Too true. In my work at the Atlantic City Aquarium, I can’t tell you how many kids I encountered from Atlantic City and other shore communities who had never seen a beach, let alone crabs and sea stars…How sad is that?

At least a third of the school groups from Camden I handled were that way, in fact most made comments about snow when they first saw the white sandy beaches of Brigantine. It was the only thing they could relate it to.

One said an empty vodka bottle was found in the brothers’ car. One of them was underage, as was Sousa. Toxicology tests will determine whether the young men had been drinking before the tiger attack. If so, then the elder Dhaliwal could be in trouble for allowing underage drinking in his vehicle. If the fourth man was also of age, he could conceivably be in trouble too, assuming his identity is ever discovered.

Even if this turns out to be true, the tiger should not have been able to escape the pen. But the above and other allegations put the incident in an even uglier light.

No zoo is completely without its problems and failings, and many zoos that are great in some aspects are poor or even downright terrible in others. For instance, the Cincy Zoo, at which I spend a lot of time, was once known as one of the ten best facilities, worldwide, for their wide range of small cat species. I have noticed in recent years that, while their number of different species of cats has declined, they are heavily involved in breeding some endangered species such as ocelots and Pallas’s cats, with more individual animals of fewer species, as opposed to having one or two indivduals of many species. They also are among the few zoos that has successfully bred the critically endangered Sumatran rhinos, and they have sent one of their zoo-born males – I believe he was the first Sumatran rhino ever to be born in captivity – back to Indonesia for breeding. Those are just a few of the Cincy Zoo’s breeding programs for rare animals – and plants. (Most major zoos are also comprehensive botanical gardens, a fact that is often overlooked.) Yet their habitats for some species, such as snow leopards, are depressingly small.

Another of my favorite zoos, relatively close to my home, is the Knoxville Zoo. They have some great educational programs, and the zoo is very kid-friendly. They also have a program for training raptors for release into the wild. They have a successful breeding program for white rhinos, and their African elephants have a big enclosure with lots of enrichments for the elephants. Yet their big-cat enclosures are woefully ugly, small and old-fashioned, with no educational value – basically they are just large two-story cages of heavy wire, with a covered sleeping platform and no enrichmant whatsoever. The zoo has signs posted everywhere for construction and improvements that are planned or underway, though, and so I hope that the inadequate enclosures will be very temporary.

Most other accredited zoos I have visited are similar in that respect – with lots of good points and a few not so good. Most municipal zoos are located in communities that are very proud of their zoo, and the boards of most zoos strive always for improvement.

I never patronize roadside zoos anymore. They’re depressing and mostly horrible, and the vast majority are inadequate to the point of cruelty. As to those fly-by-night outfits that set up in malls and parking lots, they should be banned outright. They’re dangerous and exploitative, and they drive the indiscriminate breeding of big cats for cubs for the photo-op trade.

I doubt that there is a “perfect” zoo anywhere on earth. Even large wildlife sanctuaries have their problems. But I believe that zoos are very necessary, especially as wild habitats shrink steadily from human encroachment. Good zoos can function as a reservoir for endangered species, a hedge against complete extinction. Many, many people never get to see animals even when those animals are native to their homelands – not only here but around the world. When people can see, hear and smell animals, they experience a sense of presence, and immediacy that cannot be reproduced in photos or films, no matter how well produced.

Cooperation is the key to successful breeding programs, as many an aquarium are finding that others are willing to trade what they see as exotics in exchange for what they may consider unremarkable. Where I worked we routinely received expensive corals in exchange for grass shrimp, which we literally could harvest right outside by the truckload. Even so, we bred much of those we traded in captivity.

Other problems like accepting fish from those who used cyanide to dose the reefs have also been greatly reduced due to monitoring, but more still needs to be done before we can say that even half of the fish you see are not wild-born.

1) educate,

2) understand the danger that some types of creatures are in,

3) preserve the ones that are in danger.

The days of wild animal “take ‘em alive” trappers, who bring back gorillas, elephants, and the big cats etc. are long gone. Yes I do know that there are small, disturbing groups doing this on the black market, but modern zoos are not the buyers. The whole tiger disaster at San Francisco was terrible and avoidable but you can’t paint all zoos with the same brush.

Nowadays however, I view zoos with sadness. It hurts to see these beautiful, magnificent creatures (all of them our superiors) on display and in counterfeit habitats that are not and will never be even remotely close to their natural environments. It’s no wonder that these animals lash out on occasion. I certainly would.

I absolutely understand and respect the need to study and -in some cases- preserve the various species as we, The Great Ruiners, erode the ecosystem and drive these wonderful creatures to extinction, great and small, and that sometimes preservation involves containment, but the heaviness in my heart doesn’t comprehend the logical reasoning in my brain.

And the beat goes on…

And so, a young man with his whole life ahead of him is suddenly, terrifyingly, violently and needlessly gone…

And so, a beautiful, healthy, wildly innocent tiger, by whatever circumstance of human irresponsibility or deliberate interference, is allowed to escape its protective enclosure and display, for a moment, its true animal nature, only to be torn to death needlessly by mindless projectiles…

And so, the spin begins; attorneys prance, instigators refuse to talk, authorities, zookeepers and other “officials” arrange their alibis, while the paying public looks on in numb dismay…

And the young man and the tiger are still dead.