ZOO'S DO NOT CONSERVE WILDLIFE

Help End Lies Told To Promote the Zoo!

CANNED HUNTS AND THE ZOO CONNECTION

Dear Friends,

WHYY-FM 91 -- reaching millions of listeners in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware -- constantly broadcasts the false claim that supporting the Philadelphia Zoo is a way to support wildlife conservation. WHYY has repeatedly ignored information proving that claim is false. The station keeps broadcasting it because the Philadelphia Zoo gives the station money.

Fundraising week has just begun at WHYY-FM. Please call 888-345-9499 (toll free). When the phone is answered, explain that displaying animals is not wildlife conservation; WHYY-FM must stop lying to listeners by saying donating money to the Philadelphia Zoo supports wildlife conservation; and only then will you consider supporting WHYY.

Please call intermittently through next week. Volunteers answering the phones probably know nothing about the problem and will mention complaints to station management - especially if a lot come in.

Please also write to insist WHYY-FM stop lying to promote the Philadelphia Zoo: Mr. William J. Marrazzo, President & CEO, WHYY, 150 N. 6th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106 / fax 215-351-0511 / wmarrazzo@whyy.org.

Some useful facts about the Philadelphia Zoo appear below. Please let me know if you have questions or would like more information. And please share this action alert with other caring friends. Thank you!

Best wishes,

David Cantor
Executive Director
Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc.
P.O. Box 891
Glenside, PA 19038
215-886-RPA1
RPA4all@aol.com
www.RPAforAll.org

Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization showing influential people how to establish responsible policies for animals that are also responsible policies for ecosystems and people. RPA's 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign aims to end the teaching of factory farming and animal agribusiness at U.S. universities. Its This Land Is Their Land campaign aims to protect wildlife by ending direct abuses and human land-use
practices that harm wildlife, ecosystems, and people.
______________________

A few key facts:

The Elephant in the Room
Is "The Greatest Show on Earth" spreading one of the world's most dangerous diseases? If Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has not already come to your hometown this summer, it will, because "The Greatest Show on Earth" never stops - no matter the obstacles. The obstacles include a number of lawsuits against Kenneth Feld and his company, Feld Entertainment, owner of the circus and other touring shows, including Disney on Ice operations. Three weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that a case against the circus charging animal cruelty, filed by the ASPCA and other animal welfare groups, could go forward.Documents discovered in the course of that lawsuit and others have revealed a long history of hard conditions for elephants in the circus. Feld is accused of abusing his endangered Asian elephants by allowing employees to beat them, chain them for long periods of time, and wound them with bullhooks. The circus is also accused of forcibly removing baby elephants from their mothers before they are weaned and breaking baby elephants with force to make them submissive. But the real elephant in the room, as revealed by court documents, is the widespread infection of circus elephants with mycobacterium - tuberculosis. This is the same type of tuberculosis carried by and spread by humans.

- Zoos' wildlife-conservation claims are a deceitful nationwide public-relations campaign begun years ago when the public began awakening to the fact that caging and displaying naturally free-roaming animals is cruel. Publicly owned airwaves and public radio must not serve this unconsionable deception.

- The Philadelphia Zoo keeps about 2,000 captive animals of 330 species on 42 acres in crowded, noisy urban surroundings.

- Scientific consensus holds that the captive breeding of endangered species as done by the Philadelphia Zoo -- cannot protect those species. Only habitat protection can help them. The animals at the Zoo are in completely unnatural habitat. Funds spent by the Zoo on habitat protection are negligible, involving occasional token projects.

- Displaying 2,000 animals enslaved and denied their natural lives is more likely to encourage irresponsible and possibly unlawful capturing and keeping of free-roaming animals than to promote wildlife conservation or respect for animals.

- Several years ago, the Philadelphia Zoo's lack of concern for animals caused the horrible deaths of primates when its primate prison burned. The replacement building is a barren echo chamber that cannot meet primates' needs and is an insult to the memory of the animals who died. It is named for an energy company, a key source of pollution and wildlife habitat destruction.

- Callers to the Philadelphia Zoo find it difficult or impossible to learn of any donations specifically spent on wildlife conservation. The Zoo's phone number is 215-243-1100.

Here are a few expert statements:

"We should not accept zoos as they currently are."
-- David Hancocks, director, Victoria's Open Range Zoo, Australia, in A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future (Los Angeles: U California P, 2001).

"Conservation, in the form of breeding programs for zoo animals, is also a rather flimsy platform to support the continued existence of zoological parks."
" Zoos can immediately stop degrading the word 'conservation' by employing it so irresponsibly."
-- David Hancocks, A Different Nature.

"Gradually it dawned on me that zoos were not about education at all, that the elements of zoos I deplored-the promotional gimmicks and humanizing of animals to bring people in, the gaudy media events using animals as backdrops, the exhibits that were more showy than realistic, the carnival atmosphere-were not mere frivolities that might someday be pruned away in the interest of promoting conservation but were indispensable elements, the very essence of zoos."
-- Mike Seidman, conservationist and former zoo employee, in "Zoos and the Psychology of Extinction," Wild Earth, Winter 1991-93.

"Zoos claim to 'save' endangered species through captive breeding programs and to promote knowledge and respect that will lead to protection of animals in the wild. My own view is that such claims claim too much (by far) and are intended to deflect attention from the central activity of zoos-the public display of captive wild animals."
-- Mike Seidman, "Zoos and the Psychology of Extinction."