While New Yorkers continue to enjoy a rent control system, animals at the Bronx Zoo will be soon sent packing in the search of zoos due to the economic downturn. Hundreds of animals may soon be put out on the curb, including deer, bats, foxes, and antelopes.

To the credit of the council, they decided not to eat the animals. However, their years of sponging off the city is at an end. Of course, one would expect a bit of a moral obligation to such animals after keeping them captive for so long. Yet, the council will close four exhibits to meet a $15 million budget shortfall.

The Bronx zoo is 114 years old.

It appears that they are going to locate zoos rather than have the homeless animals eat the increasing homeless human population in New York. What I find increasingly difficult to reconcile is the hundreds of billions that we have poured into Iraq (an oil rich nation) and Afghanistan while we are shutting down public facilities and cutting school budgets in the United States. Likewise, we are giving hundreds of billions to failed banks and corporations while we close public resources like zoos and parks. We have a political system that is not only fundamentally broken but pursuing a ruinous path for this nation.

We may want to send the animals to Iraq. I hear they are flush with cash.

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