First, to give praise where it is due, I commend educator Nancy Behrens for her aim to educate children to love and respect the natural world while there still is a natural world to appreciate. However, we differ strongly on the form that such education should take.
Ms. Behrens wants to create an aquarium in our midst in which fish, crustaceans, horseshoe crabs and marine mammals would be on display for the entertainment and education of area residents, schoolchildren and tourists. Like all captive displays of wild animals, the "inmates" (whether wild-caught or captive-bred) would be denied their right to live the life they evolved for millennia to live. They would be denied the opportunity to exist in the ecosystems that their millions of years of evolution adapted them to fit into so perfectly. Instead, in order to entertain our species and generate revenue, they would be held captive in artificial tanks, swimming pointlessly in endless circles as the fish at Boston's New England Aquarium do, serving a life sentence without parole — and for what crime?
Unfortunately for fish, they do not have the hosts of protectors and advocates that, for example, elephants or the great cats have, who object stridently to their abuse in the exploitative and brutally cruel world of circus "entertainment." It is our own lack of perception and intelligence — the very attributes that we cling to so smugly as the main element that raises us above other species — that makes us ignorant of the considerable intelligence of fish. Culum Brown writes in Fish and Fisheries: "(F)ish are regarded as steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions, and cooperating to inspect predators and catch food." Jonathan Balcombe in Pleasurable Kingdoms adds: "Fish representatives recognize individual 'shoal mates,' acknowledge social prestige, track relationships, eavesdrop on others, use tools, build complex nests, and exhibit long-term memories."
What do we teach children when we remove animals from their lifestyles and the habitats that make them who they are so that we, selfishly, can appreciate them in zoo or aquarium settings? Are we really so limited and dull that we can only learn about animals by incarcerating them and making them suffer, denying them so much of what makes them truly live?
Surely in this age of digital creations, interactive games, and 3-D imagery we can come up with fantastic displays that could hold children spellbound as they visualized the creatures that simply cannot make our acquaintance by coming into our homes. Truly, we are evolved enough that we no longer need to imprison another sentient being to learn from him or her. We have come a long way, after all, from the embarrassing historical fact that we imprisoned a pygmy for display in a "monkey house" at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.
I, like several other members of that night's audience, have doubts about this expensive project's sustainability — but that is not my area of expertise, while animal welfare and teaching compassion are. I urge Ms. Behrens to take the challenge to create a truly humane learning experience with no imprisonment, drawing from the creative minds of all the technowizards this century is producing.
I am willing to bet that a stupendous and unique learning experience could be created where live cams showed real animals with real lives in their true homes, and where visitors could learn far better to respect our fellow earthlings than they ever can by exploiting them. If she can bring such an innovative and humane form of education to Albany, then she has my enthusiastic support.