Four cougars were killed in the city of Penticton this last week.
That’s the bald fact. The reactions to it probably skid in two different directions.
One reaction approves of killing them. Cougars, it would assert, are wild animals. Very powerful, and potentially dangerous. For human safety – or perhaps more accurately, for the safety of straying pets – cougars must be eliminated from urban areas.
A second reaction is sorrow. Even anger. The cougars had harmed no one. Indeed, it could be argued that they had performed a service to Penticton residents, by culling a few of the wild deer that infest the city.
And besides, they looked cuddly.
I might as well confess my bias – I’m with the bleeding-heart brigade.
Of course cougars can be dangerous – anyone who has ever lived with a grumpy house cat knows the damage that feline claws can inflict. Multiply a ten-pound cat ten times, and you begin to realize the power of a full-grown cougar.
But my encounters with big predators on four continents suggests that they rarely treat humans as prey. Unless they’re cornered, or starving. Generally, if we leave them alone, they prefer to leave us alone.
National Geographic TV specials even show wild wolves licking the cheeks of wildlife researchers, or lions lying on their backs to have their bellies rubbed. I know personally that African cheetahs purr like housecats while being fed beef bits. Visitors to Churchill, in northern Manitoba, see weel-fed polar bears playing happily with sled dogs. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey showed that humans can be friends with great apes in the wild.
I have myself rubbed the ears of a full-grown cougar domesticated by the late Al Oeming of Edmonton.
Co-existence based on fear
But these cougars had to die, a conservation officer explained, because they were becoming “habituated” to human presence.
That is, they no longer feared us. Why does co-existence depend on fear?
So they had to go.
I see a parallel between our treatment of wildlife and our treatment of the indigenous peoples who once occupied this continent. Europeans arrived, and began building cities, highways, and shopping malls. The original inhabitants got pushed back into remote territories that no one considered valuable – until later arrivals discovered gems, minerals, water power, or oil there.
Canadian courts now recognize that those original inhabitants had a legitimate claim to the lands they once possessed.
But humans were never the only occupants of the land. Wolves and cougars, beaver and moose and caribou, have also been pushed back by our farms, our cities, our industries.
We, the newcomers, tried to confine or exterminate those aboriginal peoples. We herded them onto reserves, where they could die of tuberculosis, alcohol, or poverty – safely out of our sight. Unlike the U.S., we didn’t have Indian Wars. But on the west coast, explorers handed out blankets contaminated by smallpox. Epidemics wiped out 90 per cent of some tribes.
And in one of the more disgraceful chapters of Canadian history, we tried to forcibly convert aboriginal children to a readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic culture through residential schools.
In the same way, cougar habitat has been taken away from them. The valleys are given to cows and horses. The hills are taken over by housing developments, so that every homeowner can have a view.
Does nature have rights?
Granted, Canada still has vacant land cougars could move to. But -- they might argue if they had a voice in our courts --why should they? Like the First Nations, they were here first.
Of course, they don’t have a voice in our courts.
` But that too may be changing.
In 2008, Ecuador wrote the rights of nature into its new constitution. In 2011, a provincial court upheld the rights of the Vilcabamba River against a local government.
Bolivia followed Ecuador’s lead in 2010.
You may argue that nature can’t attend a court hearing to argue its case. It’s not a person.
Neither is a corporation. Or a government. Both are abstract entities, legal fictions invented by humans. But human lawyers represent them, speak for them. Why shouldn’t lawyers also speak for nature?
In fact, New Zealand has granted legal personhood to a national park and the Whanganui River that flows through it. In the U.S., I gather, Colorado, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Ohio are developing constitutional amendments that would grant legal status to nature.
This is not, I should note, a new idea. Back in the 1970s, environmental scholar Christopher Stone argued that nature should have legal rights, in an essay called Should Trees Have Standing?
Maybe one day, cougars won’t have to die so that Fluffy can run loose in your back yard.
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
If the volume of mail is any indication, I must be doing something right. Letters poured in again, a second week in a row. A few simply suggested I should send last week’s column “to every branch of the Armed Forces, and to every large and small newspaper you can think of.”
Or, similarly, “Thank you for writing this. It needs to be published in every newspaper across the world. Especially now.”
Bruce McGillis wrote to his local paper, “In sending soldiers to fight in other nations we make Canadians as a whole and politicians in particular responsible for creating, in the soldiers, minor and major traumas and a long list of other lifelong conditions. To greater or lesser extent, a returning soldier’s normal life is ruined. Sadly, some veterans turn to physical violence and mass (terrorist like) shootings.”
Robert Scott wrote, “As a veteran, I agree wholeheartedly with your article. Once we are trained, and it has to be intensive, we learn to kill without compunction. Then when we are returned to society, few understand why we act differently, and none of our family, friends, or loved ones have any idea what goes through our twisted minds.”
Steve Roney countered, “This line of thinking risks scapegoating veterans. What could be more unfair? It also relies on a ‘vampire’ theory of violence, that having suffered from violence makes you more likely to commit violence. Not only does this violate common sense, but it scapegoats victims systematically. More likely, one who has suffered the horror of war would be less inclined to violence as a result.”
Robert Caughell: “So many people suffer from PTSD from going to war, being on jury duty and having to experience lurid details of a crime, etc. Maybe someday the world will live by the Star Trek Prime Directive. ‘We will not interfere in the affairs of a less advanced culture’. This would have stopped countless conflicts over politics, religion, oil, resources, etc.
“Canada has admitted that it made mistakes over its treatment of immigrants, First Nation people, etc. There are probably more things to admit to. We are not perfect. But we are mature enough to admit our faults.”
Isabel Gibson expressed hope: “Humanity has been struggling with our tendency to violence, organized and otherwise, for our entire history. Some days, I think we we're making progress. Others, not so much.”
A reader identified only as Hartley wrote: “Thank you for your eloquence and ability to peel back the layers to get to the essence of the destruction of the human spirit when we engage in War. War is never a Win/Win situation.”
Laurna Tallman: “I could not possibly agree with you more. I have been a pacifist since the early 1970s, although my first influences were a Quaker couple at a church camp I attended when I was about 11. Any hint left in my mind about justifiable warfare was buried [during a visit to] the Plain of Culloden where the British slaughtered most Scottish males capable of fighting. The glorification of warfare on that bloody site sickened and appalled me for its irrationality.
“My reading of scripture is that Jesus was a pacifist, and any nonsense about His justifying the bearing of arms by His followers (based on Luke 22:38) totally misses the point of what He did in the Garden of Gethsemane when the sword was used (Luke 22: 48-51).”
Peter Scott remeisced, “I learned about war at my father's knee. My old pappy taught me that war was a deadly game played by rich old people who disagreed with other rich old people about something. To settle their disagreement both groups of rich old people forced poor young people to go kill other young people. No matter who was eventually declared the winner, he said, both groups of rich old people got richer in the process and both groups of poor young people suffered terribly. I guess he thought that if poor young people refused to kill each other then maybe the rich old people would have to learn to get along or do their own fighting. In the 1960s, when I heard the saying, ‘What if they gave a war and nobody came?’, I thought, ‘Somebody's been talking to my dad’.”
Tom Watson thought I might have painted my case with too broad a brush: “The 29-year-old son of a friend spent time in Afghanistan as a sniper, and now trains other soldiers as snipers. You'd be hard pressed to find a nicer guy and yet his vocation is picking other people off with sophisticated weapons.
“When the person you are killing is as much as two miles away, does the act become less personal?
“I find the whole thing difficult to imagine. Whether or not you are taking out the ‘enemy,’ it's still another human being -- someone with perhaps a wife and children at home, the same as you have. At what stage does [this killing] take its toll on one's psyche?”
“I think you nailed it, Jim!” wrote June Blau. “Now, where do we start?”
Isabel McGregor had the same question: “Excellent article, but what can we DO about war? For me, the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (BPFNA) is a good place to start, www.bpfna.org/. Their three-word slogan is Gather, Equip, Mobilize (for peace) and they have a proactive Peace Camp somewhere in North America every summer.
“The Mennonite Project Ploughshares: Research and Action for Peace, http://ploughshares.ca/ is another, even if all one can do is support it financially. There are others but these are the two I am currently most acquainted with and inspired by.”
Mary Sweet recommended a change in terminology: “Would you please use the medical terminology accepted these days? Instead of 'committed suicide' the appropriate term is 'died by suicide' or 'suicided.' In this way, you treat the person with more respect than a criminal who 'commits' a crime.”
Ted Wilson returned to dementia, my previous week’s subject: “I know that this is going to sound crass but hear me out. Instead of waiting to die from dementia we need to die from something else first. To do that we must accept that we are all going to die. Once we have accepted the fact that we WILL die then we can start to consider how we might die. Then we can focus on preventing or delaying those causes of death we consider the most unpleasant…
“A hundred years ago war was probably the leading cause of death among men. Then came the Spanish Flu… When you and I were younger, the leading cause of death in adult males was cardio-vascular failure, heart attacks, and strokes…As medical science got a handle on the cardio vascular issues, cancer became the leading cause of death. Now deaths due to dementia are increasing.
“We have gone from dying instantly while young by being shot, to dying quickly in middle age due to cardio-vascular failure, to dying by inches from cancer when somewhat older, to dying by millimetres when elderly. We live longer, but instead of dying [relatively quickly], often it now takes years.
“We need to re-evaluate our priorities and ask which is more important, how long we live or how we die. It’s a question of quality or quantity.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
Ralph Milton ’s latest project is called “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Ralph’s HymnSight webpage is still up, http://www.hymnsight.ca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatso@gmail.com or twatson@sentex.net