How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 079: Stop Feeding the Animals
I go on a bit of a rant about constantly seeing videos of people feeding animals in the wild. There are 3 things wrong with feeding wild animals that I describe in this episode.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session79
Welcome to the speaker for loop podcast session 79. Welcome back everybody. This has been a bit of a break. This is the first time we've actually taken a break since we've gone five days a week. I had a very happy Christmas Eve and a very merry Christmas. And this week we're back with some more information for you, some more ocean conservation. And today I've got a bit of a little rant that I want to go over, not to start the holiday or continue the holiday season with the rant, but I just need to get this off my chest because I see it so many times. So stay tuned and you're going to hear all about it on the speaker for Blue Podcasts. Welcome to the speaker for Blue Podcasts, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host. He still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care, Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the speaker for Blue Podcasts, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of speakerforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur, meaning I am an entrepreneur, and all of my business has to do with protecting the ocean and living for better ocean. Welcome back from the Christmas Eve Christmas break. I took two days off. We didn't do an Ocean Talk Friday, which I was a little disappointed about, but it was Christmas day after all. It's a special holiday for myself and my family and friends, so we had a great celebration. I hope you enjoy your holidays. If you enjoy Christmas, Merry Christmas, if you celebrate Hanukkah, Happy Hanukkah, and any other holidays that you celebrate, happy holidays to you and your family. This is a very fun time for me because I could spend a lot of time with my family, just extended family and immediate family. My kids love this type of, this time. Yesterday we were watching some videos on YouTube and on Facebook, and a lot of times I share the videos when I see on my news feed on Facebook about animals, because my kids love to see animals. There's actually a really cute video going around with a mother otter and her baby otter, and the baby otter is actually lying right. They're floating on the ocean, and the baby is lying right on their mother's tummy who's floating upside down around her back, and the baby is just sitting there, and they're just kind of cuddling and stuff, and it's really, really cute. I showed these kind of videos to my kids, and I was showing another video of these divers diving with sharks. They're scuba divers, and they're probably somewhere in the Bahamas, I'm guessing, and there's some tiger sharks around, some pretty big tiger sharks. As I've talked about before on this podcast, there are a lot of dive outfits who have psycho tourism dyes where they bring people to specific sites, and tiger sharks and other sharks will come by. They're probably usually attracted because of food that's brought to the dive site. But anyway, regardless, they come in and they have a great experience for the most part. Everybody that I've seen, I haven't heard anything bad happen. There have been some close calls, but nothing bad has happened. So I want to show some of these videos to show my kids that sharks are not just these eating killing machines that they're actually really nice. So I started watching this video, and so we're watching and we're going over, and then my daughter knows this something. My oldest daughter says, "Dad, they're feeding the sharks. The people are feeding the sharks." Isn't that a bad thing? And it's very interesting because, and I do think it's a bad thing. I said, "Yes, honey. I don't think it's a good thing." Now they're not trying on purpose to harm the sharks, but there's a big thing that really gets on my nerves, and this is what I want to talk about in today's podcast, is people feel the need that they have to feed animals all the time, and I just find it so annoying. And there's really two major reasons why I think they're annoying, why I think it's annoying and I think it's bad for the animals. One, actually, I guess I'm going to break it up to three things. One, you never know what's on your hands when you feed animals. Stuff that gets on your hands. You could have chemicals, even the soaps that you wash your hands in, or if you have dirty hands, or you've been handling other food, or handling cleaning supplies, or anything like that, or even the hand cleanser now that you can get the ethanol. It's like an alcohol-based cleanser that you can get when you don't need water. It just dries off on its own. Those kind of things can be really bad for animals if it gets on the food that you're feeding them. So that can actually affect their system in more ways than us, because they're not used to having those chemicals on their food. That can affect. I'm not saying it's a major thing, but it's something that can affect them, and if you're feeding them, that means more than likely you care about animals. So if you're feeding them, you care about them because you want them to eat, even though they don't necessarily need to eat, you want them to eat, but then all of a sudden you're feeding them with all this stuff on your hands, and it gets into their bodies, and it's not good for them. So think about that next time you want to feed an animal. It's like, are my hands really, truly clean for animals? And are the chemicals that I use, the lotion that I use this morning to make sure my hands weren't dry, especially here in the winter, although it's not much of a winter, but all that stuff is like, okay, what is going to be on this food that I give them? So there's that thing to worry about. The second thing is when you feed animals, are you feeding the proper things? And I'm going to go back to an example, it's not a marine example, but it's an example that I saw in Costa Rica. We went on a riverboat cruise, my family and I on Costa Rica, Costa Rica is very big on ecotourism, which is fantastic. We went about four years ago, kids were about two and four years old. We went on this riverboat cruise, and it was a very, very small boat, very, very small, maybe 12 people, but it was my family and a couple of other couples, and we saw crocodiles and all that kind of stuff, these bats that were really cool that lined up when they were sleeping and lined up and looked like the snake when they were sleeping to make it look like they were a big animal, really cool things. Anyway, there are some monkeys. I don't remember the name of the type of monkey that they were, there was howler monkeys and there was another type of monkey. It was the same monkey that you saw in friends, right? So the friends show the friends, back in the 90s had this monkey, but I forget the type of the kind of one. So it was a small monkey. They would come close to the riverboat because when tourism outfits that were not necessarily properly certified as ecotourism outfits would come by, the tour guides would give people bananas and you were allowed, the animals, the monkeys would come and grab the bananas out of their hand and eat them, great, great experience for the kids, great experience for the tourism operators and the tourists, the tourists love it, so the tourism operators love it. And when we were on a riverboat, I asked our guide, I said, will we be giving bananas to the animals? And he said, no, he says, we don't do that at our company. And I was like, oh, I was like, oh, how come? And I knew, I kind of knew why, but I wanted to explain it to the girls. And he said, the reason why they don't, he goes, you'll see a lot of people they'll feed bananas to the monkeys in this area. Now we were in Guanacaste, which is the northwest province in Costa Rica. He said, the animals there, the monkeys there, there are no bananas that grow in Guanacaste. It's just not optimal for bananas to grow in there, so there are no natural bananas. They eat berries and nuts and things like that. So the animals, when you feed a banana to these animals, this population that's in Guanacaste, they actually, it actually hurts their stomach, they actually get sick. And then they could die from it if they eat too much. They will eat it, but their stomachs can't digest it. They can't digest the banana. Even though there's another population on the Caribbean side, the Guanacaste is on the Pacific side, the Caribbean side monkeys can actually eat bananas because bananas are grown there. So they're used to bananas, naturally. So if you feed bananas to the population in Guanacaste, you can actually hurt them medically. But you wouldn't have known that because all you think of is you think, well, all monkeys love bananas. They always eat bananas because you see them in zoos, you see them on TV, and they all just love bananas. Well, just because they love bananas doesn't mean it's good for them. So we have to be careful with what we feed animals. If we feed them, the best thing to do is don't feed them. We don't need to feed them. And I'll tell you the last reason why and probably one of the most important reasons why. When you feed an animal and they're accustomed to being fed by humans, they lose their ability to hunt for themselves. Now when you get domesticated animals in zoos or animals that are in zoos and stuff where they have to be fed by humans, that's a different story. And to be honest, those animals that if they try to get reintroduced in the wild, that's one of the big problems. They don't know if they can actually feed themselves because they're so used to being fed because they lost their hunting ability, they lost their hunting instinct. Whereas wild animals have that ability to feed themselves, no matter what it is, they will try and feed themselves. So by feeding an animal and conditioning that animal to say, hey, it's really easy to be fed by this human or by this thing, I am going to come back and I am going to do it all the time now, they lose their ability to hunt for themselves because they don't want to. They just want to get fed because of course it's easier to get fed. Hunting is not an easy thing, but because they get fed by somebody, by a person all the time, they're conditioned to say, hey, I don't need to hunt, I can do something else. They lose that hunting instinct, it was that wild instinct. So they can't hunt. If you go away and they're conditioned to you, so say you're at a campsite and you're constantly feeding these animals and then you go away and then another camper comes and they constantly feed an animal, then all of a sudden it's not camping season anymore. What do you think happens to that animal, do you think they can hunt that much, that well anymore? No, they can't because they're conditioned to believe that there's food that's going to be provided to them. That's why you hear, don't feed the bears, don't feed the animals, well don't feed the bears for another reason, but don't feed the animals, right? Don't condition them to think that it's okay that someone's always going to be there to feed them. They lose their natural instinct, it's not a fun thing to do. Okay, so these are three reasons why I think it's not really good to feed animals. So I want to, I don't want to see videos where people are feeding animals. First of all, the video that I saw feeding a shark is extremely dangerous. You're feeding, they were feeding sharks by hand and I understand why they were showing why you can feed the sharks by hand, like because they're gentle, they actually just want to feed, but anything goes wrong, even if a, like a fingertip is nicked, that could change the whole diving experience, could change the whole eco-tourism experience for that, for that industry, you know, imagine if a tiger shark bit a diver during one of those eco-tourism industries, what do you think is going to happen to that industry? They're forever going to be plagued with that incident. So if you follow, if you use those techniques where you feed them by hand and you get bitten by one by accident, say they took a little too much fish off or they went a little too far, that's not the shark's fault, that's the diver's fault, but then the sharks pay for it, because now they're known again as these killing machine, and unfortunately that's the risk of interacting with sharks so closely, and trying to feed them, right? These are wild animals, we have to be very careful with them, first of all, we shouldn't be feeding them, they shouldn't be coming to a specific site, thinking that they're going to get food all the time, because they're going to lose their hunting ability to hunt elsewhere, if that eco-tourism goes away or they decide to change sites, well, what happens to those sharks, they have to feed themselves now, they have to fend for themselves and it's not easy to switch, you know, imagine myself or yourself, if you're not a hunter and you go out and you have to hunt for your food, it's going to be very difficult, you're not going to be very good at it, but we're used to getting our food from the grocery store, so we don't have that hunting ability, right? So these are things that I just want you guys to think about when you see these videos is be critical of these videos, say something, don't feed the animals, don't touch the animals, if you're a diver, the first thing in diving, when you get your certificates, say is don't touch the wildlife, you are there as an observer, you are not there to grab stuff, you are not there to check, now I understand if you want to save an animal from being, you know, from a net or like a, you know, or from some plastic, then I understand, right, you understand you have to touch them, you have to help them, I feel, that's a good reason to do so, but other than that, hands behind your back, like I tell my kids when they go into a fragile store, hands behind your back, don't touch anything, don't touch anything, just be an observer, and that's the way ocean conservationists dive and be around wildlife is we're just observers, don't try and interact, I understand if you want, if you want to help some, an animal that's in need of help that's hurt or something, I understand that's a rescue, that's something different, but don't feed them just because you want to feed them and you want to feel good about yourself, it's not helping the animal in any way, and I just told you three reasons why I shouldn't, so anyway that is the episode for today, I just wanted to kind of go on this little rant because I saw these videos yesterday and I was like this is an episode that he needs to go on the Speak Up for Blue podcast, I need to talk about this, and I may mention it again because I keep seeing these videos, but this is what I'm going to talk, that's the focus of today's episode, so anyway, if you want to support this show, you can go to speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, I have a crowdfunding campaign there, and that helps me support the podcast, support equipment purchases and whatnot, get more in depth, eventually I want to build this podcast where it will build into a bigger ocean media company, ocean science and conservation media entertainment company, so that's what I'm trying to build here, starts off with this podcast, thank you for listening, I appreciate it, and again if you want to support, you can go speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and you can put in any kind of donations at different levels, you can see the goals that we set, the different levels and incentives of each level, and remember it is a monthly subscription, a monthly payment, so just keep that in mind. So thank you very much for listening to the podcast, my name is Angelou, and I am the host of Speak Up for Blue podcast, thank you for listening, and happy conservation. [Music]