Unexpected Bigotry

[leora]

So, I have been playing a virtual zoo game. It's kind of neat in that it contributes a bit of money to help real animals, and as your virtual zoo is growing you end up finding out about all sorts of animals you probably haven't heard about before, since there are a lot of species in the game. Among the features, you can breed your endangered

Comments

[conuly]

That's... bizarre, really.

[leora]

Yeah, I suspect the people who run the game didn't see that objection coming. Although it seems to be just this one person. Everyone else who has read the announcement and commented seems fine with rescuing hybrid animals and helping them

[conuly]

Yes, you did, but it's also reasonable to worry about this person's viewpoint when presumably she has it IRL as well.

[leora]

Yes, I find that quite disturbing. I'm just glad it's highly unlikely that she can act on it in any way. If she actually is in charge of animals, then that would really bother me, but it's very unlikely. I was really startled by her real life preference.

[siderea]

I wonder what her background is. A friend who grew up among a certain strain of Christian fundamentalists reports that they have a great bias against any sort of mixing or hybridization. Of anything. Think of it as a purity fetish. She reports that, for instance, the concept of a "hybrid car" (both electric and internal combustion) is negatively valenced to them, even though it doesn't say anything about it in their scriptures.

[beth_leonard]

Wow. This sounds like such a weird stance to me, because the Christians essentially broke off from the Jews way back when over this issue -- letting the Gentiles into the fold; treating the Samaritans as your neighbors.

But somehow those groups can call themselves Christian and get press and followers. There certainly exists in some people a human desire for purity, however odd it seems to me.

--Beth

[leora]

I know nothing of her religious views, and don't really have any way to find out. But that is an interesting and disturbing thing to learn whether or not it applies to her.

[sithjawa]

I was once surfing the web looking for info on what to do upon finding an invasive reptile in my yard, and found a page where someone was decrying recently passed state laws on protected native species of turtle. This is unconfirmed by any third party evidence such as first person reports or news articles, but the person claimed this state would confiscate at-risk species that were not to be kept as pets, and, because they could not be released into the wild (pathogen dangers) would euthanize them. To protect the species. While I can see as a practical concern how this would occur (can't allow a trade in at risk species, no budget to keep them, can't release them) the person found it understandably ironic that state officials were "protecting" an at-risk species by destroying the captive breeding population.

[elenbarathi]

" But I'm really disturbed that there is someone who would rather see a healthy animal killed than given a decent home, because she feels that the animal should not have been born in the first place."What's her stance on abortion

[leora]

The jaglions were added to the game because a zoo actually bred them. But as I said, it wasn't because they were aiming to breed jaglions. They had a jaguar and a lion who had had contact and become so attached to each other that both animals became depressed when they were separated. They decided keeping them together was more humane than the attempts to separate them were.

I don't know her stance on abortion, as I don't know her and it didn't come up in the thread. She did seem to agree that endangered animals should be breeding more of their own species, but that was generally agreed upon and is a large part of why the game isn't letting you deliberately breed hybrids, but only letting you rescue them. The idea being that while we shouldn't be deliberately making the hybrids, they do exist and sometimes they do end up in bad situations and need help.

[joreth]

This healthy baby of mixed race parents shouldn't have been born in the first place because I believe in the purity of race. Therefore, as an adolescent, we ought to kill him because he should have been aborted anyway.

WTF

I wonder if her head would explode if she knew we had Neanderthal DNA, indicating that our two species interbred?

Regardless of the morality, and even practicality, of "pure" species, it's alive now. It deserves as much right to life as any other living creature. If its own ability to procreate (through natural or artificial means such as keepers preventing it) is halted, there's no rational justification for that viewpoint at all.

[joreth]

Also, I find this whole obsession with keeping animal breeds "pure" to be just bizarre. It's as if people think evolution stopped at some point in time and it's our duty to ensure that it stays at that point.

I am opposed to deliberately breeding hybrids based on traits that people find attractive that tend to create generally unhealthy new species and/or "races" of animals because of the complications that accompany those attractive traits.

But I don't get the animosity towards "hybrids" and "cross-breeds" that occur naturally (where if there are accompanying negative traits, evolution will either select against them or make them anomalies), or that occur with enough deliberation to prevent those harmful accompanying traits (usually produced by inbreeding & not enough genetic diversity) from becoming dominant. If we tried to wipe out anything that was the result of cross-breeding or a mixture of other species, I don't think there'd be much, if anything, left alive on the planet.

[leora]

Interestingly, someone did bring up the fact that humans are created out of cross-species breeding. But I don't think she'd responded to that last I looked. She may not even have seen it