Framing Nature : A discussion on the ethics of animal confinement in animal parks

Sammanfattning: The confinement of animals is today a widespread, widely accepted practice, regardless of the intention behind it. The confinement of animals for entertainment purposes, however, poses ethical questions that transgress the body of the animal itself and onto the boundaries of the human. What happens when a captured animal behaves differently from what we expect of it? Different from what we’ve trained it to? SeaWorld and Kolmården are two parks that both display animals in different ways. Both advertise themselves as offering unique experiences; close up encounters with animals that would most likely not happen in the wild. Both parks have also been subject to predatory animals behaving in unexpected ways. Furthermore, the artificial relationships established between humans and nonhumans in captivity have in the cases of SeaWorld and Kolmården proven to create a dangerous environment for both humans and animals. The ethical dilemmas that arises in correlations with the deadly-outcome incidents that have occurred in the parks, takes the form of questions regarding if confining animals such as wolves and orcas are ethically defensible in the first place