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"Sheltering an Animal’s Perspective"
by Gregory M. Simpson
If life is to be preserved on this planet then humans as a species must go beyond caring just about their own companion animals. As Chief Seattle of the Divamish Indians said in 1855, "Whatever happens to the beasts happens also to us. All things are connected."
Imagine waking up one day to learn that every pigeon on Earth was gone. Not likely, you may think, as pigeons seem to be everywhere. Actually, it has already happened to one species of pigeons – the passenger pigeon – probably once the most common bird in the world. These birds lived in enormous flocks, as large as a mile wide and 300 miles long.
As estimated five billion lived in the United States alone, but on September 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Billions of passenger pigeons had been hunted and killed in the U.S., never to be seen again.
An interesting historical fact, you may say, but this must be an anomaly. Sadly, it is not. According to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), in the last few centuries, the rate of extinction has grown 100 to 1000 times the normal pace. Although scientists do not agree on the exact rate of extinction, Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, believes that if extinction continues at its current rate, half of all species could be extinct within one human lifetime. Most telling is that the vast majority of recent extinctions are anthropogenic, i.e., influenced by humans.
Did Man learn a lesson with the extinction of the passenger pigeon? Hardly. Consider the beautiful emerald green Carolina Parakeet. At their peak, they existed in numbers exceeded only by the passenger pigeon – until they, too, were hunted to extinction. Less than four years after the passenger pigeon became extinct, the last Carolina parakeet, named Inca, died in 1918 at the same Cincinnati Zoo.
A 1995 United Nations report cites the total known number of animal extinctions in the last four hundred years to be slightly under five hundred. According to States of the Union: Ranking America’s Biodiversity, Hawaii leads the states with the most extinction. Of the remaining top ten states with the highest rates, seven are in the southern U.S. California and Ohio comprise the other two states with the most extinction. Hawaii also leads the list of states with the highest ratio of threatened species, followed by California and Nevada.
According to state wildlife agency records, more than 100 million animals are killed by hunters each year. That does not include the millions of animals killed for which there are no reports. According to statistics provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, doves and squirrels are America’s most hunted animals, with almost twenty-three million of each killed in 2001. The next largest groups killed are ducks (12,740,000) and rabbits (10,942,000). The remaining almost thirty million of America’s most hunted animals include grouse, quails, partridges, deer, pheasants, geese, and raccoons.
The above statistics also do not reflect the millions of animals that are trapped annually in devices that cause excruciating pain accompanied by frequent tearing of tendons and ligaments and breaking of bones. Many animals chew or twist off their limbs in an effort to escape. Remarkably, the U.S. is one of only a handful of developed nations in which trapping has not been outlawed. According to a report by the USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service, in a year’s time 368,000 wild fox were clubbed, suffocated, or shot after being caught in leghold traps, strangled by snares, or hunted and shot. Almost half a million coyotes and over two hundred thousand opossums are just two other examples of wildlife that shared the same fate.
The late Cleveland Amory, founder of Fund for Animals, wrote in his book, Man Kind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife, "To single out the most persecuted animal on earth is not easy. Man has persecuted them all, and with almost equal abandon." Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, between 1967 and 2002, a total of 1,318 species were listed as endangered or threatened. Of those, nine have become extinct.
For those who care about the slaughter of wildlife, Cleveland Amory ends Man Kind? with the following charge: "The hour is late and the animals’ need is great. It is past high time for all of us to be a voice of the voiceless, to speak for those who can’t, to work together for the most oppressed minority of them all."
A report based on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment estimates that 10 to 30% of known mammalian, amphibian and bird species are at risk of extinction. At the Bronx Zoo, there is a plaque which speaks to this risk and the need to respond. It reads:
In the end
We will conserve
Only what we love
We will love only
What we understand
And we will understand
Only what we are taught
The lesson for today is this: extinct is forever.
For the animals, Gregory M. Simpson
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