Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
The next time you hear or see the word ‘pest’ or ‘vermin’, please give some consideration to the deeper implications that exist, and the way words betray our speciesism.
Birds as well as other animals suffer dreadfully
from fireworks...
I recently posted about fireworks and the devastation they cause,
illustrating the post with a tragic picture of countless dead birds on a
city street following new year fireworks.
It is well documented that fireworks terrify all the living individuals in
their vicinity. Those who share their homes with dogs or cats are, for the
most part, acutely aware of this and there’s even a lucrative trade in
consumer items to soothe and calm nonhuman family members who experience the
sickening panic caused by fireworks. However these are far from being the
only species affected. For some creatures who live outdoors, the terror is
so extreme that their panicking hearts simply fail. Others fly frantically
into obstacles, killing or injuring themselves, while yet others bolt in
mindless panic, frequently becoming lost, injured or killed.
Besides being antisocial and causing distress and anxiety to many humans,
fireworks are an extreme form of noise pollution and result in widespread
toxic litter, polluting the habitats of every wild creature who depends on
the environment for food and shelter. In many places – my homeland of
Scotland included – there are ongoing and widely supported campaigns calling
for the practice to become illegal.
Celebrations
On reflection, the setting off of fireworks is one of a vast number of
‘celebratory’ practices in which our species participates casually and
carelessly; practices that cause death and destruction to innocent
creatures, and which constitute wanton vandalism, environmental littering
and pollution on a breathtaking scale, while perpetrators adopt an attitude
of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and choose to remain oblivious to the
consequences of their behaviour. Examples that spring instantly to mind are
balloon releases, sky lantern releases and setting free flocks of captive
doves, often as part of a wedding. As a species, surely we can celebrate
without destroying innocent lives?
Anyway, against that background, I noted a comment on a share of the
firework post that remarked how, in that particular city, there were people
walking about with megaphones to create noise, being paid ‘to scare these
pests out of the trees to try to get them away from the city’. The
implication was that the dead birds had only themselves to blame for not
being appropriately scared away, and the term that rocked me back on my
heels and made me feel slightly sick, was ‘these pests’.
Pests. I get the same feeling when I see the word ‘vermin’, but in this
case. it was ‘pests’.
The assumption that only humans matter
Now if this comment had been in any way unusual, I might have been able to
shrug it off, but it very neatly epitomises a whole way of thinking that is
depressingly common amongst our species. With our unchecked hubris and
supreme arrogance, humans persist in regarding their own species as the only
one that matters, with the struggling planet and her persecuted life forms
as ours to do with as we will. Without regard for the consequences, we
continue to carve blood and brutality across a burning, melting,
disease-racked globe, laying waste to all in our path in the most sustained
and destructive regime of oppression that has ever been unleashed.
In so many ways we usurp the natural world with our sprawling, ever
expanding urbanisation and with the poisons and toxins we pour so liberally
onto the land and into the oceans [For
Earth Day: thoughts about speciesism, biophilia and veganism]. We
destroy ecosystems and natural habitats, displacing the rightful occupants
of ancient communities. As our population rapidly increases, we are crowding
out the wild creatures for whom planet Earth is their rightful and only
home, every bit as much as it ever was for humans [Worldometer].
Then, when they’ve nowhere left to go, when they try to eke a living where
they have always been, we condemn them as ‘pests’ and try to justify scaring
them out of the spaces we’ve claimed, eradicating them with agonising traps
and guns and poisons, designing buildings to ensure that birds are denied
perching spaces, waging war against innocent lives.
Every day we read of foxes, bears, coyotes, raccoons, pigeons and other
displaced species reduced to scavenging for scraps in our streets and our
rubbish bins. Recent articles told of desperate elephants foraging landfill
sites in Sri Lanka, and starving polar bears raiding bins and dumps in
northern climes. Our species has taken their wild places from them, while
wrecking the balance of the climate that provided for their needs. And then,
adding insult to the worst of injuries as we always do, and assuming that
our species’ possession of any given space is of prime importance, we call
them ‘pests’ and seek to wipe them out.
Getting rid of unwanted lives
It must also be noted that ‘animal agriculture’ with its consumer-driven
requirement to accommodate rapidly increasing numbers of victims, is swift
to categorise both indigenous and introduced species as pests, often with
the flimsiest of ‘justifications’, in favour of those species whose lives
and bodies are used to generate profit. Foxes, badgers, rabbits and many
others all pay the ultimate price for their very existence, often in the
falsely benevolent guise of another related word; a cull [Looking
at language: Cull].
There are many avenues that lead from this self-importance. I would
suggest it’s related to the same callous conceit that labels cats and dogs
who have been betrayed by humans and find themselves homeless, as ‘strays’
to be rounded up and ‘disposed of’ in shelters. And meanwhile any insect,
any bird, any rodent or mammal seeking to carve an existence in the meagre
spaces between the areas claimed by our species, instantly becomes a target,
instantly becomes vermin, is instantly reviled as a pest.
I don’t intend for this to be a long blog, so I’m going to leave it here,
with a thought for the day. The next time you hear or see the word ‘pest’ or
‘vermin’, please give some consideration to the deeper implications that
exist, and the way words betray our speciesism.
Be vegan.
Pest (noun)
Vermin (noun)
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