Justice For All

The Pittsburgh Zoo has been open to the public since 1898 thanks to the generous donation of $125,000.00. I'm sure real Pittsburgh buffs know or at least might have heard the name Christopher Magee, the founder of the zoo. A refresher for the yinzers who haven't caught up and we foreigners:

One man halves the debt of an entire Pittsburgh. 

One man generates thousands of jobs. 

One man then controls a city with his partner. 

One man takes piles of human being currency and ravages entire plots of land, uses materials from the earth to construct automobiles and building sites. 

How does one single man or one woman ever have such a giant impact on this earth? 

How do we consider what is "earned" and "fought for" when the question of ownership is so one-sided? 

A little boy named Maddox was mauled and eaten by a pack of African dogs in 2012 at the Pittsburgh Zoo. He was leaning over the rails, his mother trying to help him get a better view of the dogs. In terms of ownership, and devoid of our moralities, the dogs had this piece of meat fall into their hands. They had chance fall into their laps, just like luck falls into the hands of a human being. Just as a bloody medium rare steak splats onto our plates when we have enough money to order it. Who is to say what property is and what ownership is?

Obviously, we are.

And we've since removed those dogs from the settlement, only to replace them with cheetahs. It's just another motion we've got for handling iffy situations. The parents sued the zoo, which I truly don't understand, given the liability of holding your child over a banister. And the zoo just reached another part of a settlement last week, in which the zoo will pay the U. S. Department of Agriculture $4,550.00. 

Why?

Under the Animal Welfare Act, the only Federal law to protect the treatment of animals, we have decided that the USDA is due these finances. Statute §2157 section (d) states: "Any person, including any research facility, injured in its business or property by reason of a violation of this section may recover all actual and consequential damages sustained by such person and the cost of the suit including a reasonable attorney's fee." As my class has learned from our Eden Hall adventure, what the attorneys do with this lawsuit money in terms of agriculture is really up in the air.

What exactly does all this legislation do for the animals? I'm not entirely sure, though I'd like to think that the rationale behind this decision is: human beings fear losing money. And the fear of that loss prevents (most) people from harming animals, if not for just common human decency. Hurting an animal means losing money, simple.

I wonder then, if the animals would like more. They don't exactly see any part of this settlement, do they? Sometimes they get relocated rather than executed, so I guess that can be considered a small victory. 

I see Otis the alligator in his best tux, ready for court over being put in such a small bathtub of an exhibit for so many years. He's adorned with black shimmery satin on the lapels, a stripe of the same material sewn into a stripe on the pants, should he choose to be so decent to wear pants, too. He's holding an Alligator Welfare Act 2013 copyright LexisNexis in his right arm. A Venti cup of Starbucks caramel machiatto and a yellow legal pad in his right.

But that is probably not at all what any animal would like to see.

They're not into all the pageantry of the human world.

All this snow, do I even want to talk about it right now? There are stronger minds who have already written pages and books on it. I can't stomach it to consider snow again this week. I'm standing on a snowy bridge, nobody's bridge, and considering the legality, not the morality, of my previous blog thoughts of throwing a kid over the ropes to Otis. I have very unpopular opinions sometimes, but I think neither I nor the Animal Welfare Act have it right when it comes to justice for the animals. If that's even what we're really after.