The Animal Manifesto by Marc Bekoff Read Free Book Online Page B

wear them, write about them, draw, paint,and photograph them, move them from here to there as we redecorate nature, make decisions for them without their consent, and represent them in many varied ways. Yet we often dispassionately ignore who they are and what they want and need.
Taming the Wild: Managing Nature
    It’s almost too obvious to say, but animals do not need our help to live in nature. Whenever humans seek to “manage” nature, creating parks and artificial boundaries, it is always only for the benefit of humans. Perhaps, to the degree to which animals are left alone within these parks, it might be said that animals benefit, that they have been protected from humans. Otherwise, most of what passes for “wildlife management” looks like nothing so much as a direct attack on wildlife itself, bent on destroying homes and killing indiscriminately.
    From an animal’s perspective, it’s hard to see how the U.S. government is working with their best interests in mind, nor how the federal Wildlife Services — formerly called Animal Damage Control, ADC — is their friend. Consider their conflict of interest: many divisions of wildlife and state and federal parks support themselves by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. Their essential mandate is to preserve animals so that some can be killed. Hunting is promoted as a source of income and as a “culture” to be preserved; to get more kids involved, in June 2009 Wisconsin lawmakers moved to lower the legal hunting age from twelve years of age to ten. State Representative Scott Gunderson noted, “It’s important for us to include young people in the activities that a lot of us hold near and dear. . . . This is about our heritage.” The Colorado Division of Wildlife claims that they keep Colorado wild by managingand protecting all wildlife. Clearly they don’t, for they support the killing of innumerable fish and other sentient beings using methods that cause great pain, suffering, and death. Would humans put up with such a trade-off in their own communities, in which some folks are sacrificed so that others might live?
    Sport hunting and fishing are only one aspect of “management,” however. Typically, Wildlife Services has spent about$100 million a year to actively kill more than one million animals, of which about 120,000 are carnivores, but these numbers have spiked recently. Of course, though they maintain official counts, they can’t keep track of all the individuals they kill. Wildlife Services shoots, traps, and snares animals, and uses a panoply of dangerous toxicants that harm a wide variety of species, not only the target species, for the benefit of the agricultural industry. Between 2004 and 2007, by their own records, Wildlife Services killed 8,378,412 animals. The numbers of mammals killed overall has increased recently. In 2004, for example, the agency killed 179,251 mammals compared with 207,341 in 2006. Wildlife Services has increased the number of endangered species it has killed as well, for a total of almost 2,500 individuals, primarily gray wolves, since 1996. The average number of endangered species killed annually between 1996 and 2004 was 177.5, while the average between 2005 and 2007 was 294.3. This represents a 66 percent increase in the numbers of endangered species killed in the past three years (2005–2007) as compared to the previous nine (1996–2004). As one employee of Wildlife Services was quoted as saying, “No one wants you to see this shit. . . . It’s a killing floor.”
    The numbers are staggering, sickening, and increasing. In the fiscal year 2007, people working for Wildlife Services killed 2.4 million animals representing 319 species and spent$117million doing so. This included a total of 196,369 mammals, of which 340 were gray wolves, 90,326 coyotes, and 19,584 feral hogs. Along with the larger trend, the number of carnivores killed has been steadily rising, and these numbers do not include youngsters who