January 2008
I don’t get it.
I’ve been collecting photos of each kind of mammal (Each "order") for a class I’ll be doing this fall. While I was searching on-line, I have often come across some pictures that either broke my heart or just saddened me. Big strong "manly men" posing proudly in front of an animal they have just killed. Like a lovely Arabian Oryx. Or big strong manly men clubbing a helpless one-day old seal pup to death over the head with a pick axe. (Mustn’t mar the lovely white fur with a humane bullet, now, must we??!) I just don’t get it. How does killing an animal prove your manliness? Hand-to-claw/fang/tooth would be a better show, I’d think. Now if he could catch that Oryx on foot, wrestle it down, and then kill it- bare-handed- without being skewered by the horns first, that would be something. But a shot from a high-powered, laser-guided rifle from half a mile away????… that’s no contest. Nothing to be proud of.
I actually wept as I looked at the piles of bloodied seals in Canada, and the gorgeous "safari trophies", and couldn’t help but ask God for forgiveness. This scene must just break His heart. He declared it all "Very good", and here we are, behaving like..well, humans. (Animals don’t do that!)
It’s enough to make me ashamed to be a human being sometimes.
I don’t get it.
I’ve been collecting photos of each kind of mammal (Each "order") for a class I’ll be doing this fall. While I was searching on-line, I have often come across some pictures that either broke my heart or just saddened me. Big strong "manly men" posing proudly in front of an animal they have just killed. Like a lovely Arabian Oryx. Or big strong manly men clubbing a helpless one-day old seal pup to death over the head with a pick axe. (Mustn’t mar the lovely white fur with a humane bullet, now, must we??!) I just don’t get it. How does killing an animal prove your manliness? Hand-to-claw/fang/tooth would be a better show, I’d think. Now if he could catch that Oryx on foot, wrestle it down, and then kill it- bare-handed- without being skewered by the horns first, that would be something. But a shot from a high-powered, laser-guided rifle from half a mile away????… that’s no contest. Nothing to be proud of.
I actually wept as I looked at the piles of bloodied seals in Canada, and the gorgeous "safari trophies", and couldn’t help but ask God for forgiveness. This scene must just break His heart. He declared it all "Very good", and here we are, behaving like..well, humans. (Animals don’t do that!)
It’s enough to make me ashamed to be a human being sometimes.
But then I find a picture of a man bottle-feeding an orphaned pangolin, or a group of zookeepers celebrating the birth of a baby aardvark, or a fireman giving a burnt koala a drink of water from his water bottle. Or a man running in front of a bulldozer, uprooting the rare ground-orchids they are about to pave over, so they can be transplanted. Then I sigh, and think… OK….there’s still hope.
It may be a lost cause. Humans have screwed up just about every thing they’ve touched. I might not even make the slightest little difference in the big scheme of things. But, when I die and get to heaven, I don’t think God is going to ask me if I saved the Philippine Eagle from extinction. He won’t ask me how many acres of rainforest I prevented from being destroyed. He won’t ask me if I was able to reverse the greenhouse effect. I think He’ll just ask me if I kept trying, if I did everything I could.
And I’ll say yes.
And wipe a tear.
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