Talk to the animals, they’ll tell you the truth

(photos courtesy Joel Sartore, all rights reserved:  http://www.joelsartore.com/galleries/the-biodiversity-project/)

We’re killing each other and one of us knows why– and doesn’t care

Go ahead, look them in the eye and tell them you don’t give a good damn about them or their habitat, their life, their future. Because it’s the truth. Except for a handful of humans, the rest of us are empty, self-centered, arrogant, egotistical animals who are serial killers, running amok in the neighborhood, and instead of being members of the  “Neighborhood Watch” were part of the “Neighborhood Hunt,” predators taking what we want from Mother Nature, hang the consequences.

Most of the seven billion of us are psychopathic human animals when it comes to the other animals,  some of the most beautiful, brightest and vulnerable animals on the planet, who we are slowing torturing and killing. Why? Not because we don’t intellectually know what we are doing; it’s simply that we can’t stop. We are addicted to wanting and taking what we want. You know. We want cheap or exotic furniture made from trees stripped out of the great forests. We want cheap or expensive food ripped by the boat load from the sea. We want our ridiculous SUVs and their insatiable need for BP and Middle East oil – “drill baby drill.” We are addicted to our own selfish pleasures and will consume anything and everything in order to have our fix.

A typical day of consumption by a human animal on the “hunting” might be: Hey, let’s buy another solid wood, fake-antique armoire, who cares if the bears are dying without their habitat. Or let’s order more horseshoe crabs, who cares if we are over-harvesting the food the red knot birds need. And, let’s have some more shark-fin soup, who cares that we have wiped out 90%of all the sharks on the planet. And to hell with the spotted owls, we need all that clear-cut wood and climate change isn’t an exact science yet … too bad owls. And while the politicians and corporations dither over the cause of the arctic meltdown, let the polar bears fend for themselves, they’re good swimmers. Besides, we don’t go up north much, we prefer to pollute the Florida Keys, the Gulf and the Caribbean.

Apparently, scientists say that cows are a bigger source of polluting gases than the human animal. The world’s 1.5 billion cows emit a massive amount of methane through belching and flatulence, a lot more than we do. Good thing we aren’t in a flatulence competition with cows. Actually, our flatulence is not a problem – wow, that’s a relief – it’s the belching and flatulating that our cars and trucks do that is the real problem. You see, the planet can handle all the emissions from natural sources: volcanoes, forest fires, the oceans, animals; it’s the additional amount we human animals are piling on the ecosystem from coal emissions and the 1.1 billion cars and trucks that is tipping the balance. By 2050, there will be 2.5 billion vehicles.  But who cares, we have to have our cheap cars and cheap gas because those electrical cars just don’t cut it. Too slow, too ugly, too expensive. “So filler up dude, I ain’t paying for a bunch of animal’s  survival, put’em all in a zoo and I’ll drive the kids over to visit them.”