Tigers and Whales

It is hard to find words to describe the anger felt when reading about the continued slaughter of two of the most iconic species on the planet. There are apparently only about 1400 wild tigers left in India today. Between 1800 and 1950 something like 160,000 were shot by virile, trophy hunting big game hunters, with numbers reduced to around 40,000 by 1900, and by 1972 down to just 1,800. Hunting, felling of forest habitat for timber and encroachment of ever growing human populations into precious wild areas, brought this beautiful animal to extinction in some parts of India, as well as in Java and Sumatra.



The Indian government in the 1980’s stopped the export of tiger skins, but they still fetch €28,000 on the Tibetan black market, and the demand for tiger body parts for traditional Chinese medicine and aphrodisiacs has been met by the rise of poaching. To preserve the skin, trapped tigers were sometimes killed by the insertion of a red hot poker into the anus. Protection boosted numbers to about 4,000, but standards slipped, more habitat was lost and although tiger tourism boosted income for conservation, it created more problems with tourist vehicles disorienting and killing animals, and continued growth of human habitation to support the tourist trade. Two Indian tiger sanctuaries now have no tigers. At least 12 have been killed by poachers this year already. As numbers fall, so it gets harder to avoid in-breeding and genetic decline.



Now the Sunday Times has exposed the extent of whale hunting over the last few years, at a time when there was meant to be a moratorium. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered, and it seems as if the ban on hunting will be lifted, with certain wealthy whaling countries using dubious financial inducements (including offers to build valuable infrastructure) in third world countries to buy their vote to overturn the embargo.



Man claims to be rational, but it beats me how any sane person can justify or tolerate this sort of extermination of our fellow creatures. Of course species die out, but by natural processes over tens of thousands of years, not by the deliberate action of a deluded self-important branch of the great ape family who has decided over the course of a mere 5,000 years and 200 generations that we humans are more important than anything else. What we are dealing with is not human rationality, but human mass hysteria, and human alienation from the natural world which produced and nurtured our species. We no longer seem to know who or what we are.



There is an urgent need for us to think. Ideas matter. Human rationality requires thought, reflection and silence. Education needs to move on from teaching children how to find an appropriate role in human society, and to start to focus instead on understanding the place and nature of human society within the framework of the natural world.