One day you will miss me....

One day you will miss me.

You just don't know it yet.  Why would you, when you don't know about me or care about me?  You order your world with no thought or care about me or anyone else.  It is all about you.  How can you love anything beyond yourself when you have no interest or respect for anything else but yourself and your own needs?

One day you will miss me.

When bruised and battered flower petals litter the ground, ripped by the swathe of metal wreaking its first attack. Clods of earth over turned, never to be fertile again, not whilst you are here.  Greens, browns, purples, ochres and blues to be replaced by giant concrete and steel monstrosities.  My what a colourful world you are creating, sterility will be the order of the day from now on!

One day you will miss me.

Whilst you lounge in your characterless boxes, pumping out your filth and rubbish whilst sucking up every resource to fuel your warm bland interiors I have nothing.  My home, my forest, my trees; they mean nothing to you but money!  The grandeur of the tallest twisting bough and the life that lives therein escapes you and your myopic view.

One day you will miss me.

And one day it may be one day too late.  My world destroyed; your greed and lust for the inane insatiable. I have nowhere left.  You even fight with your own kind; rape, murder and to conquer is your mantra for all living things.  Honestly, how can you have love for other beings when you have no love for your own?

One day you will miss me.

And that day is now, for I have gone, never to return.  I join the prestigious ranks of the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon.  I am missed now, but I wasn't cared about when I was beautiful, vibrant and alive. Now I am just a specimen behind glass and in print for those to read about.  'Too late, too late!' will be your lament.  But, when your children and grandchildren ask you 'why?', what will your answer be?

How do you like your fur?

How much do you love your clothes?  Do you buy them to be part of the crowd, to be an individual, or just to keep covered and warm?  What about your shoes, trainers, boots etc.?  What do you look for in these? Do you wear cottons, wools, synthetics or leather and fur? 

I don’t particularly have a problem with people wearing anything they want; however, I do have an issue when obtaining that piece of clothing comes at the welfare expense and the outright suffering of an animal for it.  When you are buying your little silver fox fur coat or wrap are you in the know about where that fur came from, and more importantly, how the animal was euthanised and skinned. 

We talk about, and with good reason too, the importance of fair trade and ensuring those in less fortunate countries are paid an honest wage for honest work.  But what about the animals?  What about their welfare?  When figures revealed recently that the illegal trade in animals reached $19 million per year, you have to start questioning where these animals are going, and more importantly why is the trade becoming so lucrative. Too many times over the last five years have I seen pictures and videos of animals being skinned alive, left to bleed to death afterwards.  Can you even begin to imagine the tortuous pain that must be?  Think of how bad it hurt when you were a kid and grazed yourself, or if you have ever had an accident where you’ve cut yourself.  Now imagine someone deliberately removing your skin.  It doesn’t bear thinking about does it?  It is cruel and abhorrent. Yet, how many actually think about that?  Those knock off cheap suede ugly boots you wear, the ones all furry inside, well it has been shown that often the fur comes from animals that have been subjected to just this sort of violence.  Nice, huh?  Please, I urge you, do take a moment to watch these video’s, just type in animals skinned alive and you will find them I assure you.  Watch as they cut the skin and rip it off the animal that is screaming and writhing in agony; watch as it looks on afterwards with nothing but eye lashes framing beautiful pain filled and bewildered eyes as blood oozes out of its body; it’s very life draining from it as it shivers in pain.  Then when you next go shopping, I want you to remember that video, the pain of that animal, the beauty of that animal and ask yourself is the money you are paying out really worth it? 

But it doesn’t stop there.  There are those that want traditional Chinese medicines that use parts of animals, which are mostly endangered.  Things like tigers testicles, or bear bile.  Yum yum!  Then there are those all-important ornaments.  Roll up, roll up, get your ivory here!  The ivory trade last year had a record number of cases.   Not just from living animals either, the want for ivory has been so high that ivory has been stolen from museums.  In fact the zoological museum in Cambridge replaced the ivory of it’s specimens with replicas and put the real items away for safe keeping.  There have been record numbers of elephants and rhinoceros being poached for their ivory and one has to wonder what on earth is wrong with us to keep doing this.  Are we really that stupid and learn nothing?  Even the most greedy must understand supply and demand and that you have to keep a stock if you want to keep that market…so why the sudden increase?

Why, and I am trying my level best to not insert words of a cursing nature here, do the governments of these countries not step in to stop these horrible things happening?  Why do we continue to help prop up this trade by not doing much?  We can’t just stick two fingers up at the countries doing this, as we wouldn’t be able to monitor the situation.  Clearly the highly publicised glamorous campaigns by PETA aren’t getting the message across well enough; and when our own governments don’t even seem keen on putting money into stopping what is a growing amount of illegal animal products being imported into this country, they have yet to decide on funding for the National Wildlife Crime Unit.  Only 6 Conservative MP’s even voted in favour of protecting the environment and biodiversity.  Does that not shout that our government isn’t bothered?  Maybe next time we go out and vote we should boycott the main parties for those that are actually committed to doing something positive for the future; but in the meantime to make any difference we need to get the message out to people that this trade is NOT acceptable and will not be tolerated.

Bring Old School Biology Back!

So I have just finished my exam for Mammalogy.  I have to admit I took this module having not done much on vertebrates previously, in fact I've more or less been more specialised to invertebrates and botany until recently.  I have surprised myself at how much knowledge I have gleaned this last few months.  I now know about animals around the world, the weird, the wonderful and everything in between.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't completely without knowledge about mammals before hand, being someone who is interested I have done a fair amount of reading in my time, as well as watching the great god that is David Attenborough many times on the idiot box.

However,  when talking to people in general conversation it shocked me how much general lack of knowledge there is about mammals.  There are those that think birds are mammals and that bats are birds!  This isn't as unheard of as you may think.  And, given the fact that these days most children will walk out of school never having dissected an insect, let alone an amphibian, reptile or mammal, and that these same students will if capable go to university and if they study biology again will probably never physically do a dissection of an animal, it isn't all together surprising.

I do not like the needless killing or suffering of animals.  No sane person who reveres the natural world we live in would.  However to understand the processes and the physiology of an animal, and to even begin to relate that animal to being similar to you and I, we must look at revisiting some of the odd school biology.  I have even been questioned on my ethics of using pitfall traps or ethanol to kill invertebrates quickly to later be able to reliably identify them (some have to be dissected, so that you can identify them by their genitalia).  This worry about dissection is because of peoples sensibilities about killing an animal.  How many of these people will only wear leather shoes, eat a nice fat steak, or enjoy a weekly roast meal on a Sunday?  Are these people ever leaving their homes, driving a car, riding a bike?  How many poor little ladybirds are squished on the motorways in these peoples daily commutes?  We have to use common sense.  If we want people to know about mammals and the welfare of them, the workings of them, then we need this in schools again; rather than having a culture where we become ever more divorced from the animals that often end up on our plates or on our backs.   Ask a young child where milk comes from, and you are most likely to be told it came from a well known supermarket; many children have never been to a working farm and as we are at an age and economic climate where it becomes a necessity for parents to work more and more hours the family discussions suffer, and these issues definitely become something for the back burner.  Before you condemn me I am not talking about mass murder of lots of animals for dissection purposes, but you know there are plenty of rats and chicks bred, gassed and frozen to feed snakes, owls etc, why not have a few given to a school once a year so that young people get a real idea of science, and not just what they see in a book or more likely a youtube video.  Ask a kid where the pancreas is, or the liver or spleen and see if they know?  Or what their functions are.  Learning it from a book just doesn't give it the context you need to make it concrete in your learning.

Biology should be fun, it should be practical with lots of hands on experience; if we want to be leaders in this field then we have to be realistic about the subject, and make it something that is tangible to all that study it.   Maybe then we will become more interested in the species around us, and feel more closely connected.

Evolution is real and the world is actually round.

I have friends of many religious back grounds and many more that are atheist or agnostic.  I have my own personal beliefs that I feel do not fit in anywhere and really I don't feel anyone needs to have them inflicted on them.  What really gets my goat though, is when people use their beliefs to 'justify' trashing science.  It also irks me when people use their religion to OK their behaviour.  I will talk more about that later.

But first why have I started this particular blog?   I came across an image on a social networking site that I regularly use.  It was posted on a page that I regularly receive updates and images of wildlife and sometimes domestic animals in many different guises. The image that was loaded yesterday was this:

My word, rather than this image getting the reaction it deserved such as 'damned right' (in my opinion), it had reactions such as 'language!', 'it would be okay if it didn't contain that awful word', 'this is disgusting, you should remove it' and the worst of all 'if evolution exists why haven't we evolved anymore, because we didn't in the first place'.  WHAT???!!!!  This provoked me to respond and point out that we have been changing over time, but I guess this moron expected us to all have grown two more limbs and have the ability to teleport across time and space just by rubbing our left ear, by now.

How can people seriously question the science of this?  Why do some people think that other species evolve but we don't?  Where is the sense in that?  I know plenty of religious people who can reason evolution and see that their religions, or in particular their books, are not necessarily all fact.  How can they be if they are written by different people.  Take for example the Last Supper.... wasn't the accounts of this all slightly different, because if even that event did take place we are dealing with human perception of said event. How I perceive something isn't necessarily the truth or how another would perceive it.   Just because a book said the world was created in such and such time does not make that book true.  Just because JK Rowling said there was a magical game of quiditch does not mean I am about to try and fly on a broom stick out of my bedroom window in the hope that I can make the team.

What worries me most about this thinking, and in particular when faced with the picture above, is most people are more worried about bad language, or that you know, us scientists are lying to the masses about evolution.  They don't see the message, they concentrate on the wrong things.  We HAVE FUCKED UP.  No doubt about it.  We are still doing so!  Until we get our heads out of the sand and stop worrying about trivial inane nonsense then we will continue to do so.  What is really sad is that above post was indeed removed.  People felt more strongly about the word 'fucked' than they did the actual message.

When people start to recognise that there is evolution at work, that when we intervene in a bad way like habitat destruction just so we can have those nice little homes or those big fat juicy heart attacks on a plate bugers, that 'God' isn't going to just wave a magic wand and it won't just be okay; only when we start to recognise this will progress be made.  That we are and have responsibility to protect.  We need to move on from the line of thinking that the planet is indeed flat and that we can do as we please; as a born again Christian once told me 'I can be as much of a jerk as I want and it's okay 'cause god will forgive me.'  We can't be jerks anymore, we have to be responsible for our actions and be grown up about it.  We have to accept that evolution is indeed part of our life and stop trying to pretend that Santa Clause hid the bones in the earth as some big trick to play on us.