36 ILLINOIS -AUDUBON S29 UL 
My old professor used to take what he called “a tragic view of his- 
torv of the human race.” He meant that the human lot is almost always 
tragic. If this is true, it is doubly true for wild animals. Their lives are 
usually short and their ends violent. But there 1s a sort of splendid nobility 
in that tragic way of life and death. To bring a wild creature indoors, 
expose it to disease and malnutrition it might not otherwise face, does 
it no good. Ultimately, the fate of any animal that crosses man’s path is 
particularly tragic. 
Conservation agents pick up kidnapped wildlife by the hundreds, and 
then the pain begins. Agents love wild creatures, which 1s why the’re in 
their jobs. But a coyote or raccoon or skunk that has been captured as a 
baby and half-reared in captivity loses many of the things that might 
have meant survival in the wild, and possibly gained some attributes that 
make its continued existence dangerous, such as a lack of fear of man- 
kind. 
The agent can do one of two things: find a zoo that needs such an 
animal, or destroy it. Neither are very attractive choices, which is painful 
to both agent and animal. It is painful to confiscate illegal wildlife babies, 
and painful to have to destroy so many of them. Maytime can be tragie 
all-round: to the person who unwisely tried to make a pet of a wild animal, 
to the conservation agent whose jobs require that they take such babies 
away, and to the babies themselves, who have been denied their right to 
a wild, free existence. Wildlife belongs in the wild. 
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