hunting bank mi
A great loneliness
"The man must treat animals of this land as his brothers.
What is man without the beasts?
If all animals should go,
Man would die from great loneliness of spirit.
For whatever happens to the beasts,
It also happens to man.
All things are connected.
Chief Seattle
Speech, 1854
Most people are aware that we have some serious environmental problems we face in the coming decades. The recent tsunami in Indonesia was a tragic reminder of the fragile balance of nature. There is nothing much we can do to stop this kind of events, except to install early warning systems. But global warming can be stopped or slowed down if and when we stop using fossil fuels and turn to sources renewable energy. The technology is developing or already exists, the wind and waves, the hydrogen fuel and nuclear fusion.
What Never be reversed if allowed to occur is the loss of the diversity of life on our small planet, green and blue. The list of endangered species is growing all the time. Environmental awareness has been a long time to come. In some ways we are victims of our own success, at least in the West. Population growth makes it increasingly difficult to preserve natural areas that are so necessary for the survival of wildlife.
"When I was a boy in Scotland, was fond of everything that was wild …
I loved wandering through the fields to hear the birds sing,
and along the coast to appreciate in the shells and the seaweed,
eels and crabs in the pools when the tide was low;
and best of all, to see the waves in awful storms thundering
on headlands black and craggy ruins of old Dunbar Castle.
John Muir
The first modern environmentalists, in a general way, were probably of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, but the man who made a profound and practical impact was a Scotsman named John Muir. Born in 1838 in Dunbar, not far from where I was born, and he left Scotland to California at the age of twenty. He called himself a "poetic-trap-botanist and ornithologist, naturalist. Today is known as the father of the U.S. national parks. On August 5, 2004, former President Bill Clinton said of him: "One of the Americans who inspired Theodore Roosevelt to conservation of our national forests was the naturalist John Muir, who once said: "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread – places to play and pray, where nature can heal and give strength to body and soul. " In today's fast-paced, high tech world, Muir's words are even more compelling. "
Another influential writer was Henry Beston. In 1928, after spending a year in a small wooden house in the Great Outer Beach of Cape Cod, who wrote an inspirational small called "The Outermost House," which included the following paragraph:
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and see what a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We treat them with condescension by their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken the form of far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and err greatly. For the animal will not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than our move finished and fully equipped, with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, life through the voices never heard.
They are not brothers are not subordinated, they are other nations caught with ourselves in the web of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travails of the earth. "
The Outermost House
Henry Beston
My special interest is the wolf, that most misunderstood of all animals. Down the ages, wolves have been the subject of much fear, hatred and misinformation, and yet, all the larger predators is the least harmful to people. In a way, know more about the nature of wolves than we do about our closest relatives – the great apes – because their descendants are all around, hanging on the front of the fire, or digging holes in the garden.
However, the wolf has been hunted and persecuted almost to the brink of extinction. There have been no wolves in Britain for 300 years. The latter was probably murdered in Helmsdale, about 40 miles north of where I live in the Scottish Highlands.
That the Vikings had a respect for strength and sagacity of wolves is evidenced by the names given to the ancient Norse kings – Beowulf, Beadowulf, Wulfstan, etc. Even ealier is the legend of Romulus and Remus. The twins were found abandoned on the banks of the Tiber by a she-wolf who fed them her milk. When they were older, Romulus built the city of Rome in the place where the wolf had been found. Although there is evidence to support the story has reached us, there are plenty of authenticated stories of similar incidents, including three of Lucknow in India dates from 1844, 1954 and 1976.
A man who was centuries ahead of his time as a protector of animals, was the Italian priest who became pattern of animals and the environment. Francis of Assisi was largely a lone voice at a time praying with the people of Gubbio to feed the infamous wolf that had been causing havoc in their herds. Their perception is even more profound given the merciless cruelty that 'Brother Wolf', as St Francisco was called, has been pursued in the last fifteen hundred years.
In January Anglo-Saxon times are reserved especially for hunting wolves. He was known wolfmonat or month as a wolf. Medieval folklore is filled with stories of wolves with fangs dripping devil and evil, slitty eyes. There are woodcuts of wolves with cloven hoofs, taking young children, and there are children's stories as Red Riding Hood and Big Bad Wolf, and varied tales about werewolves.
The theme of all these stories is in fact a wild animal, but in reality there is no authenticated instance of anyone being attacked by a wolf. I'm not saying it can not happen, just say that you are more likely to be struck by lightning.
It is possible for people and wolves to live in the same world it has been shown by various wolf programs underway in the northwest Montana, the Yellowstone area, central Idaho and North Carolina. There is also a plan, supported by Greenpeace and several politicians to restore the wolf in certain areas of the Scottish Highlands. In the U.S. farmers are again being reimbursed for loss of livestock – which are surprisingly light – by an organization called Defenders of Wildlife. This is what they say on their website:
"Some of the most prominent biologists nationwide have estimated that protecting habitat for wide-ranging predators such as wolves will conserve 90% or more of the biological diversity in general. Because wolves can require home ranges of several hundred square miles, their conservation can help keep a lot of other species using the same habitat.
It was the "organization of defenders which led the successful fight to restore the gray wolf habitat earlier in Yellowstone Park and are currently fighting the recent legislation in Alaska to allow hunting "wolves from airplanes and snowmobiles. This degrading and inhuman practice was banned in 1972 until last year, and ignores the weight of thought scientist. It has received widespread public opposition. Alaska has voted against wolf hunting aircraft assisted on two occasions in 1996 and 2000.
Killing wolves is supposed to increase the number of caribou and elk for the benefit of hunters, but biologists say that the larger species elude wolves for 97% of the time and that by eliminating the sick and elderly animals, predation actually strengthens the gene pool.
Richard Fiennes, the distinguished scientist British biologist summarized in the case of the wolf as follows:
'The wolf appears to retain a respect for human beings, and is reluctant to attack them. Not so the man, who now fears and hates the wolf and doing everything possible to destroy it. Oh, that does not recognize the descendants of the wolf, which has tamed the great virtues and loveable characters of the ancestral wolf. If wolves are extinct in some areas, however, we will deliver what the honor is due to what we can.
The old traditions this creature kind of savagery and ferocity are dilated, and the man's hand is against him, even when it hurts. There are still vast regions of the world, United States and Russia, where it can be left undisturbed; leave to stay. "
The Order of Wolves
Richard Fiennes
When I look at my dogs, I see a wolf
and when I look at a wolf, I see my dogs.
James Donaldson Collins
About the Author
James Collins is an artist and a writer living in the Scottish Highlands with his wife, daughter and three dogs. His interests are history, science-fiction, chess and snooker. He claims to play guitar like a ringing a bell.
