three models. is what are the consequences of our actions. So it's the utilitarian model, and it's one that's fairly heavily criticised that is used by zoos. There's the universal principles model, the duties and rights to the individual, the moral rights of the individual. That's been discussed quite a lot this morning already. And then there's virtue ethics, which is, for our organisation, seen as the model that would help us both, help us most in the complex decision-making processes that we work on. Virtue ethics as we see it is the kind, is we need to ask our sort, the sort of questions that they ask, what kind of person or in our case what kind of zoo do we want to be and more importantly what kind of zoo should we be because we don't want to just be where society's attitudes and beliefs are now, we want to be looking to the future. What makes a good zoo for society? and what makes us good leaders in society as cultural institutions, which, whether you like it or not, society sees them as part of that. So given that we're part of the community, this seems really core and relevant for us. And then we apply that decision-making to ensure that each animal in our care has a role to play. Now, this is morally challenging for some. Our animals in our collection... I'm using that word collection because it's a collection of animals. In our collection is one that is involved in conservation recovery programs, they're involved in education programs and they're involved in conservation science. And we believe that all those contribute and given the resources we've got access to and the animals that are in our care, we ought to be doing that and we ought to be working in those spaces given the context of the graphs that we put up earlier and our mission as an organisation. But we must also ensure that the individuals that we manage in those populations promote positive welfare outcomes. That we support biosecurity and biodiversity, so it's not just about the positive. Biosecurity and biodiversity are really, really important fundamentals of flourishing populations and flourishing individuals. And that complexity that was just covered a minute ago, that it's dignified and respectful. So as an organisation, how do we go about that process? Well first we consulted with Dr Tracey Wilcox, the University of New South Wales. She came out. did a series of lectures at Taronga to our management team and to our staff and introduced us to the culture of thinking about ethics. We then went, she guided us and sent us to the St James Ethics Centre, which is the peak body in Sydney, Australia, for ethics. And we took this responsibility very seriously because we want to make the right decisions and we want to be able to improve our decision-making. processes. So we started out with the St. James Ethics Centre model and then we adapted that model for our organisation and quite simply this is a series of steps that we're working through. But I think what's important and is certainly missing from this, because as you can imagine there's a lot of context to this, that it's built on our animal welfare charter and it's built on our dignity and respect charter. So it's got underpinnings there. We need to maximise benefit over harm. Would it make a good general rule? These are the questions that we're asking ourselves in decision making. Does it develop and maintain qualities that ensure Taronga acts in a virtuous way with regard to animal welfare? Does it promote common good related to the purpose? And I've truncated these for today of course, they're a bit longer than this. Could you live with those decisions? Would you be prepared to support them in public? It's a good test. In Australia, we call it, does it pass the pub test? Are they applying our espoused values and principles? For us, that's as defined by the principles of our Animal Welfare Charter. Does it protect the fundamental moral rights of the animals as defined by our Welfare Charter as well? Does it promote the care for animals and Taronga's vision for securing a shared future for wildlife and people? Now these are not perfect by any sense of the imagination, but they do support our conservation approach, and that's a 360 degree approach. Now 360 degree seems to be very popular these days, even Zim's has turned into 360. We did call it 360 a fair while ago, I'll just say that up front. But that is really about working with communities, in habitats and with wildlife. And with our collection, we're working very hard to make sure that we're addressing all three of those with every species on our site. We're not there yet, we've got a long way to go. But it is a holistic approach and it leads to a flourishing society and flourishing populations. And we have power. We also see 1.8 million people a year. We had 40,000 people sleep over at our zoos last year. And believe me, they come out with a different world view than they go in the night before. So we can inspire, we can take leadership, and we can act. And we use that model. A good example of that is Sumatran Tigers. Now, we used our ethical decision-making frameworks for our Sumatran Tiger precinct, and with some difficult decisions to make that. We removed five other species from our zoo just so we could display Sumatran tigers. Now they're a big cat. They're not terribly popular for display amongst some of the circles that I'm mixing with today. But some of the other context is I spend a lot of time in Sumatra. There's under 400 Sumatran tigers left. In fact, after the bushfires of two years ago, probably about 320, but most people like to tell you there's 400. That's a fact. There's about 264 in a managed program, genetically managed program, in wazir zoos around the world. So we've got a really serious conundrum here, an ethical conundrum and a biological conundrum. Oat wee. not breed any of those cats and not display those cats that we have in our zoos or should we be doing something about part of that. So what we ought to do as a decision for Taronga was let's really focus on this crisis. So five other species have been moved out of our zoo. As a result of that we've created an entire site to manage that. This precinct is only about two species, two very important species for Taronga, humans and tigers. So this precinct takes people on an aeroplane ride because we found out through our research, our HR manager actually, she said in a meeting one day when we're dealing the conundrum of palm oil, she said you know I never really got what you guys were carrying on about until I flew over Borneo and then I really got it. So what we did is we said, all right, we're going to take people on a plane over from Australia to Sumatra in eight minutes and show them the beauty of this flourishing country and the devastation that is being caused by the products that we choose to purchase in supermarkets. And that is the commitment of this precinct. Finishes in July, fly over, pay tickets to come in, will you? It's cost me a lot of money. So moving along quickly because I've got two minutes left, we need to listen to our communities and understand. So for Aturonga it's core for us to understand the needs, the interests and the welfare of the animals. As Susan said that's primary consideration if you're running a zoo, a contemporary zoo in the 21st century. We are using the most advanced metrics there is in the 21st century to model and see how we're caring for the welfare of our animals and we can continuously improve that. But it's also critical to ensure that our values are reflecting community values and our approaches need to transcend those of conservation science and welfare science. So we've developed an ethical framework for dignity and respect and I think that's one that's been talked about by others here. I'll whip through these, you can go to our website and have a look at them. The opportunity to display natural behaviours, creating a wonderment for wildlife, absolutely I believe we can impact human behaviour. Support conservation and education objectives. All wildlife contribute to the delivery of conservation, sustainability and animal welfare messaging and we can do that in a way that isn't all about the utilitarian model. ...of saying that it's a means to an ends. We genuinely believe. We want to empower our wildlife and incorporate choice or agency and that's an important word in ethical discussions. We avoid displaying animals as us being superior. I'm out of time so you can read those at your leisure but I think in the end you can see as an organisation, a practicing zoo, We're struggling with and working through the ethical challenges of keeping exotic animals, but we feel we're on a journey and it's an interesting one. It makes my brain hurt on occasions and I look forward to it being exercised and heard a bit more and made a bit fitter over the next three days. Thank you. It's time for questions. Are there cards coming up or? Everybody just loves all the... Other cards? Yeah, so I mean these are I think three very powerful points bringing up a lot of aspects about dignity, flourishing and respect and how important it is to recognize those. And I'm seeing some cards waving. Okay, good. For Jessica, how will we increase and even allow freedom if the human species continues to grow? Do we have obligations to humanely address this? Is that? Who's ever handwriting this is a tourist in mind, but I think I got through it. Simple question there. Yeah. Trying to flummox. I think as Mark suggested, the growth of human numbers is a real problem for animals. How do we address it humanely? I'm not sure if that means how do we control human population humanely. Is that the nature of the question? Yes. I mean, I think in ways that respect meaningful freedoms for people, so shying away from intrusive policies and working on... Creating situations, cultures, societies, values where a limited number of offspring is feasible, economically feasible, culturally preferable, and providing, so we're getting way off animal welfare here, but providing access to... reproductive care for women so an education yes could I um tip in on that one yeah yeah I think it's a really interesting and really important topic and 21st century wildlife concept conservation is actually all about people, not about animals. And there is a lot of work done to show that education of young women to year 10 is the best way to manage population growth. So we've got... We've got a whole lot of socio-economic prisoners out there and their welfare is much worse than most of the animals in my zoo. It's a bit provocative. I think that's a really good starting point to talk about a finite planet. We're talking about ethics in this session and the ethics of the way the socio-economic divide that we're seeing around the world, we're seeing hugely grow in Australia, unfortunately, as it is in the US. These are really powerful questions that have a big impact on wildlife conservation. This is for Cameron, but everybody is. I mean, I think it's fine if people want to pipe in from the audience. So it says, you discussed visitors' wonderment and his belief that... We can impact human behaviour. What empirical evidence is there that having animals on display can impact behaviour and improve conservation? Yeah. Look, this is a question that's thrown to zoos all the time. And there is a number of studies now. People like to go back to a couple of old research papers from the 80s and 90s where they showed that there was no evidence of any impacts of behaviour change. It's not easy. And I think as an industry, we're learning better how to research that topic. But there is evidence out there. There's postdocs that have been done through Monash Uni in Australia and other places to show that there is research out there, that there has been impacts. But I think, you know, we're not going to have a magic bullet. bullet. Zoos aren't going to have a magic bullet. We've got to work in a society and be part of a society that is changing behaviour to more sustainable behaviours, changing people's views to more sustainable behaviours. And if our councils and our governments are taking leadership and zoos are a really important part of that process, organisations like WWF, our school teachers and others are all on message, then of course there's behaviour change. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as marketing. Marketers wouldn't exist if we didn't believe as humans we could change behaviour. I just want to suggest that there's a couple of things here that we're thinking about, and this gets back to this overall ethos change that I'm sort of advocating. There's ways of... I mean, this idea of taking zoo visitors on this flight to Sumatra to see. I think there's ways of changing people's attitudes without keeping animals captive. as well. And so tying these things together, and now I'm just being very pragmatic, tying these things together seems like an old framework. If we thought about zoos more as sanctuaries, the justificatory arguments that we provided wouldn't entail finding data about the way seeing captive animals changes people's attitudes, because those are very, they vary. But the experience, if it's the 3D adventure, if it's the whatever it might be, be. That shift, I think, could be really very helpful. And, yeah, one additional point, just coming back to something that... Ron said in his talk is, you know, zoos are not, they don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in a broader number, a diverse number of different cultural settings. There are some cultural practices that are overlapping with sort of what's happening in zoos. And Ron mentioned the keeping of exotic animals as pets. And I think one of the things that zoos can do to... to help people understand what captivity means for animals and make meaningful changes is to help educate people about keeping exotics in the home environment and why that's extremely unsuitable. So a huge sort of advocacy component for zoos and working with other venues in which animals are used within human cultures and changing the way people... see animals and interact with animals in that setting I think could have a tremendous impact on attitudes toward conservation and wildlife and so forth. Well in the interest of time of course I've got three questions here each could be a meeting so I'm just going to read them to you because I think these discussions this morning have raised a lot of really important issues and feel free to talk to people over lunch. One is we've heard a lot about freedom, agency, and the importance of the full range of natural behaviors, but you've also suggested that contraception and breeding control are necessary, and this removes the opportunity for maternal and social behaviors. How do you reconcile these opposing paradigms? It's a good question. I personally don't think that they're opposing, but we'll... We'll have to talk about that. Here's another one. Both well, I'd love to go on all morning, but there's another panel, and I've been told we have 42 and a half seconds. Here we go. Both ethics for the individual and for the collective were mentioned. If and when these conflict, how can a solution be sought? Does one trump the other? It's a really good question. I mean, and I will say that the The book Jessica and I wrote, The Animal's Agenda, does approach that because you have to be concerned not only with individuals but also with what this question calls the collective. So it's a good one. The last is dignity, agency, and autonomy and freedom are human constructs. How do we know animals understand these? Is it just ethical to give others these things even if they do not understand them? How can we know how much they value these things? You know, once again, I mean, Jessica mentioned this about preference tests, and there's just... a lot of research being done on the cognitive, moral, and emotional lives of animals that show that they do have desires and needs and wants. And once again, I personally would just return to the fact that we're here because if we If everything was great, then we wouldn't be here. So it's not a criticism to say this. It's more to say that there's always more that we can do, okay? Will that curve ever end? Who knows? I think it's just going to always asymptote that we're going to want to do more and more because, as I said before, that a better life is not necessarily a good life. And I always use dogs as an example. I always ask, would you do it? do it to a dog and people go, God, no, I would never do that. Well, why would you do these things to other sentient beings? So anyway, thank you. And I'm sure we will have lively discussions.

And I was on her PhD committee, so don't hold that against her. Great. Laurie, where are you?

Yeah. Oh, good. Hi, I'm really quite honored to be here and I actually have quite a bit to say but not a lot of time to say it in so I'm just going to jump right in.

I just wanted to mention This volume that I published recently, The Ethics of Captivity, it turns out that three of the authors of chapters in the volume are actually here. And I think it's an interesting... Captors in the Volume raise an interesting set of issues, particularly about particular animals and also some of the philosophical or ethical questions. But I use this slide right now because I want to say a little bit about ethics and then a little bit about captivity before I get into some philosophical arguments that I want to present to you.

So let's talk a little bit about ethics. And I'm going to just do this very, very quickly. As Mark just said, I'm a philosophy professor and I've...

I've studied and taught ethics. My PhD was in ethics, and I've been doing that for probably longer than I want to share with you. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a meeting that included some primate researchers, and it became really vividly clear to me that it's not just my students who think ethics is just something people talk about, that it's not an area of study, that it doesn't have a long history, one of the longest histories of any academic discipline. And so I just want to, and I think...

I found that when talking with these primate researchers, that they really just thought that what I was saying was my opinion about things, rather than sort of recognizing that this is an area of research that I've worked on for decades, but more importantly, many, many, many scholars have worked on for thousands of years. I think, too, that because People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which is an advocacy organization, has the word ethical in its name, it makes it seem that when you you're talking about ethics and animals, that must mean you are aligned with people for the ethical treatment of animals. And I don't think that's necessarily true. Ethics is really about principles that help guide decisions about right and wrong actions. And one of the things that I often tell my students and people who are interested in thinking about these things is what we're trying to do is come up with right and wrong answers.

We haven't maybe reached the right or wrong conclusions yet. We're not in . any way able to say, ah, this is absolutely right and this is absolutely wrong for many, many, many practical questions.

But that doesn't mean it isn't worth pursuing ongoing, and this is the next sort of point, arguments which are based on sort of reasons that we might give to try to compel each other to think through what would be right and what would be wrong. It's not just about our opinions. Everyone's entitled to their opinions. Everyone's entitled to their opinions. And that's a great starting point for trying to argue about rightness and wrongness.

But it's not the end point. So I just want to make really clear that ethics is fundamentally about talking together and working through arguments to try to make, ultimately, our relationships with one another and with the rest of the natural world better, as I think Mark was saying. So fundamentally, ethics is concerned about how we engage with... the other.

And of course there's going to be lots of disagreements about who counts as the other, how much they should count. All of those kinds of arguments are very alive in our discussion of ethics. But I think it's really important to recognize that when we just have opinions about these things and we don't move to an area of argument, we can't actually ever come to agreement because our opinions are ours. We don't need to provide reasons for our opinions. and then we never really can come together to really think about how best to engage with the other.

Okay, let me say a little bit about captivity, what I mean by it, how to think about it. One of the things I think is so important in thinking about captivity is that what's happening when we hold a being in captivity is that we're denying that being a variety of goods and frustrating her interests in a variety of ways. Now, sometimes... Thank Those frustrations and denials might be justified, but it's really important to recognize that they are a part of keeping another captive.

The other thing I want to highlight about captivity is that although captive situations vary considerably, and I'll show you a particular case in a moment, they all amount to holding another in a condition in which they're confined and controlled, and, importantly, are reliant on those in control to satisfy their basic needs. That is, I think, a really important recognition, and I think, as Mark said a minute ago, we have that recognition with humans in captivity as well as with non-humans in captivity. One of the basic features of captivity is the individuals that are captive are not... free to satisfy their own needs themselves.

And I think this is part of where some of us disagree with Ron about the penguins, because part of what makes for a meaningful life for many, not all, I don't want to overgeneralize, and it's hard in 15 minutes to be very specific, but the idea is that part of what makes a life a meaningful life is that one sets one's goals and works to try to satisfy those goals. So one of the things that is deeply frustrating about being captive is that one isn't in the position to satisfy their goals, those goals are often satisfied by those who are keeping the other confined and in control. Okay, so that's what ethics is in two seconds.

That's what captivity is in another two seconds. Now, let's turn to thinking about why captivity really does focus our attention on others and what is at stake. One of the really important ethical questions, Mark alluded to it a moment ago, Jessica will speak to this in greater length, is that their freedom is denied. As an ethics professor, as somebody who's interested in thinking about ethics, it's not enough to say their freedom is denied. What we want to try to do is figure out why is the freedom important, what is the value of freedom, are there certain freedoms that are inevitably denied?

We all have limitations on what we're free to do. What makes it so that captivity might put us over a line of how much freedom is being denied? And as I said, Jessica's going to focus on that in a few moments. There's an obvious question of suffering, and many of you have spent your entire lives dedicated to thinking hard about how to minimize suffering.

Captive animals suffer, obviously, by experiencing physical pain, self-injury. Oftentimes, you know, routine physicals that involve anesthesia, surgery, recovery, all of that can lead to suffering. We've heard all too often, I think, about... animals not actually even recovering from regular physicals under anesthesia. There's also, and I think importantly, psychological suffering.

And I think the psychological suffering is one of the things that's not attended to as much as it could be. Light, sound, boredom, frustration, lack of socialization or too much socialization, lack of enrichment, unhealthy relationships with conspecifics, unhealthy relationships with caregivers or keepers. These are all kinds of ways in which the psychological suffering of captives matters.

Mark mentioned earlier that he's been working for about 15 years in a prison environment. I've also been working for about 10 years in a maximum security men's prison teaching philosophy there. And one of the things that I've learned and become really sensitive to is the ways in which noise and light and sound can really...

really fundamentally alter the well-being of the captive. Really slight things that we might not have thought about in advance. One of the other ways I think that we see... I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this. I'll try.

One of the other ways that I think we see psychological suffering is that, what I mentioned before, when animals are under our control, or when humans, for that matter, are under our control, there's a sense in which they lose a way of being themselves. And when you lose a way of being yourselves, that actually impacts maybe not your well-being so much as we normally understand it, but your flourishing. And so one of the ideas that I want to introduce is this notion of flourishing.

Flourishing goes beyond the promotion of well-being. Flourishing is what you can achieve when you're able to, again, make your own mistakes and correct them. Set your own goals and decide whether those are actually the goals that you want to satisfy.

Flourishing within the philosophical literature, going back to Aristotle actually, is this idea that somehow there's a way of being you, and that can be both species-typical way of being you and a way of being you based on your own personality. And if what we want to do is promote flourishing, this is an important consideration for thinking about... the justification, the ethical justification for any form of captivity. I want to give an example of why it might be important to think about flourishing as opposed to just thinking about well-being. So here's a case in which we have chimpanzees in captivity.

I think this is right. Your upper left and lower right are zoo conditions, and the upper left and lower right are sanctuary conditions. These look really good.

I mean, I hope you agree with me that these don't look like necessarily like there's something outrageous or problematic. These are captive conditions. That's certainly happening.

It seems that even if we can imagine, and this sanctuary here is Chimp Haven, which I think is a pretty... ideal captive environment with habitats and enclosures that promote a great deal of well-being for the animals. And then I think in certain cases what we see here too is that there is a lot of choice in both of these instances as well. But I still think that there's more we can do in terms of promoting their flourishing.

And the thing that I want to argue for, and this is actually inspired by some of Ron's idea, although what we're interested in might differ in a certain way, and that is adopting what I call a sanctuary ethos for zoos. So basically turning zoos into sanctuaries. Ron talked a lot, two slides with a lot of different ways that that's going to go.

I don't have enough time to go through that. I'm going to try to keep my time to the three minutes I have left, which I believe is right. So basically I want to just say a little bit about what it would mean to make a zoo a sanctuary or to adopt a sanctuary ethos in the zoo.

So sanctuary is more than a word. Ethos, of course, is the root of what ethics is. So sanctuary is about a set of attitudes for engaging with the others. Remember, that's what ethics is fundamentally about.

So in addition to just thinking about well-being, which is definitely not, it's a part of it. I'm not suggesting we don't pay attention to well-being. Well-being is a part of it, but there's more that needs to be thought about, and this falls under the idea. of flourishing.

One thing is we need to recognize that in these relationships with these other animals, particularly other captive animals, we need to develop relationships of respect. Now, respect is the kind of thing that's very difficult. It's tricky in the literature.

It's very hard to figure out what it is to ultimately... respect another, there's disagreements. We could have a conversation, and I hope we will, but one of the things that I think...

is extraordinarily important is that you don't respect another when you kill them for non-humane reasons, when you kill them for population reasons. That is not an act of respect. So calling an animal, even a surplus animal, and then killing that animal is not an act, I would argue, of respect. In addition, as I think Mark was suggesting as well, when we break up social groups and And we don't allow them to maintain the relationships that they've built on. When we do it when it's not in their own interests, of course there's some animals that obviously don't get along at all, that no need to force them to respect them in those instances.

Might be not to have them having to interact with one another on a regular basis. But to respect that they have these relationships, they have these friendships, they have these connections and very complex sometimes relationships. So respecting an animal would mean that you don't transfer an animal to another environment, particularly for breeding purposes.

Because when you put an animal into the category of someone who is a breeder that represents a wild population, what you're doing is not respecting them as the being that they are. And finally, I just want to say a little bit about dignity. We haven't really spoken much...

about dignity, it's a seriously complicated notion. Some people think I'm a little wacko when I talk about animal dignity, but I think it's important to think about dignity in the case of non-human animals. That's not to say that we put human values onto non-human animals to try to make them dignified for our human society, but what it does mean is allow them, for example, the ability not to be seen if they don't want to be seen, that these are not beings that are there to enter.

entertain or amuse us. We don't treat other animals with dignity when we see them in that way. And one of the senses that I think is really important is to think about the ways in which we move beyond well-being and think about how it might be that we could promote other animal flourishing by developing a sanctuary ethic or a sanctuary ethos and try to think harder together about what would constitute respecting other animals and protecting and preserving their dignity.

And I'm up out of time. Thank you. Thank you, Lori.

I'm sure there's lots that we will discuss at the end of this. So our next speaker is Jessica Pierce. She's a bioethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

And she pulls me to the left. She said I shouldn't say that, but anyway. Jessica. Thank you.

Yes, Mark lies. And I apologize for looking at my screen a little bit. I very carefully got my lecture notes out of my bag this morning to look at them and then very carefully left them in the hotel. So my apologies for looking down. I want to start with a quote from Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist.

He talks about freedom in nearly everything he writes, and he wrote in his book Rationality and Freedom, it's difficult to think about the excellence or limitations of a society or the rightness or wrongness of some people. social arrangements without invoking in one way or another freedoms of various kinds and their fulfillment and violation in the societies under scrutiny. Sen talks about freedom as what he calls a focal variable.

in thinking about human social arrangements that most closely achieve a state in which humans can flourish. And I'd like to take freedom as my focal variable in talking about the ethics of zoos and ethics of captive animals in various venues because I think it helps crystallize some of the problems with zoos and helps identify opportunities for evolution into the future. So, like us, animals value their freedom. How do we know, other than common sense? First of all, the fact that there is an entire literature dedicated to so-called captivity effects should give us...

some clue that captivity itself is a problem. The literature has enormous reach from behavioral problems observed in various species held in zoos and other captive venues to evidence from neurobiological and physiological... changes induced by captive conditions to the human psychology literature, including a robust data set on the harms of captivity to human prisoners of war and under conditions of incarceration.

Captivity effects include long-term activation of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, changes to immune function, brain morphology, reproductive behaviors, circadian rhythms, and so on. and so on. And then preference testing, which is all the rage in animal welfare science circles these days.

So we can elicit information about what animals value and what they want by asking them through experimental setups that offer choice and examine preferences and cognitive biases and so forth. And we can perform the most basic preference test of all, which is simply open the cages and see what happens. The basic moral principle we might draw from the empirical literature that we have on captivity is that it's prima facie unethical to hold animals in captivity because captivity imposes suffering and because it's wrong to impose suffering on sentient beings.

And throwing in just a little bit of bioethics lingo here, the phrase prima facie is actually quite... important. What it means, if you're not familiar with it, is at first face, literally in Latin, and it's a tool that bioethicists use to suggest that, you know, moral values are like species. There's a lot of diversity.

There are a lot of... of values that compete for our attention and no single value is absolute in all circumstances. So prima facie in a sense leaves the door ajar to extenuating circumstances.

where a competing moral value might have a stronger pull. So, for example, animals who are currently in captivity who would perish were we simply to open the cage in them. and let them out.

So I see efforts to evolve zoos in the future focusing on our focal variable of freedom as having twin goals. First to identify and reduce freedom inhibitors, both large scale, so maybe cage bars are a large scale freedom inhibitor, and small scale certain conditions of captivity that restrict normal behaviors, movement, and so forth. And then identifying and increasing freedom.

increasing what you might call freedom enhancers, those things that we can do to meaningfully increase the freedom of animals. So the language of freedom has already been part of our conversation today. It's part of the welfare vocabulary. It has been for a long time.

However, I think we need to think carefully and keep thinking carefully about what we mean when we use the language of freedom. And the five freedoms, I know these are being supplanted perhaps by five domains, but I think the essential core remains the same, and the history of the freedoms as freedoms is important. So just remember for a moment that the freedoms were conceptualized, and Mark made this point, as a reaction to or as offering animals some minimal degree of protection from conditions of captivity.

So they're not really about freedom. They're about captivity. It's... It's about reducing where economically feasible and practically feasible the distress felt by animals as we subject them to uncomfortable things.

And in fact, freedom is the one thing that the fire freedoms don't offer to animals. And I don't know why the language of freedom was chosen. It seems a bit of a cruel joke on animals, actually. In their early articulation by the Farm Animal Freedom, Farm Animal Welfare Council, it was made abundantly clear that the five freedoms are a sort of pie in the sky ideals and that we work toward them, but we're never actually going to achieve these things.

And I think an important question here is why integrate failure into our working model. Businesses don't usually do this. I'm not sure why we should do this in animal welfare either.

I think on the positive side, the five freedoms provide a really useful basis for thinking about what animals want and need. As long as we take freedom in a slightly more robust and meaningful way than sometimes happens. So what would a more, sorry, I'm talking at the speed of light so I can get through as much as possible.

What would a more robust concept of freedom look like? I'd like to borrow again from Amartya Sen. He uses the phrase well-being freedom, which I really like. And he says, he defines well-being freedom as a person's capability to achieve functionings that he or she has reason to value.

So freedom is the real opportunity to pursue well-being. And it's important to make a note here that real, and this is not, this is. sin, not me, that real freedom is differentiated from freedom that might exist on paper or in theory but isn't actually meaningful. For example, you could say women in X society have the freedom to pursue whatever kind of work they want, but these aren't meaningful freedoms if it's a society in which women don't have access to education or birth control.

So, some meaningful freedoms where people can actually access well-being. So, how do we build robust freedoms for animals who are in captivity? And I think one way to do this, using, again, freedom as the focal variable for my brief talk, is to... work on including in our vocabulary as much as possible words of choice, control, empowerment, agency, autonomy, self-determination.

And I know zoos are actively working on that. working on these things and I think it's exactly the right direction to go. One example of trying to think more robustly about freedoms, taking freedom from hunger as a simple basic example, you know, as you can imagine being simply provided with a meal every day, it's better than being hungry, but it's not really freedom. And there's a lot of evidence from animal studies in various different species that being given a choice between free food and the ability to work for food, animals choose to work for food.

The same thing applies to humans. You know, it's people need meaningful work. People don't want a free food. free lunch. It doesn't do people any favors.

So, and they also don't want to eat the same thing every day. So one way to think more robustly about the first freedom is not just freedom from hunger, but freedom to actually eat in interesting ways. and interesting things and zoos are a lot of zoos are trying to integrate these food enrichments which I think are a wonderful step in the right direction and solve the the free food problem in a meaningful meaningful way for animals Amartya Sen again, on choice. So, allowing animals a fuller range of choice in their lives.

And again, meaningful choice. One example would be allowing animals to choose their own mates. That's hard if you don't have social groupings that are large enough, and it's also hard if you're trying to manipulate breeding.

But one way to give more choice would be... That's pretty important to us, choosing our own mate. I wouldn't want to have that choice made for me.

We can give animals control by, for example, teaching them to... to accept injections voluntarily. And, you know, you could say, well, an analogy is using prisoners in medical research. They can't really consent to interventions in that context. But, you know, I think some consent, some autonomy is better than none.

And I want to skip ahead here really quickly because I want to talk just for my last three minutes on my particular area of passion, which is in... In bioethics, we use the phrase vulnerable populations, populations of people or animals who, for whatever reason, need special protection, and the vulnerable population of particular interest to me are elderly, geriatric, ill, and disabled animals. And I want to just give a plug for the organization that I'm very active with, the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care.

One thing that happens for animals as they age... or when they get ill or disabled is that their freedoms are inhibited even more than already. And so one of the things that we can do to really benefit the welfare, well-being of animals is to pay special attention to the freedom needs of the elderly and the ill.

Oops, let me go back here. So freedom from pain. Pain is a major freedom inhibitor.

And you've probably all had a painful time. episode in your life at one time or another so you know it really it restricts how you feel it restricts how you act how you interact with others and pain is largely treatable by us we have a really good pain management toolbox and we have a strong responsibility to animals in captivity under our care to to take care of physical and psychological pain particularly important to pay attention to pain caused by chronic disease because it's a lot more insidious it's harder to recognize and it's harder to treat. And sometimes we don't even know that animals are suffering from it until necropsy and you're like, oh, whoops, could have done something about that.

From the human literature, we also know that the experiential worlds of the elderly often constrict. When you begin to lose your sensory acuity, if you have, if you're hard of hearing or if you have a parent who is hard of hearing, you know how much their worlds can constrict. And loss of mobility, pain, which I just mentioned, compromised quality of life from nausea, from loss of balance.

inappetence all of these things are freedom inhibitors and there are things that we can address in captivity quite effectively and a lot of zoos I know are paying attention to these things freedom enhancers in this context might include physical modification modifications to housing, extra attention to potential sources of anxiety. Anxiety is a huge problem for the elderly, not just elderly humans but also elderly animals. And physical therapy to maintain mobility and balance.

And then finally, in allowing animals to express a full range of behavioral repertoire, I think one area that we haven't paid enough attention to yet is death-related behaviors. You know, we just, we have expediencies at the end of life that typically involve taking animals out of their enclosures when their quality of life is compromised or reaches a low point. And there isn't a lot of opportunities for animals to, and this is maybe sounds like sentimentalizing, but to mourn or say goodbye or understand loss. But I think it's an area we just don't have, there's not a robust empirical research. set yet on death-related behaviors, but I think it's something we need to be asking about.

And, you know, do animals have important needs in this realm? I suspect the answer is yes, and maybe it's an area where we can do more to enhance freedoms and reduce the effects of captivity. Thank you.

Thank you. And our last speaker is Cameron Kerr from the Taronga Conservation Society in Australia, and then afterwards we want to hear from you. Thank you.

Thanks, Mark. Well, good morning. I'm going to give you a practitioner's perspective on our struggles and the challenges in running a zoo.

A zoo organisation, we've got a couple of zoos, and the ethical frameworks that we're working our way through in making those decisions and working in that practical environment. So I guess it's been a long journey and one that's required a lot of thought and it's really stimulating to hear the speakers just before me as we've been tackling a lot of these same thoughts and ideas. And I think one of the things to look at, of course, is to recognise that intrinsically zoos are part of societies.

And zoos bring together a very unique set of skills. disciplines I guess, conservation science, education, field programs and recreation and they're unique because they're all on the same campuses and they are all really tightly intertwined. One of the challenges to my colleagues when I first took over the role of CEO was do we really need zoos, where do we add value in society? There's universities and schools and others that do education, there's Jane Goodall Institute that does field work.

There's other institutions that are good at research and education and there's theme parks that do that. So why in the 21st century would we even bother with zoos? And I'm sure there's a few people in the room that would be able to answer that for me and say, we don't. But we came to the conclusion that there is a role and it's bringing together those unique sets of skills.

We rely on the goodwill of our communities, though, to survive. And contemporary zoos... modern zoos invest really heavily in trying to understand and work on the issues that have exactly been discussed by the presenters before me. Leading expertise in those fields and yet we still it's never enough and it never ever should be enough. We should be on a continuous learning journey but that means of course that ethics is also intrinsically a part of what a contemporary zoo leader needs to consider and think about.

So that makes us ask the question, what ought we do? Because I think in ethics, as was said before, you know, there's different definitions for ethics. But underlying that, I guess our conclusion was that it's what ought we do?

What sort of decisions should we make in the context as practitioners and circumstances that we're under? So we were compelled to ask ourselves those questions, but we need an ethical framework to do that in. So we've got to answer the questions well. When we've got decisions to make, how can we answer them well?

How can we answer them consistently and make consistent judgements? We're an organisation of over 500 people on two different sites over 300 kilometres apart. How do we act in a manner that accords with our core values as an organisation and our principles?

So Taronga's mission, the reason for being its raison d'etre, is to secure a shared future. and that word's really important, for wildlife and people. So it's acknowledging that we're going to have to have a future together. So our response to what ought we do means that we've got to consider wildlife as individuals, wildlife as a population, and humans in that.

And that's complex, and it's very, very difficult to deal with. And to fully understand how we should act... we first need to also understand the environment that we're working in.

And this is not news to anyone. But as someone said a bit earlier, we're actually in the Anthropocene era now, in geological time. That is the era of humans dominating this planet.

We acknowledge that. And if you look at the last 80 years and the impact that's had on wildlife and the welfare of wildlife as individuals and as populations, there's some fairly shocking information there. and that's the data. So as our population grows we see wildlife extinction going through the roof. Our 21st century challenge of course is to maintain nature in all its forms and functions and create at the same time an equitable society for people with finite resources.

This is getting complex isn't it? So what do contemporary zoos and ethics do? How are we socially responsive to this approach? So at Taronga, we recognise that we've got the public's trust and we value that greatly.

So it creates a situation where we need to be really critically evaluating and consistently reflecting on our decisions because the information in our environments changes every year and we all know that and that's why we're here today. We need to have moral awareness. That's probably not something that was on the agenda of zoo leaders 20 years ago.

We have to have moral judgment and we have to have ethical behavior as part of our culture when leaders of this room are shaping the staff decisions in their organizations. So we looked at three frameworks, three ethical frameworks. They're all normative, come from normative ethics. And I'm sure everyone here is familiar with them.

I'm not going to go through them in detail. But in essence, the way we interpret those three models. is what are the consequences of our actions. So it's the utilitarian model, and it's one that's fairly heavily criticised that is used by zoos.

There's the universal principles model, the duties and rights to the individual, the moral rights of the individual. That's been discussed quite a lot this morning already. And then there's virtue ethics, which is, for our organisation, seen as the model that would help us both, help us most in the complex decision-making processes that we work on.

Virtue ethics as we see it is the kind, is we need to ask our sort, the sort of questions that they ask, what kind of person or in our case what kind of zoo do we want to be and more importantly what kind of zoo should we be because we don't want to just be where society's attitudes and beliefs are now, we want to be looking to the future. What makes a good zoo for society? and what makes us good leaders in society as cultural institutions, which, whether you like it or not, society sees them as part of that. So given that we're part of the community, this seems really core and relevant for us. And then we apply that decision-making to ensure that each animal in our care has a role to play.

Now, this is morally challenging for some. Our animals in our collection... I'm using that word collection because it's a collection of animals.

In our collection is one that is involved in conservation recovery programs, they're involved in education programs and they're involved in conservation science. And we believe that all those contribute and given the resources we've got access to and the animals that are in our care, we ought to be doing that and we ought to be working in those spaces given the context of the graphs that we put up earlier and our mission as an organisation. But we must also ensure that the individuals that we manage in those populations promote positive welfare outcomes. That we support biosecurity and biodiversity, so it's not just about the positive.

Biosecurity and biodiversity are really, really important fundamentals of flourishing populations and flourishing individuals. And that complexity that was just covered a minute ago, that it's dignified and respectful. So as an organisation, how do we go about that process?

Well first we consulted with Dr Tracey Wilcox, the University of New South Wales. She came out. did a series of lectures at Taronga to our management team and to our staff and introduced us to the culture of thinking about ethics. We then went, she guided us and sent us to the St James Ethics Centre, which is the peak body in Sydney, Australia, for ethics.

And we took this responsibility very seriously because we want to make the right decisions and we want to be able to improve our decision-making. processes. So we started out with the St. James Ethics Centre model and then we adapted that model for our organisation and quite simply this is a series of steps that we're working through. But I think what's important and is certainly missing from this, because as you can imagine there's a lot of context to this, that it's built on our animal welfare charter and it's built on our dignity and respect charter.

So it's got underpinnings there. We need to maximise benefit over harm. Would it make a good general rule? These are the questions that we're asking ourselves in decision making. Does it develop and maintain qualities that ensure Taronga acts in a virtuous way with regard to animal welfare?

Does it promote common good related to the purpose? And I've truncated these for today of course, they're a bit longer than this. Could you live with those decisions? Would you be prepared to support them in public?

It's a good test. In Australia, we call it, does it pass the pub test? Are they applying our espoused values and principles? For us, that's as defined by the principles of our Animal Welfare Charter. Does it protect the fundamental moral rights of the animals as defined by our Welfare Charter as well?

Does it promote the care for animals and Taronga's vision for securing a shared future for wildlife and people? Now these are not perfect by any sense of the imagination, but they do support our conservation approach, and that's a 360 degree approach. Now 360 degree seems to be very popular these days, even Zim's has turned into 360. We did call it 360 a fair while ago, I'll just say that up front.

But that is really about working with communities, in habitats and with wildlife. And with our collection, we're working very hard to make sure that we're addressing all three of those with every species on our site. We're not there yet, we've got a long way to go.

But it is a holistic approach and it leads to a flourishing society and flourishing populations. And we have power. We also see 1.8 million people a year. We had 40,000 people sleep over at our zoos last year.

And believe me, they come out with a different world view than they go in the night before. So we can inspire, we can take leadership, and we can act. And we use that model.

A good example of that is Sumatran Tigers. Now, we used our ethical decision-making frameworks for our Sumatran Tiger precinct, and with some difficult decisions to make that. We removed five other species from our zoo just so we could display Sumatran tigers.

Now they're a big cat. They're not terribly popular for display amongst some of the circles that I'm mixing with today. But some of the other context is I spend a lot of time in Sumatra.

There's under 400 Sumatran tigers left. In fact, after the bushfires of two years ago, probably about 320, but most people like to tell you there's 400. That's a fact. There's about 264 in a managed program, genetically managed program, in wazir zoos around the world. So we've got a really serious conundrum here, an ethical conundrum and a biological conundrum. Oat wee.

not breed any of those cats and not display those cats that we have in our zoos or should we be doing something about part of that. So what we ought to do as a decision for Taronga was let's really focus on this crisis. So five other species have been moved out of our zoo. As a result of that we've created an entire site to manage that.

This precinct is only about two species, two very important species for Taronga, humans and tigers. So this precinct takes people on an aeroplane ride because we found out through our research, our HR manager actually, she said in a meeting one day when we're dealing the conundrum of palm oil, she said you know I never really got what you guys were carrying on about until I flew over Borneo and then I really got it. So what we did is we said, all right, we're going to take people on a plane over from Australia to Sumatra in eight minutes and show them the beauty of this flourishing country and the devastation that is being caused by the products that we choose to purchase in supermarkets.

And that is the commitment of this precinct. Finishes in July, fly over, pay tickets to come in, will you? It's cost me a lot of money. So moving along quickly because I've got two minutes left, we need to listen to our communities and understand. So for Aturonga it's core for us to understand the needs, the interests and the welfare of the animals.

As Susan said that's primary consideration if you're running a zoo, a contemporary zoo in the 21st century. We are using the most advanced metrics there is in the 21st century to model and see how we're caring for the welfare of our animals and we can continuously improve that. But it's also critical to ensure that our values are reflecting community values and our approaches need to transcend those of conservation science and welfare science.

So we've developed an ethical framework for dignity and respect and I think that's one that's been talked about by others here. I'll whip through these, you can go to our website and have a look at them. The opportunity to display natural behaviours, creating a wonderment for wildlife, absolutely I believe we can impact human behaviour. Support conservation and education objectives. All wildlife contribute to the delivery of conservation, sustainability and animal welfare messaging and we can do that in a way that isn't all about the utilitarian model.

...of saying that it's a means to an ends. We genuinely believe. We want to empower our wildlife and incorporate choice or agency and that's an important word in ethical discussions.

We avoid displaying animals as us being superior. I'm out of time so you can read those at your leisure but I think in the end you can see as an organisation, a practicing zoo, We're struggling with and working through the ethical challenges of keeping exotic animals, but we feel we're on a journey and it's an interesting one. It makes my brain hurt on occasions and I look forward to it being exercised and heard a bit more and made a bit fitter over the next three days. Thank you.

It's time for questions. Are there cards coming up or? Everybody just loves all the... Other cards? Yeah, so I mean these are I think three very powerful points bringing up a lot of aspects about dignity, flourishing and respect and how important it is to recognize those.

And I'm seeing some cards waving. Okay, good. For Jessica, how will we increase and even allow freedom if the human species continues to grow?

Do we have obligations to humanely address this? Is that? Who's ever handwriting this is a tourist in mind, but I think I got through it.

Simple question there. Yeah. Trying to flummox.

I think as Mark suggested, the growth of human numbers is a real problem for animals. How do we address it humanely? I'm not sure if that means how do we control human population humanely. Is that the nature of the question?

Yes. I mean, I think in ways that respect meaningful freedoms for people, so shying away from intrusive policies and working on... Creating situations, cultures, societies, values where a limited number of offspring is feasible, economically feasible, culturally preferable, and providing, so we're getting way off animal welfare here, but providing access to... reproductive care for women so an education yes could I um tip in on that one yeah yeah I think it's a really interesting and really important topic and 21st century wildlife concept conservation is actually all about people, not about animals.

And there is a lot of work done to show that education of young women to year 10 is the best way to manage population growth. So we've got... We've got a whole lot of socio-economic prisoners out there and their welfare is much worse than most of the animals in my zoo.

It's a bit provocative. I think that's a really good starting point to talk about a finite planet. We're talking about ethics in this session and the ethics of the way the socio-economic divide that we're seeing around the world, we're seeing hugely grow in Australia, unfortunately, as it is in the US. These are really powerful questions that have a big impact on wildlife conservation.

This is for Cameron, but everybody is. I mean, I think it's fine if people want to pipe in from the audience. So it says, you discussed visitors' wonderment and his belief that...

We can impact human behaviour. What empirical evidence is there that having animals on display can impact behaviour and improve conservation? Yeah.

Look, this is a question that's thrown to zoos all the time. And there is a number of studies now. People like to go back to a couple of old research papers from the 80s and 90s where they showed that there was no evidence of any impacts of behaviour change. It's not easy.

And I think as an industry, we're learning better how to research that topic. But there is evidence out there. There's postdocs that have been done through Monash Uni in Australia and other places to show that there is research out there, that there has been impacts. But I think, you know, we're not going to have a magic bullet. bullet.

Zoos aren't going to have a magic bullet. We've got to work in a society and be part of a society that is changing behaviour to more sustainable behaviours, changing people's views to more sustainable behaviours. And if our councils and our governments are taking leadership and zoos are a really important part of that process, organisations like WWF, our school teachers and others are all on message, then of course there's behaviour change.

Otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as marketing. Marketers wouldn't exist if we didn't believe as humans we could change behaviour. I just want to suggest that there's a couple of things here that we're thinking about, and this gets back to this overall ethos change that I'm sort of advocating. There's ways of...

I mean, this idea of taking zoo visitors on this flight to Sumatra to see. I think there's ways of changing people's attitudes without keeping animals captive. as well.

And so tying these things together, and now I'm just being very pragmatic, tying these things together seems like an old framework. If we thought about zoos more as sanctuaries, the justificatory arguments that we provided wouldn't entail finding data about the way seeing captive animals changes people's attitudes, because those are very, they vary. But the experience, if it's the 3D adventure, if it's the whatever it might be, be.

That shift, I think, could be really very helpful. And, yeah, one additional point, just coming back to something that... Ron said in his talk is, you know, zoos are not, they don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in a broader number, a diverse number of different cultural settings.

There are some cultural practices that are overlapping with sort of what's happening in zoos. And Ron mentioned the keeping of exotic animals as pets. And I think one of the things that zoos can do to...

to help people understand what captivity means for animals and make meaningful changes is to help educate people about keeping exotics in the home environment and why that's extremely unsuitable. So a huge sort of advocacy component for zoos and working with other venues in which animals are used within human cultures and changing the way people... see animals and interact with animals in that setting I think could have a tremendous impact on attitudes toward conservation and wildlife and so forth. Well in the interest of time of course I've got three questions here each could be a meeting so I'm just going to read them to you because I think these discussions this morning have raised a lot of really important issues and feel free to talk to people over lunch.

One is we've heard a lot about freedom, agency, and the importance of the full range of natural behaviors, but you've also suggested that contraception and breeding control are necessary, and this removes the opportunity for maternal and social behaviors. How do you reconcile these opposing paradigms? It's a good question.

I personally don't think that they're opposing, but we'll... We'll have to talk about that. Here's another one.

Both well, I'd love to go on all morning, but there's another panel, and I've been told we have 42 and a half seconds. Here we go. Both ethics for the individual and for the collective were mentioned.

If and when these conflict, how can a solution be sought? Does one trump the other? It's a really good question. I mean, and I will say that the The book Jessica and I wrote, The Animal's Agenda, does approach that because you have to be concerned not only with individuals but also with what this question calls the collective.

So it's a good one. The last is dignity, agency, and autonomy and freedom are human constructs. How do we know animals understand these? Is it just ethical to give others these things even if they do not understand them?

How can we know how much they value these things? You know, once again, I mean, Jessica mentioned this about preference tests, and there's just... a lot of research being done on the cognitive, moral, and emotional lives of animals that show that they do have desires and needs and wants.

And once again, I personally would just return to the fact that we're here because if we If everything was great, then we wouldn't be here. So it's not a criticism to say this. It's more to say that there's always more that we can do, okay?

Will that curve ever end? Who knows? I think it's just going to always asymptote that we're going to want to do more and more because, as I said before, that a better life is not necessarily a good life.

And I always use dogs as an example. I always ask, would you do it? do it to a dog and people go, God, no, I would never do that. Well, why would you do these things to other sentient beings?

So anyway, thank you. And I'm sure we will have lively discussions.

Transcript for:Ethics of Exotic Animals in Captivity

Transcript for:
Ethics of Exotic Animals in Captivity