WHY ANIMALS DO THE THING

(Image Credit)

Let’s talk today about how important it is to fact-check major publications in the realm of animal media before sharing any information they present. Specifically, let’s talk about why The Dodo is never a source on animal related issues to be trusted, because of the misinformation they perpetuate and the directly harmful ideas they propagate. Dodo articles are rife with misinformation, twisted presentations of facts, quotes from purported ‘experts’ who are well known to be biased and unreliable sources, have non-existent primary citations, and in many cases are just egregiously incorrect about things that can simply be googled.

Today, a new article showed up that I was hoping would be a valid source of information: How To Tell if An Animal Sanctuary is a ‘Fake’. It is, sadly, just as egregiously not fact-checked as everything else animal related The Dodo has produced - and what’s worse is that the incorrect information it presents is mixed in with other really valid and important points for interpreting the quality of a sanctuary. Before we break down why it’s so infuriating, let’s look at the way Dodo articles are produced in general.

The Dodo’s Problematic Publications:

The Dodo purports itself to be a publication that is “committed to creating entertaining, meaningful animal-related stories – we cover everything from viral videos and animal behavior to rescue stories and advocacy efforts. Our goal at The Dodo is to deliver the most emotionally and visually compelling, sharable animal stories and videos to the biggest number of readers possible to help make caring about animals a viral cause. (Source)” Unfortunately for it’s readers, The Dodo has appeared in recent years to focus entirely on the ‘emotionally and visually compelling’ and ‘sharable’ aspects of the stories they report, rather than actually getting the information they report correct.

One of the biggest problems with The Dodo is that as while trying to represent themselves as a news organization they rarely, if ever, cite primary sources for their writing for anything other than referencing current news stories. Most of their click-through links cite other stories they have published, which in turn cite other Dodo articles. Even then, they appear to be more of ‘continued reading’ links than direct sources: a link in their recent article ‘How To Tell if An Animal Sanctuary is a Fake’ regarding a theoretical visitor needing to use judgement to determine if an animal can perform it’s natural behaviors in it’s captive environment redirects… to an article about a sloth sanctuary that only briefly discusses the horrors that befell the specific animals involved because they couldn’t engage in specific behaviors. That article in no way touches on any information a visitor could use to determine what crucial natural behaviors are, if an enclosure allows for them to occur, and if they’re being performed other than when the visitor is present.

When outside sources are cited, they’re often only from a single contributor - for instance, Big Cat Rescue’s website or Founder appears to be the only source utilized for almost all big-cat related articles - or they’re an organization known to have a specific agenda regarding captive animals, such as PETA and the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Many times sources that are implied to be primary citations are really second-hand information, such as portraying as factual a Wildlife Sanctuary Facebook post regarding the Bowmanville Zoo allegations that was a quote from simply ‘a source in Canada’ (Source). 

One thing that is obviously missing from any Dodo media is the consideration of multiple points of view.  There is no comparison of the information available from multiple sources - even on topics for which multiple sources of information that agrees with the writers’ stances - nor any exposition about the credibility of the sources utilized. In fact, it’s never acknowledged that conflicting viewpoints to those expressed in the articles exist, even when they’re backed up by decades of scientific research and professional experiences.

The writers for the Dodo also appear to not need to be investigated for credibility - none of the writers appear have bios on the website. This means that there’s no information on their educational or practical backgrounds that would inform the content they produce. The Dodo asks us to trust the credibility and field-specific knowledge of their writers simply on the grounds that they were hired.

It would be exhausting to go through and fact check all of the most egregious Dodo articles - I know, because it’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past couple of hours sitting at my computer. So much of what they publish is flat out wrong, sourced to pages that have almost nothing to do with the implied content, or phrased in twisted ways that further misunderstanding of important information that it takes hours to pick apart any one article thoroughly. Previously, I’ve written about why Granny (Southern Resident Orca J-2) is not 103 (link) as gleefully reported two years ago by The Dodo and the actual scientific evidence behind that conclusion. (The Dodo article regarding Granny, “Whale Fingerprints”, contains no citations for the information and quotes contained within, and the author appears to have not actually read the census data and the accompanying report that talks about how the age of wild orcas is derived).

Here’s a breakdown of today’s article, How To Tell if An Animal Sanctuary is a ‘Fake’, to get you started thinking about the ways the Dodo tricks you into thinking it’s reporting solid stories, when in fact it habitually publishes pieces that leave the reader feeling falsely educated and morally righteous while imparting incredibly little useful information.

Problems with How To Tell if An Animal Sanctuary is a ‘Fake’:

This is actually one of the harder Dodo articles to pick apart, because instead of being just flat-out misleading, it mixes a lot of important points in with a number of blatantly incorrect and problematic statements. Things that are correct about this article include: sanctuaries should not be breeding animals, except by accident, and should be straightforward about the mistake and how they’re going to prevent it in the future; in almost all cases sanctuaries should never allow guest contact with residents, except in the cases of specifically proctored ambassador presentations and even then contact should be incredibly infrequent and highly supervised; sanctuaries should provide adequate housing, enrichment, and medical care for all residents.  

The biggest issue I see with this article is that nowhere does the author mention the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries as an accrediting agency that consumers can use to vet the credibility of a sanctuary. It’s a huge oversight that author of this article knows so little about the sanctuary and animal management worlds that they neglected to even mention the existence of an accrediting organization. Oversight and accreditation of the type provided by GFAS are essential because ‘rescue’ and ‘sanctuary’ are appellations that require no proof or professional background to use, and it’s important for visitors to be able to distinguish between high-quality facilities and private excuses for backyard menageries masquerading under a sanctuary label. GFAS was founded a decade ago by leaders from all different sectors of the animal world: incorporating members were from Born Free USA, the Humane Society of the United States, the Captive Wild Animal Protection Campaign, and the World Society for the Protection of Animals. Their stated mission is simply to ‘help sanctuaries help animals’. GFAS animal care and welfare standards are strict and GFAS accreditation for a sanctuary is mentioned by both HSUS and PETA - organizations notorious for decrying the welfare of any captive animal - as a sign of the best places to support. For a news source that likes to work closely with PETA and HSUS, it makes no sense that the author of this article chose not to include information about the sheer existence of GFAS - unless they didn’t know it existed, at which point, they clearly haven’t done enough research into their topic to write an informed piece.

The theme of ‘the author really doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and the editors didn’t know enough to catch that’ continues throughout the piece. One specific quote makes it incredibly clear exactly how little background knowledge about animal management the author has:

“Wild animals aren’t obedient, and usually can’t be trained without negative enforcement — which means whips, shackles, food deprivation or other questionable methods, even if the keepers tell you otherwise.”

This statement alone makes it clear that the author has no idea how animal training works, and is working off of uninformed assumptions. ‘Negative Enforcement’ is not a real term - but it’s nicely ‘emotionally loaded’ to the unaware reader and sounds like it’s coming from a knowledgeable source. However, ‘negative enforcement’ is not a real training term, nor is it something you’ll find in any of the primary literature relating to animal learning or cognition (Source) . The author may have been intending to say ‘negative reinforcement’ - but unfortunately, if so, got the definition of the term completely wrong. Negative reinforcement is the removal of a stimulus to make a behavior more likely to occur; e.g., stopping pulling on a dog’s leash when it chooses to walk towards you. ‘Whips and shackles’ are positive punishment (adding a stimulus to make a behavior happen less), and food deprivation isn’t even a training method because it does nothing to influence an animal’s inherent tendency to perform a behavior. ‘

In addition to being completely incorrect about animal training terminology or methodology, the writer is obviously completely unaware of the innumerable successes that have occurred in the past decade by using positive training techniques on exotic animals (in their article referred to as ‘wild’ animals). In a world when tigers voluntarily offer their tails for blood draws, beluga whales willingly present themselves for long medical procedures, and bull moose stand still to allow farriers to work on a cracked hoof, the statement that ‘wild animals aren’t obedient and can’t be trained without negative techniques’ is blatantly false. The citation for the statement that animals cannot be trained without negative techniques, by the way, is a single link to another Dodo article that discusses allegations against a trainer at the Bowmanville zoo for beating tigers during training sessions. Nowhere in that article - which is used as a citation for an incredibly broad claim - is anything to do with training methodology, learning theory, or animal behavior discussed. Training animals in sanctuaries is essential to minimizing their stress during husbandry routines and to providing minimally invasive medical care.  By leaving all this crucial information out, the author leaves the reader to assume that any visible animal training is only for the purposes of ‘tricks’ - when what often looks like a ‘trick’ is often a key part of the animal’s routine care.

Even statements in the article that are technically correct are surrounded by such misinformation that it’s hard to be supportive of them. For instance, the author states in the third section that “if a sanctuary permits wild or exotic animals to be passed around to tourists, or cuddled like a pet, it doesn’t have the animals’ best interests at heart.” This is a very valid point - GFAS has a direct rule against this type of ‘ambassador animal interactions’ because that’s not the role of a sanctuary that exists to provide the best possible life for it’s residents…  but the hyperlink the Dodo article uses as a source for some reason links directly back to an article about the Bowmanville Zoo allegations. This page contains no information on cub petting schemes or how being handled affects and animal’s welfare, and instead has exactly a single sentence stating that “a quick glance through Bowmanville Zoo’s Facebook page [showed] a number of questionable practices, including visitors playing with lion and tiger cubs.” The connection the author wants you to make is that allowing guests to touch animals was abusive because the facility was brought up on abuse allegations, and by linking the article as a source they hope to imply that all places that allow guests so touch animals are as equally abusive and problematic. While it’s a bad sign if a zoo or sanctuary allows guests to interact with animals in more than strictly monitored ambassador presentations, the ‘any contact = abuse because a single abusive place allowed it to happen’ equation is quite a fallacious chain of logic being passed off as unquestionable.

The article ends by telling readers to “try to figure out if the animals’ physical and mental needs are being met” but gives them literally no accurate information with which to do so. It mentions checking physical condition of the animals through a visual inspection (neglecting to provide adequate information on the correct body condition of multiple taxa), looking for enrichment (while calling them toys and not mentioning any number of reasons it might not be visible during a facility visit), and equates any type of repetitive behavior with stress and bad welfare (without mentioning that stereotypies can outlast bad welfare situations for years, or considering any other reason a guest might see a seemingly repetitive behavior happen for a short time). The citation for animals ‘looking skinny or ill’ is a Dodo article about an arguably bad roadside zoo (link) that briefly talks about obvious cases of neglect. The citation for ‘looking for enrichment’ is a Dodo article about ‘how zoos are hell for animals’ (link) that re-uses the media from the roadside zoo article and does not mention ‘enrichment’ or ‘toys’ anywhere in the piece. The citation for ‘repetitive behaviors can be stereotypical and from stress’ is a Dodo article about a whale at Seaworld ‘appearing to be too depressed to nurse’ (link) that contains a single statement about an observed behavior that might be a stereotypy and does not define that category for the reader. None of these citations provide a reader with any information - correct or not - through which to make the judgement calls that the author has imparted upon them as their responsibility. Nowhere does the author suggest that the visitor ask questions of the staff to learn more about a facility or provide ideas for what questions a reader should know the answers to before making a decision. That’s not how you create educated, critical readers - but then again, The Dodo doesn’t want people to think independently - they’d prefer to be considered a reliable source, because any critical reader is going to notice all the glaring omissions and errors in their published work.

Source count: Of 21 in-text links to ‘sources’ for the article How To Tell if A Sanctuary is a ‘Fake’, only 2 are links to non-Dodo pieces. One is a link to a university website regarding stereotypical behaviors in research primates, and one is a link to Big Cat Rescue’s general website rather than to the information referenced in the article.