Occasionally, anyone who’s creating or running an animal sanctuary is asked whether the money wouldn’t be better spent on other programs like conservation and education.
Depending on the particular area, the question goes something like:
- “Why are you spending so much money looking after a few dozen elephants/ chimpanzees/ whales when there’s a more urgent need to protect their habitats in the wild?”
- “Why are you spending so much on these chickens/ cows/ pigs when we should be working to shut down the factory farms?”
- “Why are you spending so much to take care of a few hundred dogs and cats when we need that money for spay/neuter programs?”
As if, in each case it’s an either/or.
It isn’t. It’s not a zero-sum game in which the benefit to one group of animals means a loss to another group. Nor an argument over a finite sum of money and where it can result in the greatest apparent benefit. There’s a need for both approaches, and a win for one can be a win for the other.
As regards wildlife, the two approaches can be described as conservation and reparation.
Broadly speaking, conservation is about stopping things from getting worse: like protecting elephants and chimps in their native lands.
Reparation – as in caring for elephants from circuses or chimpanzees from laboratories – is about giving something back to these animals whose lives have been destroyed.
Conservation
Daphne Sheldrick at the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage, which combines a sanctuary with a conservation program by caring for orphan elephants and then returning them to their ancestral homes.
At its best, conservation helps protect our fellow animals from some of the worst atrocities that we humans are wreaking upon them.
But conservation is also often described as “management of natural resources.” And this kind of language that’s often used betrays how human-centered it can become.
Living creatures aren’t “resources” that need to be “managed.”
Living creatures aren’t “resources” that need to be “managed.” They don’t exist for human benefit; they exist for their own benefit. And euphemisms like “stewardship” (increasingly popular in the religious community as an alternative to “dominion”) carry the same arrogant belief that the rest of nature exists primarily for our benefit, while tempering this claim with the notion that we should treating the rest of creation “responsibly”.
Worse yet is when this attitude is used as a rationale for institutionalized abuse. Classic examples would be that sport hunting promotes conservation, and that circuses and “Shamu” shows are educational.
By contrast, many of the best conservation organizations now use the term “compassionate conservation” to emphasize that their work is not about, for example, “conservation of fish stocks,” but is about protecting the individuals who make up these populations.
Reparation
Reparation is a somewhat different concept: It’s about giving back to individual animals what’s been taken away, and thus making up, as best we can, for the damage and abuse we’ve inflicted.
One of the best ways of doing that is by providing them with a sanctuary where they can live in an environment that maximizes well-being and autonomy and is as close as possible to their natural habitat.
Lions rescued from circuses in Peru, now at the Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in South Africa.
Reparation can go hand-in-hand with conservation, like when you restore a damaged wetland in order to conserve a natural ecology and protect its inhabitants. But it begins with the recognition that nature and our fellow animals aren’t “resources” in the first place. As Henry Beston famously wrote:
“They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Reparation is about doing what’s right for the animals themselves. We do it to make up for the wrongs we’ve committed against them; we do it because we can; and we do it regardless of the cost or the inconvenience to ourselves.
If there are additional benefits that serve a wider, perhaps conservation-oriented, purpose, that’s good, too. But the act of giving back is ultimately its own purpose – a true act of altruism.
Giving them their own sanctuary can help to heal the deep wounds we have inflicted upon the fabric of nature itself.
In the case of the Whale Sanctuary Project, we’re talking about animals most of whom were born into captivity and have never even seen beyond the concrete walls and squealing audiences that make up the only world they’ve ever known. They have never experienced the close family relationships that are the bedrock of life in the ocean; never eaten the food that’s natural to them; and never lived the life for which 50 million years of evolution had prepared them.
By any definition and by any standard, keeping these apex predators of the ocean in small, shallow tanks for the amusement of small, shallow people is more than just wrong; it’s a crime against each of them individually, a sin against nature, and a wrong that cannot be righted simply by conservation efforts toward others of their kind, fueled by notions of “better stewardship.”
Rather, it is a gesture, born of the recognition of human error, and an attempt to make up, if only in a small way, for the deep wrong that our own species has committed.
In creating sanctuaries that can make up for some of what went before, we offer the best we can by way of restitution. And even though we can never fully recompense them for what they’ve lost, giving them their own sanctuary can help to heal the deep wounds we have inflicted upon the fabric of nature itself.
(Photo at top courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.)