WHY DOES THE CAGED BIRD SING?

My trip to Hong Kong' Bird Market coincided with reading a passage of Yann Martel's Life of Pi that challenged my take on animals in cages.

As an ex RSPB’s Young Ornithologists Club member (fo' real), I take animal rights seriously, but sometimes the lines defining cruelty blur.

Perched (PUN) near my flat in Prince Edward, the daily Bird Market showcases birds with cages stacked like cereal boxes in a cheap supermarket. The noise is deafening; my insides squirmed.

Shouldn’t these birds be free to fly, feed and mate as and when they please? That evening I read Chapter 4 of Life of Pi, which gives a convincing defence of Zoos:

“In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out… Such an enclosure is subjectively neither better nor worse for an animal than its condition in the wild; so long as it fulfills an animal’s needs, a territory, natural or constructed, simply is, without judgement, a given, like the spots on a leopard.” (pp 23-24)

So, a natural state is subjective and, as long as the animal can satisfy it’s needs, then whether its environment is created by a human or not is irrelevant.

In its curent state, the Hong Kong Bird Market appalls me, but after the passage from Martel, with larger cages and better treatment for the animals, I’d find it difficult to argue against it.

Perhaps lamenting for these birds’ loss of freedom is as fruitless as lamenting the constraints on my own life.

Deep.

#PFHK