6D Chu Ying Ying
No More Fake Kind Act
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Lily Chu a F.6 student from Carmel Alison Lam Foundation Secondary School. May I thank you for giving me a chance to have a sharing with you about no feeding wild animals?
Feeding wild animals is always interpreted as a help to them but it will cause serious consequences to both animals and humans. Therefore, the kindest thing you can do is to leave them alone. Not convinced yet? Let me introduce you 3 reasons why it is vital for you not to give them food.
To commence with, it makes wild animals lose their foraging instincts. According to Dr. Chris Wong, a veteran scholar from the Science Department of the University of Hong Kong, some animals have their special learning process called “imprinting” and the learning process takes place in infancy, such as pigeons and ducks. If they recognize that they can get food from humans, they’ll be used to waiting for food and will no longer searching for food by themselves. Also, another predictable situation is that the animals are not be able to distinguish real food and packaging and so they mistakenly swallow plastic bags as food and die, which is really saddening.
Secondly, it cause harm to wild animals if people introduce a new type of food into their diet. Based on the report from the Zoological Society of London, every species has its specialized diet. So if they take on an inappropriate diet, they may be malnourished and die. For example, have you ever seen some guys feed pigeons with white bread? However, this may result in their death. Since pigeons will subsist on that high carbohydrate-based diet during the aforementioned learning process, their bones cannot develop healthily and their ability to fly is ruined.
Thirdly, it threatens our safety. It is no doubt that feeding wild animals makes them lose the natural fear of humans and be used to us. So they may become aggressive and ambush humans for food. The AFCD has indicated that the number of case of citizens being attacked by monkeys in the Kim Shan Country Park and the Shing Mun Country Park rose significantly in the last decade due to illegal feeding.
To conclude, you have heard about the top three reasons for not offering food to wild animals. It is important for us not to neglect our responsibility to the nature, so I hope you can act accordingly after listening to my sharing.
Thank you for being such an attentive audience.