As much as I lambast animal rights organizations for bullying animal shelters for not adopting aggressive dogs so as to meet a 90% statistical number; I find myself on the same side wth them when it comes to wild animals. I think all roadside zoos should be shut down.
Although my college background is in wildlife resources, I am against State laws that require that trappers only have to check their traplines once every three days. I can’t imagine an animal being stuck in a leg hold trap for three days. I can’t imagine an animal having to be in a leg hold trap for even three hours. Whenever I am given the opportunity to update a city or county animal ordinance, I always work in a prohibition on leg hold traps. There is no use for them in populated or unpopulated areas. They are a danger to domestic pets and they are intended to harm another living thing.
While I am bandstanding, wild species should never be a backyard pet. For a while idiots were allowed to purchase ligers, half lion and half tiger. There are probably still people keeping these animals in their backyards. The real dumb ones probably have them running around in their houses. The problem with natural selection is that instead of wiping out the person with deleterious genes (for stupidity) is when a child becomes injured due to someone else’s gene pool.
I worked with someone conducting college research on taking coyote puppies and attempting to domesticate them. They hand-raised them from birth; only to find that the animals were coded from birth to be wild. The human species is not smart enough to figure out that wild animals are coded with DNA to be wild. It is inhumane to make them any different than what they are coded for.