If Only People Understood... (Rant of Sorts)

I come to you at the brink. The world is becoming a terrible place -a world diminished to its bare minimum. Animals surviving on nothing -nothing we've given; only what we've left behind. We've provided them with an unglorified image and reputation, meanwhile stripping from them everything they need to survive. It is incredibly frustrating, because it is all of this, that I already know. I'm faced with it daily as our population continues to rise, while the very creatures I devote my life to simply perish as if they don't even matter.

Life is meant to be a beautiful thing... the birth of a baby, somehow, a miracle? What would be a miracle is the rehabilitation of this planet, considering how far gone it ALREADY is! Everyday, I'm told to stay strong and keep on truckin' (which I will), but I feel like we're fighting the inevitable. We're battling against a timeline already stacked against us. It almost feels like the planets time-card has already been punched and there really isn't much we can do about it, aside from delaying what will ultimately come.

The Barbary Lion - Extinct

Everyday, our charismatic, beautiful mega-fauna are destroyed for their skins, bones, meat, body parts -their very life blood! And, it's all for our benefit. As if that isn't enough, we also destroy them for a false sense of security that somehow guarantees our protection from the man-eating predators who, realistically, wouldn't even know we exist if not for the fact that we've stolen their homes! We seem to think that by persecuting all that is beautiful on this planet will somehow provide us with immortality and no fear. THE LEADING KILLER OF MAN IS MAN! Not tigers, not lions, not bears, nor any other large-scale predator of this planet. Then, why, I ask, are we funding the extinction of basically everything living on this planet aside from ourselves?

Along with exploitation for monetary gain and persecution, our planet is cheapened as a form of entertainment! We pit toothless (thanks to our blackened medicine) lions against defenseless goats and chickens. FOR WHAT? So that people who have lost all sense of decency and sanity can watch, laugh, and cheer as a terrified goat figures out he might die today. Not only that, but we do this over and over and over again.

The Californian Grizzly - Extinct

I fear for the day that all the animals I love can only be found in a cage or behind a fence or glass. This day means the end of my sanity and my life as I know it. I know that I likely won't be here when that day comes, but somehow, I know I'll feel it wherever I am. I am not a religious person and do not believe in God or heaven. What kind of God would allow this world to die as a result of his favorite children? What kind of God would sit back and watch it happen? No God of mine and hopefully, not one of yours. Despite my disbelief in the afterlife, I do believe in karma -I do believe in experiencing harm as the result of harm you've done to others (creatures and humans alike). This is why I believe I'll feel the last days of the WILD come to a close. I feel as though it'll be karma for me not doing enough- not stopping it or fixing the problem. I know I'll feel that pain. And frankly, I pity a world without our animals. I pity a world where the only animals in existence are found in factory farms, zoos, and rescues. I know that the day this happens, I will roll over in my grave.

Sadly, it could happen all too soon.

I'm reading an amazing book that breathes nothing but truth and says nothing but fact. No fiction. Only honesty. If faces the grim ugly truth that we are destroying everything and have been for decades.

The Florida Panther - On The Brink Of Extinction

This book is called, "Monster of God: the man-eating predator in the jungles of history and the mind" by David Quammen. It looks at the way humans view large, 'alpha-predators' and how we have viewed them throughout history. This includes views throughout the history of religion, throughout natural history, and in the new world. Honestly, not much has changed. It's, excuse my French, the same old shit. We fear what we can't and don't understand -that which we cannot relate to. What we fear becomes what we hate and what we hate becomes what we kill.

And all throughout this, we have lost a key component in the characteristics of human beings!

"Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat."

We have lost this. If we, like other mega-fauna, took to the wilds and lived naturally, we would not be the top-predator. We would be DINNER! Without our guns and mass-made weapons, we are nothing but fleshy sacks of meat waiting to be devoured in the natural food chain. People have become so attached and dependent on these things we call 'guns'. I call them 'tools for easy murder'. Whatever happen to playing fair? In the days of the Native Americans, they fashioned their own bows, made with their own hands, from objects found in the wild. They didn't compress metals to provide themselves with instantaneous, easy death. They lived with the land. We do the exact opposite now. We destroy it.

The Atlas Bear - Extinct

Of course a gun will take down a bear, but imagine if the bear could shoot back at you. What would we sink to next? Blowing them up? There is nothing fair about shooting, trapping, or bludgeoning an animal.

Every single person who hunts an animal with a gun and considers it fair needs to put that gun away and face that animal in the wild with their own hands. I guarantee, the human will lose. A tiger versus a human. The human stands no chance. We are merely dinner without a gun. And that is the NATURAL order of things. There is nothing natural about black steel and a bullet.

We've taken it too far and have taken too much. When, I ask, will we give it back?

I'll leave you with a passage on Large Predators from David Quammen's book and I hope it speaks to you in the same matter that it speaks to me.

The Javan Tiger - Extinct

"Those times and those landscapes are disappearing. Alpha predators face special trouble in the struggle for collective survival, because they live at low population densities (spaced by their own hunger and ferocity), require a high energy input per individuals (especially the mammals among them, less so the reptiles and sharks), and need a large area of habitat to sustain a viable population. Many of them have vanished within the last couple of centuries -the Barbary lion, the Atlas bear, the Javan tiger, the California grizzly -and many other populations, subspecies, and whole species are in jeopardy. Because of their charisma -their handsome scariness and their thrill value -they'll probably long remain popular as zoo attractions. But it won't be the same. When they're lost from the wild, they're lost in the deepest sense. Though samples of their DNA may still exist, twitching innoculously in cages or test tubes, their survival as functional members of intact ecosystems in another matter.

"Over six billioon humans currently weigh upon this planet. According to the most authoritative projection now available (from the United Natuons Population Division), five billion more may be added within 150 years. With every additional child comes additional pressure on the productivity of landscape, turning forests into crop fields and rivers into gutters. Under pressure of this kind, alpha predators face elimination. Already, they're being marginalized, diminished in number, deprived of habitat, leached of genetic vigor, constricted within insufficient refugia, extirpated here, extirpated there. One aspect of that trend is thet they're becoming disconnected from Homo sapiens and we're becoming disconnected from them. Throughout our history as a species -tens of millenia, hundreds of millenia, going on two million years -we have tolerated the dangerous, problematic presence of big predators, finding roles for them within our emotional universe. But now our own numerousness, our puissance, and our solipsism have brought us to a point where tolerance is unnecessary and danger of that sort is unacceptable. The foreseeable outcome is that in the year 2150, when human population peaks at around eleven billion, alpha predators will have ceased to exist -except behind chain-link fencing, high-strength glass, and steel bars. After that time, as memory recedes and the zoo populations become ever more genetically attenuated, ever more conveniently docile, ever more distantly derivative from the real thing, people will find it hard to conceive that those animals were once proud, dangerous, unpredictable, widespread, and kingly, prowling free among the same forests, river, estuaries, and oceans used by humanity. Adults, except a few recalcitrant souls, will take their absence for granted. Children will be startled and excited to learn, if anyone tells them, that once there were lions at large in the very world."

I dread the day that I have to explain to my children the very thing this passage speaks of. I dread it more than anything and for this very reason, I almost can't even comprehend having children, nor seeing the worth in a planet without lions, cheetahs, bears, snakes, sharks, crocs, and gators. Vital to my own happiness, I can only imagine the distress a child will have knowing that the lion cubs reared in the zoo will never be free to live in their natural homes with their natural prey, enjoying their natural behaviors. Who would want to tell their kids that?

I don't want to live to see a world without Asiatic Lions or without Tigers, Bears, or any other creature who inherited this world just as we did. We've taken more than our share. We've stolen it and we're taking the very organisms meant for our children to continue to protect. It's a horrible reality and one that animal-lovers, advocates, biologists, scientists, and everyday people will have to live with -a reality that we will have to understand and place blame of the only shoulders responsible... our own.

Are you ready for this world?

I sure as hell am not...

Thanks for reading,

Ashley