If you ask me, the belief in animal rights, and the actions of the animal liberation brigade, are detrimental to the conservation process. There are many within the animal liberation movement who will argue against this statement. They will hide behind the mantle of conservation and pretend to be a vital and indispensable part of saving our environment and our wildlife. They will tell you that saving every single animal is good for the wild populations and for the environment. Further, they seem to think that they have the monopoly on loving animals and caring for wildlife. However, nothing could be further from the truth than these animal liberation claims.
The core tenants and goals of animal liberation are counter-productive to effective conservation, and in many cases, make it impossible to achieve it. To adopt the principles of animal liberation, on a world wide scale and in all societies and communities, would be to condemn vast numbers of wild animals to a slow and painful death from starvation and create ecological disasters of a biblical scale. In simple terms, you cannot have animal liberation and effective conservation, too; you must choose between one and the other and conservation is the only real, logical and workable choice.
Some readers might be asking themselves, “That can’t be right; surely saving all animals will satisfy the cause of conservation, too?” The answer, to this question, is a firm and irrefutable, NO!
True and effective conservation involves the management of all species, natural resources and environments to preserve biodiversity. You will notice that a key component of conservation is management and the paramount objective is to preserve biodiversity; it is NOT to protect every single member of a handful of ‘cute’ or ‘marketable’ species at the expense of all the other species.
Yet, one of the key goals of the animal liberation movement, and I am quoting from the goals stated on animal liberation’s own website, is:
“…to fight for all non-human animals until they are able to live lives of their choosing, free from intervention, use and abuse by humans.”
Note that this goal states “free from intervention” and this includes free from the management component of conservation. When you examine that goal, and compare it to the key conservation tool of management, then it is easy to see that conservation and animal liberation cannot coexist and that animal liberation does not support conservation. This is because one relies upon the management of animals, plants and the soil by man and the other strives for a total ‘hands-off and let it sort itself out’, approach.
Animal liberation blindly assumes that Mother Nature will sort out our mess for us, but can she? To answer this question, you only have to realise that man has already, irrevocably, changed the environment on earth and the evidence is all around us. We have built millions and millions of farms, homes, factories, roads, canals, airports, seaports, power stations, dams and a host of other facilities that support our civilised and developing world. In addition, the rate of construction is increasing, exponentially, as the human population also increases exponentially. In the process of all of this, we have deprived wildlife of much of their natural range, polluted a lot of what remains, introduced foreign species of animals, plants and insects, driven some animals to extinction and, seriously threatened the survival of others.
In general, the existence of civilised man has totally upset the balance of nature. We have, effectively, killed off Mother Nature so we cannot rely on her. We could argue about the morality of this, discuss the depravity of mankind and civilisation, but that would be missing the vital point that something effective and workable needs to be done to counteract, or at least, minimise the damage and save our wildlife, and the clock is ticking!
On top of this situation, the human population is now increasing at a frightening, and exponential, rate. More people living on the planet means even less land for wildlife and further degradation of the environment. We have caused all of these changes with the growth of our civilisation and so it is our responsibility to try and minimise the effects of our growing population on the natural world. It is simply impossible, and unrealistic, to think that man and nature can exist in some sort of hands-off equilibrium when there is no longer a natural balance to effect that. We destroyed the balance when we first climbed down from the trees, learnt how to make fire and weapons to protect and feed ourselves, started wearing animal hides to keep warm, built shelters from the weather and the wildlife and began to declare ourselves to be civilised. For thousands of years we have been on this path and, even though most of us would like to see the natural world prevail, the fact is it won’t even survive if we humans do not accept responsibility and take action to minimise the effects of our modern world on the natural world.
However, if we were to adopt the animal liberation view and remove all human intervention in the lives and affairs of animals, where would we end up? We would end up with one ecological disaster after another, the loss of a great deal of vital habitat and the extinction of many important species. Some animal populations would explode and start eating themselves out of house and home, and others would succumb to the pressures of trying to coexist with man’s expanding populations and the competition of their more resilient animal ‘brothers’. To take our hands off the wheel of the conservation ‘bus’ on the winding mountain road that we are trying to travel, simply because some misinformed passengers believe that the bus will drive itself, would be to invite a catastrophic crash into the valley below.
In future parts to this post, I will look at a couple of real-world examples of how animal liberation is interfering with working conservation programs and the disastrous effects this has had so far and the terrible end that awaits us if we do not reverse this trend now. Later, I will look at a couple of examples of how management of wildlife has had remarkable success and how some species have come back from the brink of extinction to become numerous once more.
The first example I will address is the plight of the African elephant in Kenya and will compare this situation to elephant populations and conservation in several other African countries.
(To be continued)
(If you would like to read more about animal liberation and their goals and objectives, please go to: https://www.ifyouaskme.com.au/www-ifyouaskme-com-au-social-issues/what-is-animal-liberation/)
And you might also want to view: 4 Reasons NEVER to Support Peta, and these reasons apply equally to all animal liberation organisations.
To hell with animal lib and tree huggers. Their main aim in life seems to be nothing more than to bring upheaval and turmoil to justify their own over-inflated egos.