This weekend was the Fleece Festival at the Zoo. We shear our sheep and alpacas and give the wool away to the Lefferts Historic House next door, where they make things out of it. It seems like a good excuse to talk about the domesticated animals we have at the Zoo, since domesticated animals have their benefits and drawbacks.
The domesticated/farm animals live at the Barn, and there we have sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, a miniature horse, alpacas, sebastopol geese, and most recently a cow.
Most of these are animals we are all familiar with. Their benefits are obvious: they provide us with meat, dairy, eggs, and materials for clothing. Clearly these are animals whose importance we don't have to stress very often, because everybody knows them.
They can serve the purpose of talking to people about the conditions under which the farm animals in this country are living, which many are unaware of. One visitor described it as "21st century slavery," which isn't too far off if you're familiar with feedlots and commercial chicken houses. The animals in the Barn do a lot of good for showing people that they should be more appreciative of the cows and chickens that their meat comes from.
The drawbacks of mass producing so many of the same species is a loss of biodiversity, which I feel obligated to point out as well. These animals take up a lot of space, and farmers want to grow as many as they can to make more money. Imagine if we humans kept expanding as a species, eventually needing so much space to raise cattle that all other habitats are cut down to make feedlots. The only remaining species besides us would be the ones that we raise to eat, there wouldn't be any wild species left. What kind of world would that be?
