Long rant ahead- So these thoughts that have taken me away from my writing are probably going to be nothing more than some sort of subjective moralist, rambling, bunk, but I am writing them anyway. Somehow tonight, the things I read the other night about the history of rhino hunting tied into indigenous peoples, music, consumerism, capitalism, and my dogs. As divergent as the topics may be, it all makes perfect sense to me. It always has. Since this is only a cursory attempt at putting these thoughts down, they will be simplistic at times, and there will be some inaccuracies, but I hope to still be able to convey the main points, and hopefully without offending anyone. What first….let’s do the order they came to me. Rhinos have been hunted for their entire existence basically, but for many ages it was as a part of subsistence survival. No doubt early peoples traded in animal parts, but he part traded were what was from the subsistence hunts, the animals were not hunted en masse for profit. While native tribal peoples carried on their way of life for millennia, other peoples were developing into larger societies, which the history books have always been referred to as civilization. Some Asian expansionists were the first to encounter the large numbers of rhinos in India that they indiscriminately killed for pleasure. A king, the actual title escapes me, bragged about killing several hundred over a period of years, this being in the 12-1300s. The killing continued over the centuries. One by one each region lost its native rhinos to senseless hunting. As late at the 19th century a scientific minded man visited the Indian ruler and was invited to the trophy room. Upon entering the man was sickened by the large number of rhino ‘trophies.’ He said to the king that he was taken aback and pointed out to him that there were only a few hundred of the species left. The king replied “that is good, than there will be enough for me to hunt until I die.” I am fairly certain we all know the story of the African rhino. It faired better for a while, but once the Europeans set up shop on the continent, they where hunted in numbers too great to tell. All for no reason. One hunter boasted about having killed 15 rhino before noon. Then I read the story of a rhino back it the 70s 0r 80s that ended up in a sanctuary, it may have even been DSWT. The rhino became a favorite of everyone. He loved attention, loved his daily mud baths and was like a pet there. The regular handler moved away for a bit and another person was over seeing the rhino for part of the days. This person beat the rhino. Daily. Eventually the rhino struck back at the person. When he did, he was unaware of an older man who walked between him and his target. Then man’s leg was punctured by the horn and he bled to death in the hospital that night. The rhino was banished to a far corner of the park. A few days later he came upon some lions and because of his being raised by people and his good nature, he thought it was playtime. He was killed by the pride. Because someone was an asshole to a playful friendly rhino, the rhino fought back and for no fault of his own, the rhino was banished and killed. I do not know what happened to the caretaker, but I can tell you what I would have done to him. Then I came home and was greeted by my dogs. As I pet them and we played, I saw in their eyes the same as what I saw in the eyes of the rhino in the picture. Call it innocence, call it love, call it spirituality, you really cannot call it anything because it has no name, life maybe, whatever it is, it was the same, You see that same thing in the eyes of every animal, every bird, every cetacean. You know where you do not see that? In every person. But in the animals’ eyes you see something if you are willing to look, or if you are open to understand it or blessed to see it. A cow loves being scratched too. So where did we lose our compassion? Why was it lost in every “civilization”? As I have said, civilization is by definition removal from nature; and the further removed from nature the less empathy for other living beings. Many of the early civilizations, any where in the eastern hemisphere, had little regard for human life, let alone animals. At one point during the Age of Reason it was declared by the church that animals had no soul, have no desires, and feel no pain. If the church declared it, it must be so. But the Romans had slaughtered animals thousands at a time, so the church cannot be fully blamed. Indigenous peoples had/have an entirely different attitude toward animals. I am not so naive to think there was a utopia among native peoples, but in the vast majority of those peoples, they were far closer to it than the civilized ones ever have been. This is also not to say that these peoples were not corruptible, for once Europeans had dug their talons into those peoples, the same tribal peoples began killing animals in large numbers to satisfy European demand be it tusks in Africa or beaver skins in America. But before that corruption, there was no need to kill in unsustainable numbers. Tonight I was listening to some music from various indigenous peoples and that of peasant/pagan Europe. Some of the music was ceremonial, some celebratory, all of it grounded to the earth, but at the same time reaching the ethereal. Studies have been done about the notes of music and it is rather fascinating to read about sound, its vibrations, and its effects. But in this music there is a connection to animals, loosely, but it made sense at the time. In the music of the pipes of Jou Jouka or the Whirling Dervish or American Indian pow wow, Yoruba, Santeria, Haitian Voodoo or anything with a beat or rhythm there is also a dance. The dancer is the medium between music and the earth. The music takes the listener on a journey from the profane to the sacred and within the world of the sacred are the animal spirits. These peoples did not have monotheistic beliefs, not even polytheism for that matter, but were animistic in that their “religion” was in all that was living. That is why they did not kill elephants just to carve their tusks, they carved the tusks of elephants they killed for survival. They did not hunt bison in the hundreds of thousands to create and fuel a market for buffalo blankets; they used the hides of those they killed for warmth. Watch the bees, butterflies, and ladybugs on a summer day. It is the natural world, like watching cheetahs, impalas, and hyenas. We live in a time thousands of years removed from living within our environment. How do we change this apathetic way of thinking that has been building for centuries? There is no going back and sometimes I fear no hope, just a prolonging of the inevitable. No matter how far removed form it we live, we are part of the earth. We are a species on the earth. We fit in with the rest of the species as we are classifiable- we are mammals. But more importantly to recognize, we are parasites. We are the world’s largest parasites. We take on a daily basis and we spawn thousands upon thousands of more every day. And not only do we take, we take more than we can ever need, and we destroy to make more things we do not need, so we have taken again, and without mercy as we watch orangutans burn and gorillas massacred to take more land to make even more unneeded products that we buy without giving a thought and when we hear something bad is happening we pause for a second but go right back into overdrive taking, taking, and taking and only giving back waste and pollution. And then we hear that there are only 5,000 tigers left in the world and we say, that’s a shame, someone should do something about it and we buy the very thing that the tigers are killed for. Then we hear there are 3000 tigers left and we say that is a shame, someone should do something, and we are told why they are being killed, but we again buy the very thing they are killed for. Then we hear there are 300 tigers left, and we say someone should do something and we buy the product again. And then we hear the last tiger died and we say that it is a shame, someone should have done something, as we buy the product that killed all the tigers and the product that will cause the next extinction. And with each extinction we will say the same thing but never slow down enough to reflect upon it or to understand that we have given the earth over to capitalistic corporate greed who have accelerated the demise of the planet to a pace that the destruction is too rampant and widespread, the apathy engrained so deep that the only way it is ever going to end is if the earth does it itself.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:57:19 +0000
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