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101 pages

English

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There are many ways that people are harmed by mankind's treatment of and disregard for wildlife, including human suffering and death. Accidents and fatalities can occur from hunting-related activities, while at the same time species are in danger of extinction due to both legal and illegal hunting (poaching) and to the illegal wildlife trade, including the demand for body parts largely focused in Asian countries. The wildlife trade also partially funds terrorist and criminal groups and often fuels corruption. Animals share the dangers of infectious diseases with humans and suffer the consequences of climate change along with us: heat waves, wildfires, and extreme weather. Wildlife (both vertebrates and invertebrates) also benefit mankind by helping to provide a healthy planet in spite of humans' thoughtless efforts to damage it and in spite of what amounts to a "war on wildlife." When people do what they can to help and protect wildlife, we humans almost invariably benefit as much as or more than the animals we help.

Sujets

Sciences de la nature

Sciences de l'environnement

Science

Ecology

Sciences et techniques

Life Sciences

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Publié par	Outskirts Press
Date de parution	12 octobre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781478792352
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Helping Animals Means Helping People
From Hunting and Poaching to Climate Change and Nuclear War
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2017 Harold Hovel
v4.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Outskirts Press, Inc.
http://www.outskirtspress.com

ISBN: 978-1-4787-9235-2

Cover Illustration by Ginger Triplett © 2017 Outskirts Press, Inc. All rights reserved - used with permission.

Outskirts Press and the “OP” logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Chapter 1: Helping Animals
Sport Hunting
Wildlife Killing Contests
Pheasant Stocking
Wildlife Services (formerly Animal Damage Control)
Poaching.
Canned Hunts
Wildlife Refuges
Extinction
Chapter 2: Helping People
Hunting Accidents, Injuries, Fatalities
Lyme Disease
Deer-Car Collisions
Extinction
Poaching, Park Rangers, and Terrorism
Trapping
Chapter 3: Marine Wildlife
Chapter 4: Ocean Wildlife, Human Health, and Human Risk
Chapter 5: Climate Change
Timeline
Dynamics and Consequences of Climate Change
Temperature
Greenhouse Gases
Wildfires
Sea Level Rise
Extreme Weather
Agriculture
Ethics
Helping People and Animals
Diseases: Human Health and Animal Health
Diet and Climate Change
Energy
Natural or Man-Made
Summary
Chapter 6: Nuclear War
Chapter 7: A Few Suggestions
Epilogue
References
Index

FOREWORD
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and err greatly. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
- Henry Beston.
It’s understandable that the message in this book may be hard to read for anybody who cares about animals, or for anyone who cares about people too. I apologize for that, for having to describe so many disturbing, sometimes heart-wrenching, details. The story of wildlife and man’s treatment of it is unfortunately a negative one. There’s no “positive” way to discuss the horrendous poaching of elephants in Africa, or the atrocities of lion, tiger, and bear “farms” in Asia, or the sufferings and deaths of people from infectious diseases that have increased due to climate change. But the first step in solving a problem is knowing that it exists, and hopefully, by describing these problems and how they adversely affect both animals and people, some changes might be brought about and all of us will benefit as a result. The “good news” is that helping animals would be a very positive step toward helping people, as we will show in abundant examples. In the climate change issue, to take just one example, we can wrest positive results out of what would otherwise be very negative; if we can curtail global warming, we have the opportunity to save, literally, hundreds of millions of lives, both animal and human, over centuries of time.
But before we can get to the good news, how people’s lives can be made safer, healthier, and better by changes in the ways we treat animals, we have to look at the ways that we treat them, and the story isn’t pretty. There are some animals that are treated well by a few people, mostly dogs and cats and some horses, but for the most part humanity treats its non-human fellow travelers on the earth in terrible ways, from farm animals languishing on factory farms, to animals in rodeos and circuses, wildlife trying to escape from hunters or trappers, fish taken violently out of their natural habitat, animals driven to extinction, and on and on. But the good news is, at the risk of being repetitive, if we would change how we treat animals, people would benefit as much as the animals, including saving human lives and human suffering.
I had several reasons for writing this book. One is a lifelong desire to do whatever I can to help animals, and the second is the equal desire to help people, and especially to show people this connection between their own well-being and mankind’s behavior toward animals. I reasoned that my experience as a scientist could be put to good use in doing the background research and organizing the data. I decided at the outset that I would be as objective as possible. My thought was that, even though pleas for kindness and respect for animals have been written about by many individuals for many years, it apparently hasn’t worked, hasn’t been enough, and animals continue to be treated badly all over the world. Perhaps showing people that helping animals is really in their own selfish best interest, they would be more receptive to treating them well.
Remaining objective in describing so many areas where animals are being harmed, abused, and killed turned out to be no easy task, and when I came to the topic of hunting and its related topics (predator killing contests, government-sponsored wildlife destruction a.k.a. Wildlife Services, canned hunts, poaching, extinction), I found it impossible to remain objective, especially since many writers before me have pointed out that mankind in effect has an ongoing war on wildlife . All the research I carried out more than reinforced that statement.
The Christian and Jewish God, Yahweh, the Islamic God Allah, the Great Spirit, Budda, and probably others in other Beliefs have all been said to have created the Earth and the animals and people on it. How can we humans who believe in these Faiths assume that we have the right to wantonly destroy what They created, to treat other species with thoughtless or deliberate cruelty, to deny their needs and comforts, to kill them every year in the billions for our own wants and desires?
There are a number of animal-related issues where the connection between helping animals and helping people isn’t obvious, except in the moral and humanitarian sense. Some of these issues are genuinely egregious and horrifying. One example is the “crush videos” wherein scantily-clad women beat, stomp-upon, and torture to death small animals, usually kittens and puppies, selling the video recordings to people that apparently derive sexual pleasure out of watching them. Other, perhaps less egregious issues but not much less, might include animals in entertainment where chimps are beaten to make them perform, horses are tortured by acid placed on their legs to cause them to “high-step” in an attempt to minimize their pain, and dog racing where greyhounds are trained by chasing a chained rabbit and otherwise lead lives of solitude and caged misery between races. Horse racing is another topic, where horses are forced to race at young ages where their bones haven’t fully formed and many hundreds die each year from broken bones or other injuries during races, while the horses that don’t win or who stop winning are often sent to the pain and terror of the slaughterhouse.
In other topics, the benefit to people may exist but may seem marginal. The treatment of circus animals, especially elephants, comes in this category. Elephants are usually captured as infants or adolescents, beaten repeatedly to break their spirit while teaching them tricks, chained in one place for most hours of the day between circus acts (elephants in the wild wander many miles during the day), and abused with the infamous bullhooks with which they are jabbed, grabbed in sensitive body areas, and sometimes beaten. Upon occasion, elephants in the circus get loose and run amok, killing their trainer and others who may be nearby. Of course, humans blame the elephant who dared to rebel this way instead of placidly accepting his or her treatment.
But other issues - hunting, poaching, extinction, factory farming, climate change – clearly affect and harm both people and animals at the same time. This book begins in Chapter 1 with a description of the utilitarian way mankind treats wildlife, to man’s supposed benefit but the animals’ detriment. The second chapter describes how human beings are harmed directly or indirectly by the way wildlife is treated and how many people would benefit if that were changed. The third and fourth chapters deal with marine wildlife: marine mammals, fish, corals, shellfish, etc. Chapter 5 goes into climate change in great detail because of its horrendous potential effects on human and animal life, and Chapter 6 describes the civilization and life-ending possibilities associated with nuclear war. Chapter 7 lists a few ways that we can start to turn things around, to the benefit of all.
In many cases the way animals are treated is sanctioned by powerful interests and even by governments, and trying to change minds and fight entrenched interests is a difficult and long term process. Animal welfare and animal rights organizations have been carrying on this battle for decades, and have made slow but steady progress. Cruelty to animals, for instance, was a minor issue in most U.S. states and generally didn’t cover wildlife, but recognition of it as a moral issue, and perh