Tiger babies

First a link in German (for the English readers, sorry I could not find a link in English).

http://www.fr-online.de/zoo-frankfurt/tigerbaby-zoo-frankfurt-tigerin-malea-ist-wieder-mama,4407556,22278642.html

People who work in zoos are remarkably committed to the animals in their care and do an excellent job in trying to keep species alive and healthy.

The Sumatran tiger is one of the world's endangered species and the news of a baby being born in the Frankfurt zoo has to be good news.

You will also note from the above article other snippets of animals born in the zoo here in recent years - the record is excellent.

The only thing that saddens me is that the future of these animals seems to be "in captivity". Establishing a "natural" environment for a creature in a zoo is not easy, as hard as all the people who work there try. And as hard as worthy organisations such as the WWF try, keeping animals like the Sumatran tiger alive in the wild - in its natural habitat - gets ever more difficult. Humanity has overpopulated itself to such an extent that living space is seemingly reserved for excess humans first and the remaining diversity of species a poor second.

Regardless of the other considerations (the poverty that goes hand in hand with having unmanageably large families for example), I cannot help but think that we have got this wrong. We are born with brains - instincts are controllable if we apply our brains to them. Unfortunately to the detriment of most other species on the planet, we still do not make sufficient use of our brainpower to enable other creatures to continue to exist alongside us.

And as exceptional as are the talents that you find among zoo personnel and nature conservationists, a lot more still needs to be done. 10 to 12 billion humans living in all the earth's livable areas and all the earth's remaining creatures in zoos, as may well be the case in a few years time? No thank you!