Some wildlife experts are concerned that captive breeding could change the very nature of the animals it aims to preserve. Alan Greer is Principal Research Scientist in Herpetology at the Australian Museum. You have to ask them I guess, what their purpose is. What exactly do they want. Dr Greer says the managers of Scotia and other captive breeding programs may be misguided when they claim they are recreating Australia s wildlife exactly as it was.
Captive breeding is a highly artificial situation.
You select animals that are fecund, tractable, that is easy to manage, don t pose any particular problems. You feed them often artificial food sources, you keep them immune from, or separated from predators. When you look at it in detail, most captive breeding programs have a huge number of artificial components built into them, and the longer these go on in relation to the generation times of the animals, the more severe that the outcome is. And this has an influence, albeit subtle at first, on the stocks, the breeding stocks. We re going to be getting further and further away from the features of plants and animals that were the product of that ahuman environment.