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

[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?

"[Ligers] have to be male lion/female tiger bred because of the size.
The males are sterile, they never develop beyond puberty so they are unable to sire cubs.
The females are fertile but they can breed only with tigers again because of the size and the lion's genetic material then becomes diluted within couple of generations.
The same thing happens with mules, donkey sire, horse dam, the offspring are infertile males and fertile females which can then only breed with horses."

....I don't think 'jaglions' are actually a viable hybrid. I'm opposed to the breeding of ligers because female tigers in captivity ought to be breeding more real tigers, not wasting their fertility producing cross-breeds. But if those cross-breeds are already born, how can it be right to just kill them? It's not like zoo-bred ligers are going to be escaping into the jungle or the taiga to pollute the gene-pool of the remaining wild tigers - if a liger reproduces at all, it's because humans went to considerable trouble and expense to make it happen.

[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.