Ethics and Insemination

In attacks on animal agriculture by animal rights groups, few topics are as electrifying - and emotional - as artificial insemination.  You can read all sorts of angry comments about the "rape" of cows, sows, mares, and other animals.  Exotic animal husbandry doesn't receive as much of the firestorm, with the exception of the biggest lightning rods, orcas, which again are described as "rape victims" by activists.

Farm animals (and zoo animals) are, of course, not able to verbally consent to artificial insemination, and applying the Golden Rule here - asking whether you would want someone to artificially impregnate you, and if not, why would you do it to animals - feels a bit... icky.  I've been asked by more than one new keeper about the ethics of such practices.  Zoos by their nature are about imposing an element of control on animals, whether we're talking about the boundaries of an enclosure or the individuals that we place in a social group.  Is artificial insemination a bridge too far?

It's worth remembering that we limit animal's reproductive choices in the zoo already - we effectively decide who is mating with who by deciding which males and females have access to one another.  Also, natural breeding isn't always one in which choice is given a lot of weight.  In the wild, female ducks or frogs may be drowned under the mass of males trying to breed them.  Spider males often end up inside the digestive tracts of their mates.  For some species breeding is painful, frightening, stressful, or even potentially deadly.  

I prefer natural breeding of animals whenever possible.  I like the idea of preserving natural behaviors, and that includes courtship and copulation.  A male is more than a sperm donor, a female is more than an incubator.  In some cases, I worry we look too closely at genes and genes alone, trying to maximize diversity.  Maybe certain individuals shouldn't be represented in the future.  If a male is a mate-killer, for example, is it possible that there's something about him that we shouldn't want to see in future generations?

In other cases, however, artificial reproduction is the easiest, safest, and most cost-effective way to bring about the next generation of endangered species.  Is it playing God?  Sort of - but when you're dealing with extinction, either by bringing it about or by trying to prevent it, you're already kind of playing God.