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

[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.

Inter-race breeding of humans was brought up, but she said that was different, because we are all the same species. I'm also not sure whether or not she's opposed to all species mingling or only species mingling where endangered animals are involved, since she was saying how they ought to be breeding more of the animals that are endangered. Which is fine for deliberate breeding, and nobody disagreed, but irrelevant for cases of accidental breeding or cases where somebody created the hybrid animal when they shouldn't have and now the animal exists. The fact that it's not a great idea to breed hybrid animals simply for entertainment value of zoo visitors or for people to keep as exotic pets is pretty well agreed upon in the thread, but that's why the game won't let you either breed your different species together to make the hybrids or try to breed your hybrids directly (which generally won't work, but I don't know if there are some hybrids that do sometimes get fertile males and females).

So, yeah... most people take the view once the animal exists it should be cared for. It was nice to see some people vocally commenting in support of helping all life. And it's just one person disagreeing, but I still find it so weird.

Oh, and I agree I don't have a problem with hybrids in general, but I think it's a fair point that if the species is endangered then it's worthwhile to focus human-directed breeding efforts at creating more of that species. The game application only lets you breed endangered species, even though your zoo can have tons of non-endangered animals (my petting zoo, for example, contains guinea pigs, horses, and pigs, among other not especially endangered animals). The rescues used to be only for endangered species only, since it was added to help you get more adults for breeding. So, the jaglions are a bit of an exception and a new thing. You're not trying to help an endangered species in their case as they aren't a species. And most cat hybrids occur very rarely in nature, since it is uncommon for the different species to encounter each other and get close enough to breed. If you're going to go through the effort of breeding an endangered animal and raising the offspring, it's best to have it help keep the endangered species going. But if you end up with the hybrid offspring anyhow, then you might as well care for them if you can.