The newspaper's spurious "news" item is really only a P.R. puff piece for this zoo. More and more, the 5th estate does not investigate and report; it repeats what it is fed by the businesses with the money to pay P.R. firms. It does this because it is cheap and easy.

Animal conservation is the latest New Zoo marketing tool. In fact, the New Zoos do not let the word zoo into their lexicon. Maybe someone should suggest to the embattled Greater Vancouver Zoo that it only needs to change its name to Greater Vancouver Conservation Center.

When the public began showing its disgust with animals in little cages and revenue was threatened, the zoo business revamped itself into the animal welfare business. It built bigger cages and it ramped up breeding so that it could claim to be saving species. The only way species are ever going to be saved, except for a few lucrative display specimens, is for humans to stop invading their homes and to just leave them alone.

There's all kinds of fake animal welfare businesses around such as ski resorts with a few caged wild animals that it has "saved" as a side-line business and animal "shelters" that sell and kill.

"A captive population can act as an education outreach program for people who would otherwise never hear about the plight of the painted dogs. Eventually, Mountainview and other programs like it might be a source of new animals for reintroduction," the article says.

If you see "captive" animals and money is being charged, it's a business, no matter how it bills itself as an "education outreach program". The Mountainview Conservation Centre charges adults $30, Children and seniors, $20. For that money, Painted Dogs were being kept in cages without water-holes, and some people are getting paid. It would be interesting to know how much. Did the Langley Advance "reporter" ask?

If you believe that the New Zoos are only about animal welfare and species conservation, you probably believed there wouldn't be any Winter Olympics cost overruns too.

Notice that the word zoo does not appear anywhere...