What is wrong with captive breeding?
Mr Bill Leverett, Founder of Hong Kong Dolphinwatch: The other argument against captive breeding is that you have to have a genetically viable population, or you end up mating fathers with daughters, brothers with sisters, etc. Capturing 10 won’t do it. There were worries that the wild population in HK, at a hundred or so, wouldn’t be enough. Capturing that many Sousa chinensis from the wild would be a severe blow to their chance of survival, all for a risky, untried scheme. Not to mention the point: where to keep them all? Captive breeding has all sorts of barriers: – capturing them without injuring them or their children/parents – keeping them alive (they killed about 30 Inia geoffrensis (the other pink dolphin) before they figured out that they need shallow parts of their tanks where they can lie on the bottom with their blowholes above the surface) – getting them to mate – bringing them to term successfully (note problems in that place in Thailand) – accommodation, transfer – intro
