One of the few things that genuinely got me excited about moving to a Mumbai hostel last year was the fact that it was five minutes away from a zoo!
For someone to whom zoos meant the distant Al Areen Wildlife Park and Reserve for most part of her life, actually having elephants and lions next door was something to celebrate.
My initial euphoria soon disappeared when I saw how unhappy and out of place the inhabitants of the erstwhile Victoria Gardens (since renamed) were far from their natural habitats.
My hostel mates who normally don't frequent the place have told me there are more people than animals in there.
I don't condone caging animals, but I have visited the gardens occasionally when my friends were away or when there was little to do during heavy monsoons.
There was nothing much I got to see except capture in video for my younger brother a hippopotamus jumping into a pond or parakeets and exotic birds chirping away in the aviary.
I feel rather bad about it now especially when gruesome reports of wildlife being encroached upon came to light in the last few months, I realised that caging animals for a child's merriment is no laughing matter.
It broke my heart to read in papers a week or two ago about hyenas and big cats from Africa and Asia being shipped into Al Areen later this year.
It is doubtless that the wildlife park has done a wonderful job in protecting native Arabian species such as the oryx but spending BD200,000 to house animals brought in from far away Africa seems needless expenditure to me.
If it was a huge game reserve, such as Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya, seeing animals roam freely in their natural habitats might be a worthwhile sight.
However, the very thought of shipping in these hapless animals in specialised containers just sickens me.
Some of the animals being brought in are endangered in their native countries.
The hyenas are widely hunted for sport and medicine in Namibia and Kenya, while the leopard on the other hand is listed as a "near threatened" species by International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Carting off these threatened animals to reserves around the world might be some people's idea of conservation, but it's wrong.
Some months ago, when in a shocking revenge attack after tigers were found to be praying on livestock, villagers in the Indian state of Rajasthan poisoned several goats - leading to the death of two cubs that fed on them - a Mumbai trekking group decided to take matters into their own hands.
They decided to campaign to educate the villagers about the endangered tigers, of which only 1,411 remain in India.
If everything goes as per plan, my friend and I are planning to join the group next month to Ranthambore National Park, on the outskirts of which the incident took place.
Awareness tourism plays a crucial role in helping save species as it highlights the plight of the animals first-hand as well as bringing in the revenue needed to keep them alive.
Human influence of any kind may be unhealthy for the animals as ecological and anthropogenic factors have already depleted the earth's ecosystems and wildlife.
The recent oil spill from the off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is another unpleasant reminder of the extent to which we have gone about tampering with our environment.
By treating nature and its denizens as playthings, we are concocting a toxic potion for ourselves that we'll be forced to drink sooner or later.
I don't know how much difference the new additions to the Al Areen family will make in attracting visitors, but I think it will make the hyenas happier if we left them alone in the savannahs.
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