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MY WORD - 5/7/2008
(by Holly Stewart - OpEd Columnist - May 07, 2008)
Barely worth bearing
Here it comes, the first great standoff of the year between the pro-hunting crowd and the animal-rights activists: Bears have been sighted, and they are up to some mischief in our neighborhoods. Depending on your perspective, it’s either time to talk about killing some of our Black Bears in a state-sanctioned hunt this fall or get ready to defend those (occasionally) flesh-eating furballs tooth and nail.
I have been up and down both sides of this street repeatedly, although I am certain there are those who would doubt that. Regardless, I visit and revisit every angle of this argument whenever it reemerges into our local conversation to see if the way I feel has changed about the bear hunt. I consider the safety issue, especially for young children. I think about how hard humanity is encroaching on wild places. And I remind myself at every turn that I am not innocent when it comes to using animals for my own greater good.
I wear a leather jacket when I ride my motorcycle. It blocks the wind and makes me feel protected. There’s nothing in the world like a perfectly grilled hamburger on a summer afternoon washed down with a nice cold beer. And I cannot say that I know how the chicken I roasted last week was treated in life or whether she knew she would die a horribly painful death before she ended up on my best platter for Sunday dinner.
Oh yes, I realize all of these things very clearly. Sometimes I even lose a little bit of sleep over them, especially after I’ve eaten pepperoni. But whenever I have personally had an opportunity to help other creatures, great or small, I’ve gone out of my way to make it happen. For that reason alone, I always come up on the side of the bears.
They didn’t ask for my neighbors to leave their pizza-box remnants sitting on the picnic table overnight. They didn’t ask me or anyone else on Bearfort Mountain (note the name) to move up here and cramp their style while simultaneously encouraging bad relations between our species by making free food readily available at the rip of a thin plastic bag. We’ve allowed them to become junkies for our trash, and now we want to thin their numbers because they’ve become an outright nuisance.
Thousands of years ago, when dogs first become domesticated, they lived on the edges of human compounds eating bones and whatever else primitive peoples cast off. Slowly the two species formed a working relationship that continues to this day. Unfortunately for them, bears are cute from a distance but too darn big and dangerous to encourage a similar bond. And that’s how it is between mankind and everything else: If an animal can offer us something without a lot of resistance, we’ll take them under advisement. We’ll feed and shelter them. Some will be companions. Others will be lunch by the lake while wearing a thick wool sweater.
The rest will be wild, and they will be closely monitored. If they succeed too well, they will be culled. They will be reduced to manageable populations. Individuals that threaten human life will be immediately destroyed. Some say this is the compact God meant when He said mankind shall have dominion over all the animals. I am not among them.
As a race we continue to be bad stewards of our planet overall. We take the easy way out 99 times out of 100. We’re still using fossil fuels and encouraging commercial farming. On a lesser scale, some morons can’t remember to screw the lid onto the bear-proof garbage cans and have a little sense when it comes to interacting with wild animals.
All of the truly wild creatures of the Earth are living on borrowed time in preserves or at the mercy of local hunting laws and those who choose whether or not to enforce them. We have domesticated everything of use to us and pillaged most of the rest. We’ve polluted our waterways and messed up the food chain. If the wild animals had any organizational skills at all, they would be rounding us up and thinning our numbers for being such a nuisance in their neighborhoods.
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