Obama speaks for Elephants but Not For Wildlife of the West

 

“On Monday, President Obama made an unprecedented move in the fight against illegal wildlife trafficking.” the Wildlife Conservation Society reported. “In a visit to Tanzania, the President launched a poaching crackdown, dedicating the United States to fighting back against poachers and criminal wildlife traffickers.” 

This touched and surprised me.  “Larger” planetary concerns such as oil drilling and fracking are mired in layers of politics and power.  As to concerns about “wildlife”  has President Obama taken any other action that clearly speaks to the essential matter of wildlife as part of the evolving new approach to human stewardship of the planet?  

Consciousness grows slowly as we see, learn and work to develop a different role in the wellbeing of the planet.  The lives of the “wild” animals who are our co-inhabitants of the earth most often are not considered, or they are placed in secondary or minor positions within the discussion.

The actual concept of the web of life – and especially the reality that we humans live within the web, not above or separate from it – still is thought in the main as poetic or irrelevant or invalid. Business and commercial leaders, if considering the concept at all, demonstrate that they regard the idea primarily as being obstructive to their goals.

Any new approach to planetary thinking has to consider the human position within the animal realm – to which we belong. We are animals. How strange that we flaunt and praise our “civilization” and “progress” while we wear the skins of our fellow beings, enslave them in “meat industries,” trap and use them for experimentation and entertainment.  In the case of elephant and rhino poachers humans often shoot them with tranquilizer darts, then saw off their tusks while they are alive and leave them to die long and horrible deaths – all that for what is called “ivory” to be used for objects or adornments or ground up to sell as potions for sexual potency.

Obama comes late, as most people do, to the global plight of elephants.  But most remarkable, he does not come at all to the American equivalent:  whole sale federally funded massacre of wolves, coyotes, wild horses and other such “wild” animals in the west of the country. There is an industry for rounding up and killing wild horses for their meat. These and other killing actions are fueled primarily by the political contributions and the subsequent power of ranchers who abrogate unto themselves the kind of status formerly held by kings and emperors.  To increase, everlastingly, the profits of the meat industries – America is business - they demand to kill all animals who may encroach or compete from adjacent lands.

Since they are imperial, they see no other options. Since they possess the power of one of the globe’s most profitable businesses, they exist in private kingdoms within the United States. They are no more interfered with than the leaders of other sovereign nations.

Obama takes no stand on the wholesale killing of wildlife in the American west. 

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that American “advisors” routinely use campaigns of education and various kinds of pleadings to convince those in “emerging” nations not to kill the wild animals who are a part of their identity, their heritage, their birthright – and not incidentally the foundation for profitable tourist and travel enterprises that can profoundly affect the quality of their lives. 

There are a few organizations and voices who speak for the animals of the American west.  {These “animals” are as American as you and I!)  However, in the overwhelming snarl of distortions, omissions and lies that comprise so-called news and information in the America that has come to be, they are voices in the wilderness.