Got a question about animal rights?Write to Cholly c/o PETA,
501 Front St., Norfolk, VA
23510, or GrrrMag@peta.org.
Dear Cholly,
If zoos didn't exist, how could we ever see wild animals?
I love to see the baby animals. —Madison S., St. Paul, Minnesota
Dear Madison,
Imagine if aliens put you in a small pen so that
they could watch your every move.You'd become
depressed and go nuts—just like animals in zoos
do. In fact, scientists have a name for this mental
disease—zoochosis.
Cute baby animals draw crowds, but when they grow up to be not-so-cute “surplus” adults, many are sold or traded to substandard zoos or circuses—or “game” farms, where they are killed by hunters.
Many zoos were founded back before we had TV and the Internet. Today, we don't even have to leave our homes—or steal animals from theirs—to learn about animals from far-away places. The Detroit Zoo, which recently decided to close down its elephant exhibit and send the elephants to spacious sanctuaries, is changing its mission to be more about helping animals and less about “entertaining” the public.
Dear Cholly,
I wrote to Iams to complain about its experiments on animals,
but they said that they don't use that lab anymore. Should I lay
off them? —Trixie P., Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dear Trixie,
Iams may have agreed to stop doing business with the lab that
PETA investigated, but that doesn't mean that it has stopped
locking up animals in barren laboratory cages and testing on
them. All Iams has done is to move more of its tests “in house,”
which isn't a house at all—it's just another lab filled with cages.
The kicker? There's no need for these tests. Other companies
like Newman's Own and PetGuard do not conduct any tests on
any animals in labs. Find out more at PETAKids.com.
