why-animals-do-the-thing:

500daysofbecky:

I really need everyone to see me throwing a piece of bread into a bears mouth.

Edit: since people are concerned I’ll clarify – these bears are not wild. They’re retired show bears. They’re very famous – google waving bears.

Hey guys, remember this really viral / contentious video? Well… the facility it’s from, the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, WA, has been notified of an intent to sue by the Animal Legal Defense Fund for multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act (as well as violations of state animal cruelty laws and at least one count of being a public nuisance). 

I am normally fairly skeptical when animal rights groups bringing Endangered Species Act citizen lawsuits against zoological facilities because that’s not really what the citizen lawsuit statute was written into the law for, and because they’re frequently used as a weapon to attack zoos and further anti-zoo agendas (PETA has brought them up at anti-zoo conferences before, talking about how the ESA is more useful for going after zoos than state cruelty statutes), but this potential lawsuit is… worth paying attention to. I’ve read through the entire “intent to sue” document, and it pretty much lines up with all the concerns I had when I visited the Olympic Game Farm last summer. 

Things like this sign. They let you buy bread as you go into the facility – six or ten loaves, if you want – and then there’s this sign trying to pass the bread off as a USDA requirement. I confirmed with USDA afterwards that it wasn’t real, and it was confirmed by this part of the filing:

“The Game Farm sells loaves of bread to visitors and allows visitors to bring their own bread, which they can then throw at the bears without restriction.(62) USDA notified the Game Farm, as early as June 25, 2014, that bread is an improper food source. (63) In over four years since this notice, there is no evidence the Game Farm has implemented more species-appropriate food.” 

The bears from the stretch of the park as the original video above were all incredibly obese, and spent most of their time – as long as I was able to stay and observe before other cars pulled up behind me – standing at the fence-line and waiting to be fed. 

There’s a lot more to the park than just the bears – there’s a drive-through carnivore area that looked like it had pretty small enclosures (but I wasn’t able to get close enough to see if there were gates between the yards that could be used to expan the space animals had access to), drive through yards with bison and elk who would approach to be fed (and had learned to charge / hit cars to get bread if they weren’t being fed), and a small reptile collection that appeared to be generally not in great conditions. 

I can’t say I’m surprised by this ESA suit – there are small unaccredited zoological facilities I absolutely support and will stand up for the quality of care at, but the Olympic Game Farm isn’t one of them. I’m really concerned by some of the things I see in the lawsuit – such as using working AZA animal care documents (written by the animal care staff and considered by AZA to not be official and final recommendations of best practices) as standards all other facilities must be held to – but it looks like there’s a good chance of many of the allegations within it being accurate. I really do not like the relief ALDF plans on asking for (they want to confiscate the entire animal collection and send it to sanctuaries, or force the facility to close to the public and become a sanctuary under a specific accrediting group – these things are more problematic than they seem at face value) but, honestly, things probably do need to change at that facility somehow. 

Zoo politics are complicated, but now we know for sure: the original video still isn’t cute.