On Not Killing our Environmental Puppies
Yesterday, your neighbor’s yellow lab gave birth to a litter of puppies.
Today, the owner has made up his mind to do one of the following: to turn them outdoors to fend for themselves in the heat and take their chances with the traffic; to poison them outright; or to simply ignore their whining there in the next room until they die from starvation.
The dogs are his. They live, however briefly or unwell, on his private property. But if we heard about irresponsible treatment of creatures in this way, we’d think it fitting that the local sheriff visit your neighbor to explain to him the consequences of reprehensible treatment to animals. Animal cruelty is a behavior universally abhorred — against certain cherished and cuddly animals, at least.
And yet some very vocal people of our times are convinced that a godless, liberal, socialist one-world-government conspiracy is ramming down our throats the notion that other animals than pets have “rights” that limit how they ought to be treated.
As much as I love my dog, in the larger scheme of things, the songbirds and bats that eat mosquitos and Japanese beetles along Goose Creek play a more crucial role in maintaining the resilience of our local habitat and natural community than my dog, whose single role is to eat and cavort and to tell me I’m a special being, and I believe him.
I don’t love Blue Jays in the same way I love my pets, but I honor them and acknowledge they have a job to do in this complicated puzzle of life, and I am convinced that they have a right to as much health as my field and forest can give them.
The more we learn about the role played by the diversity of living things in our woods, soils and oceans, the more we come to value the contribution of services performed by that natural mix and balance. We should consider it abhorrent as killing puppies that a natural community of plants or animals be damaged for personal convenience or profit, if such injury can be avoided or mitigated.
If we relinquish to greed or indifference the fate of other plants or animals that we’ve not personally admired or look the other way from exploitation of ecosystems in countries where the people are not like us, then we have abandoned our obligation to build a livable future and failed in our role as stewards.
There are those amongst us who run the risk of becoming so fixated on the sanctity of their personal freedom that they would rather die — of a poisoned planet, an abandoned responsibility of the highest order, or to “accidents of nature” from conditions they helped create — than to work in harmony and common purpose for the life and the living planet we’ve been given.
That personal rights have recently been so grotesquely elevated in the media radar might be a good thing if that prominence helps us establish limits very soon to just how much one man, one faction, one corporation or one country can be allowed unfettered rights to bring about the loss of an ecosystem or the extinction of a species. Our own species might well be on that list.
Nature is not our own personal kingdom, and the wild west with limitless space to despoil and buffalos to shoot for fun are gone. We are not kings, and we are not cowboys. There is no wilderness left to move to. This is all the rations we have left for the duration, and it might be a good idea not to kill, starve or ignore our horses til we get where we’re going.
Next time you feel the warm fuzzies snuggling with the family pet, consider the that, by your lifestyle, your votes and your values, you determine every day which creatures live and which ones die — usually in a land far, far away. And we cannot live here without the diversity of things alive as much as your children. Forests; meat animals; earthworms; oysters; tuna; caribou: they may not greet you at the door wagging their tales, but they are worthy of honor for their own sake, and are links in the chain of life we still so poorly understand.
Originally drafted in July 2011 but apparently never published in my blog, Fragments from Floyd, as intended. I think the Michael Vick fighting-dog issue was above the fold at the time. That matter turned up the volume from animal lovers, many who were at the same time opposed to any environmental or natural species protections. It seemed incongruous to me, hence this screed. Unfortunately, the point of this essay has not been dulled by the passage of time or changes in who is ostensibly in charge of the commons we share.
