I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I prefer living wildlife to not. Scientific articles and important commentary pops up and I’ve gotten a few useful leads from the site, but you have to weed through thousand comments of people screaming at each other’s walls.
One question in bold that got hundreds comments and ten times as many likes and dislikes was, simply, “WHY DO LIBS LOVE EVERY SPECIES MORE THAN THEIR OWN?”
Comment sections are hell for faith in humanity. I don’t know who the libs are exactly, but in a world of heavy industry and mounting dangers posed to most species, people who love animals more than ourselves are absolutely needed.
I found this to be an insulting question, insulting to those who don’t vote Democrat, or whatever the definition of libs is. In my travels, I’ve found just as many conservative folks who care for and see animals as equals.
An ecologist of mixed Raramuri and Western Apache descent recently said to me, “Humans are the dumbest of the animals.”
Everything is political except love for animals. That is human. Some don’t like them and I get it. That gene wasn’t passed along, or memory has lapsed from all the time we spent as early Homo sapiens trying to figure out what the other animals were up to. I knew a woman who couldn’t stand birds, who said just look at them, the way their heads tick around, their filthy feathers crawling with parasites. Ok, that might be human, too; we’re an anxious and strange lot.
I’m leaving soon to teach a three-day writing workshop about animals at the edge of Zion National Park. When I first announced the class I worried it wouldn’t be taken seriously, sounding too whimsical, too fun. Classes that are called for right now are those helping scientists write for the public, and those teaching poetry about climate or political change. But animals? Who remembers them?
Many do. Just look at The Last World on Nothing’s roster; it’s a nest of animal writers feathered with astronomers.
Animal stories are needed now more than ever. The fierceness, the freshness, the wildness. Splash them up on walls, write them down in notebooks, tell a neighbor about a bird you saw in the neighborhood. Our collective muscles of empathy feel like they’re weakening. We are becoming so human that we forget to look over our shoulder. For our needs, there might as well be only a vague curation of wild species left, not the rich variety that all living things crave, not the biological vastness and complexity that cares for tender networks of food and water we rely on. You can imagine a world of selected trees, domestic animals, and little else, and many people might not notice the change, the 99.99% extinction. Not at first. Then would come rapid trophic cascades and we’d all be done for, the Earth would have to start again.
A few weeks ago I was working on a panther story in southern Florida, spending my days tracking and returning to the city at night. The juxtaposition was whiplash. Days were blinding with abundance: waterbirds, vultures, alligators, and the tracks and scat of bears and panthers. The largest panther on record in the state was tranquilized, weighed, and collared at the same time I was out, coming in at 167 pounds. This profusion is set in a matrix of swamps and pine-palm-cypress jungles on large swaths of uninhabitable (to us) conservation lands.
Nights were traffic, open-air Cuban jazz bars, and all you can imagine of everything human all the time. This led me to a region of street art in Miami where one night I set out to photograph paintings on walls that represent animals or signs of animals I had identified in the swampy backcountry. It took hardly two hours and I found almost everything from spiders and butterflies to wildcats, bears, hummingbirds, spoonbills, and pink flamingos. They were painted down alleys and on the corners of buildings, an alligator smiling, a raven on a door, a raccoon on a lamppost.
Even in our steel and glass bastions we remember the animals, and we love them, maybe more than we love ourselves. Which is needed.
Image: street art in Miami’s Wynwood District by muralist Tirso Paz, known as Bublegum; photo by me.
Oh absolutely Craig! Thank you! As children, we all naturally loved animals. We used farm animals to learn sounds, and count. Our clothes were adorned with baby animals. We were read books and listened to music with animals themes. Zoos are often a first family outing. Then somewhere along the way, we have forgotten their value. We decided they were here FOR us not WITH us. They are so special and so important and mustn’t lose sight of that.
One little experience that sticks out to me after reading this is about a visit to a trail in Arches NP. We arrived just before a bus of a tour group and joined them as we all filtered along the trail to a double arch. The group appeared to be made up of elegantly dressed, urbanites, possibly Persian. Shoes were dainty and barely adequate even for the groomed trail. As we all milled about, mumbling in various languages, I looked down and spotted a jack rabbit sitting just off the trail. It seemed confused about all of us. Were we a threat? Should it remain still and thereby invisible or should it run like hell. It finally decided to hop away quietly. Even this movement didn’t attract the attention of anyone. I felt kind of like I perceived this creature feeling at the time. What was I doing here among all these people. Many of them appeared to be unimpressed with the majesty of the arches. Maybe I’m full of it by imagining others’ thoughts and feelings, but there you are.
Thank you for this piece. Your big question in bold comes up often in my line of work too as a government scientist. It seems to me that the question and the attempted answers usually miss the mark because the question is based on a false premise. At least in my experience of more than three decades hearing this kind of thing working as an agency scientist, planner and land manager. For folks in my line of work, the question is not properly framed but rather based on an assumption that we like plants and animals more than people or that we think other species are more important. That is a false premise. In fact, many of us scientists and others with a similar point of view like people too much and the concern is that without some of these important plants and animals and their ecosystems that are endangered, then we as a species are on a trajectory of extinction as you mention in your piece. That of course is the main concern and a self serving one that we should all be able to get onboard with unless these people you mention are OK with our eventual extinction. Extinction of the other species is just how we get there and nothing more if we don’t better educate some of these misguided folks and work to fix this big misunderstanding. These folks certainly do not see what is coming if our society does not reverse course partly because this is too far away for them to see and partly because we fail to explain it in a way to help them to see this truth for what it is.
Plants seem to me to be the most intelligent life form on the planet. They exist in a state of reciprocity with their habitat. Animals are a close second. Some humans are more like animals. Maybe they are the ones that love animals the most.
Thank you so much, Craig, for noticing our furred brethren. Humans are animals, maybe stupid, many kind.
If you wander back to la Florida, please come to our neck of the woods (Ocala) – Silver Springs and the Ocala National Forest are worth a visit!