Back when the Atlanta aquarium opened, I questioned its decision to capture four whale sharks and keep them in captivity. Whale sharks are massive animals—there are reports of them as long as 60 feet—and they migrate hundreds of miles, possibly to breed. They feed by swimming slowly at the surface and scooping up plankton in their wide mouths.

It was hard to imagine that a such a massive animal with those migrating and feeding habits could survive in captivity.

Sadly, one of the aquarium’s whale sharks died a couple of weeks ago. No one knows why. But its death was predictable, and its loss pointless.

Not everyone agrees with that. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, retired SeaWorld executive Jim Antrim defends the aquarium.

“Do you think you can sit on a bluff and watch these whale sharks swim by and learn anything about them?” he asked. “It is naive to think you can learn about species if you don’t bring them into a captive environment.“

Of course, no one is talking about sitting on a bluff to learn about whale sharks; that’s a classic straw man. It’s also absurd: Of course you can learn about species without capturing them. In fact, since animals behave differently when confined, who knows if what you’re learning has any real-world value?

I’ve been fortunate enough to swim with whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico, where I learned a bit about them. That’s more expensive than going to the aquarium, but not unaffordable for a middle-class person. With frequent flier miles, you could do it for a few hundred bucks, far less than the price of a new flat screen TV. Of course, such eco-tourism can have its downsides, and I suppose you could argue that it’s better to kill a few whale sharks than to have the many harassed by clumsy snorkelers such as myself. (Although the whale sharks really didn’t seem to mind; they were unfazed by our miniscule presence.)

Still…we humans have to accept that some things ought not to be put in a cage and “studied.” We should not kill whales ostensibly to study them, but really to eat them; we should not cage whale sharks on the basis of studying them but really to drive up aquarium attendance.

It may slow the pace of our knowledge-gathering about whale sharks, but it will increase the pace of our developing humanity.