Posted by:
bwaffa
at Sun Jun 27 21:47:37 2010 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by bwaffa ]
The classical "conservation through commercialization" argument does not rest on the presupposition that the private sector is establishing "reservoirs" for later re-release. The idea is simply that when species disappear due to habitat destruction and other ecosystem-level factors, these species will continue to thrive in captivity rather than simply going the way of Titanoboa, Tyrannosaurus, and others I wish I'd had the chance to breed.
You raise the good point that the selective process we use is an imperfect system. On the one hand, deliberately breeding for deeply repressed recessive traits does nothing to help maintain the "natural" beauty of the animals we've taken from the wild. However, even those who breed for high quality "wild-types" still introduce their own personal element of selection over a series of generations. We choose to breed those specimens which are most pleasing to use because of their pattern, temperament, food choice, etc. Nothing several generations captive bred from wild stock -- even "normal" patterned animals -- are truly ideal for re-release. Studies in other animal groups have corroborated this idea.
As someone else mentioned, this is one (of many) reasons why hybridizing species should be so universally frowned upon. The elements of selection that breeders introduce are practically unavoidable, but they stand to do little to drastically change the overall morphology in a captive lineage over time. Deliberately crossing species, on the other hand, deals an irreversible blow to the gene pool and, as I've written elsewhere, violates an implicit ecological responsibility we assume in bringing wildlife into captivity.
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http://www.waffahousereptiles.com
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RE: a point I would like to make ... - bwaffa, Sun Jun 27 21:47:37 2010