Abstract

Of all the issues related to animal ethics discussed in this handbook, perhaps the most visible is captivity. This chapter begins with an overarching critique of captivity in Lori Gruen’s “Incarceration, Liberty and Dignity.” It proceeds to a fundamental challenge to the ethical defensibility of zoos in Liz Tyson’s “Speciesism and Zoos.” The final set of essays detail the harm produced by the captivity of nonhuman animals who are known to be intellectually, emotionally and socially sophisticated. Catherine Doyle’s “Elephants in Captivity” summarizes the critical discoveries about elephants that show why life in zoos and circuses is ethically indefensible. Rejecting the resistance of many marine mammal scientists to recognize “the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that captivity does not work for dolphins and whales,” Lori Marino’s “The Marine Mammal Captivity Issue” calls for all involved to cooperate in creating a “paradigm shift—a new way of relating to marine mammals.” This chapter concludes with Thomas White’s “Whales, Dolphins and Humans,” which argues that the fundamental problem regarding the captivity of cetaceans is that most marine mammal scientists and executives in the entertainment industry are blind to the ethical significance of the scientific facts already known.