For the last 20 years, Prof. Annie Booth has taught the class on environmental and professional ethics class, a fourth-year undergraduate course at UNBC. The students in several streams in the arts, sciences and planning are required to take ENVS 414 before receiving their bachelor degree.
The course is challenging. Not only is the work load and mandatory reading heavy, the class can be emotionally charged and longheld worldviews can be shaken and shattered. Voices raised in anger and quiet weeping happen. Even after warning her students at the beginning of the course that she's fine with debate but will not tolerate outbursts or disrespectful rants, Prof. Booth has had to ask students to step outside to cool off.
In 2002, while working on my master's degree in natural resources and environmental studies under Booth's supervision, I served as her teaching assistant in ENVS 414. She asked the class to name all the unique abilities humans have that no other species can do. With each suggestion, from culture, language and emotions to abstract thinking, self-awareness and concept of time, Booth countered with examples from the animal kingdom of similar behaviours.
Finally, there was silence. Nobody could stump the professor.
The journalist in the room decided to try his luck.
"How about the written word?" I piped up.
Booth wasn't phased, noting how numerous species scratch trees to let others know that this territory has been claimed, while other male animals build elaborate nests and other constructs to demonstrate fitness and fertility to females.
"But that's not writing!" I protested.
"If the members of a species all understand the meaning of certain markings, which are not random but intentionally done as an act of communication," she replied, springing her trap, "how is that not a form of writing?"
Well, so much for that.
Humans are part of the animal kingdom, she stressed, and the differences between us and the other critters (she loved using that word, revealing her roots in the American Midwest) are simply degrees of separation on a continuum, rather than novel attributes.
Accepting that fact comes with major implications over animal rights and human relations.
Legally, Canada and many other countries have laws where people can be found criminally responsible for animal abuse, cruelty and negligence. In other words, animals have inherent rights and humans are willing to penalize one another for violating those rights.
Seen in that light, the decision by the Vancouver Aquarium this week to stop permanently housing whales and dolphins for public display was inevitable, just the latest step on a long journey with our fellow animals that's included the banning of travelling animal circuses and the sale and importing of many exotic animals.
Conducting sensitive and meaningful research on whales and dolphins is commendable. So is rescuing and rehabilitating injured whales and dolphins. Keeping them in captivity for entertainment, however, is not. There is little to no educational merit to charging people to watch highly intelligent creatures used to massive ocean habitats confined in a tiny pool.
Rescued whales and dolphins should receive the same consideration as other wild animals, which are kept in wildlife sanctuaries in a habitat as natural and as respectful as possible, free from the stress of human tourism. In Smithers, the Northern Lights Wildlife Society does this kind of admirable work of rescue and rehabilitation but it's no zoo. Anyone who comes on site works as a volunteer caring for the animals, in an effort to reintroduce as many of them as possible back into the wild once they've recovered from their injuries.
Hopefully, there will be a time in the future when zoos and aquariums no longer exist as profit-generating entertainment centres reliant on human tourists but strictly as sanctuaries for injured animals, closed to kids of all ages banging on the glass or throwing vegetables at gorillas.
Like the other animals, humans eat animals, hunt animals and have symbiotic relationships with other species, some mutually beneficial, some less so. Only humans, however, keep other animals in captivity solely for amusement. We're on the road to eventually ending that practice and the Vancouver Aquarium's decision this week is another step towards that ethical outcome.
