People.
There are 7.5 BILLION people on earth. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t each present a massive carbon footprint. No matter who you think you are or how simply you live your life, everything you do affects this entire planet. There is not one corner of earth we have not affected in a negative way. There is no wild left.
The problem is simple. There are too many people on earth. The solution is not simple. Until we address the fact of human population control we are not going to make serious inroads into saving the environment and the animals we share this world with. It is not chance that the two most polluted countries in the world are the most highly populated countries in the world.
The second problem is attitude. We are all caught up in our little worlds. We live our lives the way our family, our peers, the government and the media tell us to. While details vary, for most people that means having a job, a mini-van, an SUV, a mortgage, a television in every room, and 2.5 children all needing to go to soccer practise NOW and if they can afford it, a vacation to Mexico this year and a new set of golf clubs.
The majority of people deal with the animals and the environment in the same sociopathic manner. Ask an average person what should happen to animals and the odds are (especially after a few martinis) their answer will be:
“They should be left in the wild.”
The question is: “What wild?”
There is no wild. If not through loss of habitat, pollution, climate change or a good old fashion bullet-to-the-head, we are killing every animal on this planet.
To say we aren’t is flying in the face of every National Geographic documentary, conservationist, environmentalist, and scientist in the world.
And yet it is not strictly the complete truth. Are chickens going extinct? Sheep? Cattle? Dogs? House cats? Pigs? Goats?
Recently the cheetah was added to the endangered list. The Panda bear was recently removed from the endangered list.
Why?
We do love our Pandas.
People who say they should be left in the wild are really saying: “we can kill them, eradicate the species and destroy all the animals on earth – just don’t hurt them.”
What is the point of thousands of people protesting the welfare of a single animal while an entire species goes extinct?
Here is an Analogy explaining what needs to be done:
A condensed story taken from the book “David and Goliath”
By Malcolm Gladwell.
The Story of Dr. Jay Freireich.
In 1955 Dr. Freireich took a job most of us would never consider – in the children’s leukemia ward at the National Cancer Institute. In 1955 leukemia was a fast moving cancer that killed most of those children infected. At that time, the children would not die of cancer but they would bleed to death before doctors could ever deal with the cancer problem. The doctors gave massive transfusions to the children in hopes of keeping them alive long enough to stop the cancer. The result was that they just bled out. The cancer ward quite often resembled an abattoir more than a hospital ward. There was blood everywhere. The ward was a horrible place filled with dying children and grieving parents forced to watch their children die slowly from a horrible and painful disease. The turnover rate of doctors in the clinic was high. Most could not take the day to day suffering and constant emotional storm in the ward. The doctors would do what they could to counter pain and sit with the patients and their parents as child after child died.
Doctor Freireich worked in Hematology and he watched this go on month after month. He decided that instead of spending his time with dying patients, he would concentrate on what was killing the children. It was a hard decision. His patients and their parents saw the lack of time he was devoting time to them as a betrayal.
He understood that the human blood supply has platelets. This is what stops blood from flowing in a damaged area. The cancer was destroying the platelets. What he couldn’t understand was why transfusions of new blood didn’t make any difference. He started to spend all his time in the lab when he wasn’t with patients. He discovered the method used to count platelets was flawed. Then he discovered something more important. Platelets were sticking to the glass bottles, rubber tubing and steel needles used for transfusions.
He argued with the hospital to switch to plastic bags and silicone needles and use direct transfusions. The hospital refused. More than once in meetings with his superiors Jay accused them of killing people. The hospital refused to consider his approach so he rallied private individuals to donate blood. The plan worked. Bleeding slowed and stopped in many of his patients and allowed the doctors the time they needed to cure the cancer. Since then, millions of patients have benefited from this understanding.
Many times the hospital threatened to fire him for his untested procedures. His answer back was: “I would rather not work here anyways if that is what you do.”
Worse yet is that animal welfare groups and the government share the same ideals. They are two sides of the same coin. They both use fear, intimidation, ignorance, negativity, and social conditioning to further increase the degree of separation people have with our environment and the animals. In all fairness, most animal rights groups do have the individual welfare of animals at heart. Governments have nothing at heart but themselves. They care about one animal only: humans. Why? Humans pay taxes, give them power and vote. Government’s only care about one thing: the bottom line. The foundation of government thinking is: what is the decision that will make their life easiest today? They don’t need oversight or infrastructure for conservation if it is all just against the law.
These are two separate groups determined to control how you feel and think about animals and we will comment on each separately.
The Problem with the Current Group of Animal Welfare People.
There is a problem with most people that are involved with animals. They generally believe they are the ONLY people in the world capable of saving the animals or being allowed to work with animals. A woman with 100 tigers in cages will stand in front of a news crew and tell them NO ONE should be allowed to care for captive tigers.
Sooooo, stunned as we are, we can’t help but note she has a 100 tigers in cages.
There is NO magic to animals. Just understanding and patience. Anyone can learn to care for any animal and care about any animal. One of the big problems is that this whole world is set up to accommodate people, not animals, so working with animals is not something you just decided to do when you get out of bed this morning. Have a plan. One of the biggest things we need is a leveling of opinions. Although a new generation of animal people are appearing on the scenes who know we need to widen the scale of conservation, the animal world is still full of breeders of that very rare form of animal – the hypocrite.
Do you believe the government is going to help?
In British Columbia, Conservation Officers kill EACH YEAR on average 500 black bears, 165 cougars, and 125 brown bears. This does not include the roughly 1800 wolves that are killed in BC each year. The total wolf population in BC is between 8000 to 12000 animals. If you have a problem with an animal in BC and you call the Conservation Service, you are killing that animal. The ONLY thing Conservation Officers conserve in BC is our way of life. The Ministry of Environment itself is literally a death machine. The environment is nothing more to them than a resource. A few years back they began a wolf cull because wolves were killing off the last caribou and elk in certain areas of BC. The reason the caribou and elk were declining was because the Ministry of Environment was letting lumber companies like Tolko Industries destroy habitat. Worst of all is that the BC Government is spending $2000 an hour to rent helicopters and shoot wolves from the air (one of the most painful methods possible) and at the same time saying this is the most affordable solution and only solution. So, BC tax money is being used to subsidize logging companies by shooting wolves. This is all based on the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Hypocrites.
The money rolls in, the wheels stay greased.
Now, I could say a lot of things. Sugar coating the problems isn’t going to help. Governments aren’t going to change. The media isn’t going to change. If you pardon me for saying, they would both sell their own grandmothers for a nickel.
The only way things are going to change is if we make them change as a society.