This is exactly it. The argumentation "it is still a wild animal" is fundamentally lazy and seeks to banish a random class of organism to a space where it is okay to be needlessly cruel because understanding how it works is too hard.
Highly experienced trainers who understand very well their animals end up dead. I think it is quite a high grounded statement to call professional zoo-keepers and related professionals lazy.
The only understanding i can see is that having wild animals as pets should be banned as they normally are in most jurisdictions.
and I further retort that humans are animals, and that classifying humans into "something other than animals" is fundamentally flawed.
Why are so many humans wont on forgetting that we're an animals too?
> The only understanding i can see is that having wild animals as pets should be banned as they normally are in most jurisdictions.
I suppose owning humans as pets is already banned in all jurisdictions, so I think we agree on this.
Humans who understand other humans also get killed by humans - at rates other animals will never match.
In the ballpark of ~20,000 murders are committed every year in the US, yet even though there are 90 million dogs in that same country, only about 30 to 50 people are killed by dogs.
It would be pointless comparing the number of fatal bear attacks, because the numbers per year are usually 0-2, and usually by wild animals, not ones in captivity.
At the end of the day the most dangerous thing to a human is another human. No other animal comes remotely close.
That is true, but also not related to what your GP was talking about IMHO.
I understood their comment as coming from a perspective of either "you should fear what you can't understand/explain - and you can't really understand animals" or "it's their nature to be violent, it doesn't matter whether you understand them", either of which I think is flawed.
You made a much better point.
I just have a habit of picking at reasoning even if I agree with the conclusion. Sometimes you end up with a more concise and to the point argument at the end of that, and in this case it came from you!
The stronger argument is that animals aren't as aware as humans which actions will have consequences. Animals do have customs about what's okay and what's not, but they often don't align with human society's laws.
It's "ignorance of the law is no excuse" taken to an extreme.
For another argument, consider that if you went into the woods and were mauled by a bear, nobody who found your body would feel the need to confront the bear and hold it responsible. The bear would not need to be convicted in order to be acted against.
This is because we make the right decision to not live in close proximity to lions, tigers, bears, apes and all the other menagerie of dangerous creatures we share Earth with.
> "...only about 30 to 50 people are killed by dogs"
It's not a coincidence that this number is low. We keep domestic cats and dogs as pets precisely because their propensity and - in some cases - ability to kill us is low. If bears were as commonly kept as household pets as dogs you would see a completely different result.
I don't personally know what the solution is, but I'm sure there's a more elegant middle ground between "let it roam free among humans" and "cage and torture it until it dies."