By Sharon St Joan
On Friday, November 2, 2018 at 11 pm in Maharashtra, India, a tiger called Avni was shot and killed by the Forest Service, leaving her two ten-month old cubs, who are too young to survive on their own, without their mother. There has been a major outcry against this injustice in the Indian press. For details, you can google “Avni” – beware of numerous fabricated justifications (lies) being given by the authorities.
In Utah, in the U.S. (and in other states), hunting native big cats is not illegal. Every year in Utah the number of cougars allowed to be hunted is increased, despite the fact that there is no real data on the actual numbers of cougars left in the wild. This hunting season, the target for cougars has been raised from 581 to 642 – the equivalent of 61 additional, innocent “Avni’s” slated to lose their lives. (Please see the link below.)
A cougar is not a tiger and is not – not yet anyway – endangered. Not being endangered, however, is not a reason to allow the senseless killing of living animals – for the sole purpose of displaying their heads on the living room wall. Both tigers and cougars are astonishing, magnificent animals. And every other animal on earth – from the bright fish in the sea to the squirrels who are gathering their food for winter is a living, sentient being, whose life has worth and value.
Connectedness
Entirely apart from the consciousness and sentience of each living animal, to whom her life is as precious to her as ours is to us – we, as humans, are all connected to the world of nature.
This connectedness is extremely ancient knowledge, still alive in India – and, to some extent, in the west as well. In Hinduism, every God or Goddess is linked to an animal. The Goddess Durga, one of the forms of the wife of the great God Shiva, is also an independent, powerful deity in her own right. She is fierce, a warrior Goddess who fights and defeats evil. Durga and the tiger are inseparable.
This ferocity is also the nature of the tiger – powerful and dynamic, a mother who defends and protects her young. Or a male who represents the wild spirit of the forest.
The tiger is the essence of the wild – untamable and free.
Who would want to kill such a magnificent animal?
Paleolithic and neolithic people did hunt for survival, but not for sport.
Since the beginning of time, animals have been hunted for food by tribal people. For at least 10,000 years Native Americans lived off the land, hunting and fishing, as well as growing whatever vegetables they could. In the sixteenth century, when Europeans arrived on the shores of America, they found a land of unbelievable beauty and magnificence – filled with a vast abundance of wildlife and wild lands which had not been destroyed or diminished – which they promptly set about to demolish. This destruction continues unabated to this day, until there is not much left of the great wilderness that was once here.
Europeans, my ancestors and perhaps yours, brought with them a culture of dominance (over other peoples and nature), which is also a culture of alienation from the natural world. It’s a case of “us” and “them,” which proclaims, “I’m a human, and that thing over there, unfortunately, is just an ‘animal’ – just an object to be used for my benefit.”
Malevolent intent?
We can see this thinking alive and well today in the way that the word “animal” is still being used, endlessly, sometimes to apply to anyone who is simply “other.” The word “animal” is also used for those who demonstrate disgusting or criminal behavior – despite the fact that animals are innocent beings, and no animal behaves, or thinks, like a criminal. The attribute of “viciousness” can logically apply only to humans, because it applies to malevolent intent, which animals simply do not have.
It is this malevolent intent which is the problem. Not all humans, thankfully, have this trait. And not all cultures either. It is something gone awry in the history of our race. If one goes far back to the time of the Romans, the Europeans, then pagan tribes, were worshipping trees and nature, just like other early peoples.
They had genuine spiritual traditions, really not so different from those of India, which were based on peace and harmony with nature. Not that they were entirely peaceful, they certainly weren’t, but there was an underlying premise of being at one with nature – of being part of one overall earth – of not being alienated or superior to this planet – and there was an absence of the desire to kill nature. (Sadly, western religions seem to have little to do now with their own origins, and they have, in large measure, been taken over by the western view which sees everything as a dichotomy.)
Inciting fear
Killing a tiger, a cougar, a bear, or a wolf, is, in a way, emblematic of this malevolent intent – this destructive, evil force which has, to some extent, possessed the human race. These great archetypal animals seem to incite fear and to have a magical power within them – some sort of force, a will, which is untamed and untamable. They are hunted for no rational purpose – hunted to near extinction. No one in Utah, or elsewhere in the U.S., is in any reasonable danger of being killed by a cougar. We are in far more danger of being killed by our own cars, while we are driving them, than we are of being harmed by any of these animals.
There is something vastly irrational about the destruction that we as humans are inflicting on the earth. We have already destroyed 60% of the animals on the planet. We have turned half of the earth’s land mass into farm land, destroying forests and natural ecosystems.
With our artificial chemicals pouring into waterways, we are rapidly poisoning the ocean – as well as the air and the land. And, as we know, we are destroying the climate.
Since we are dependent on the earth for our survival, there is absolutely nothing sane or rational about these human activities. They are like a suicidal madman waving about a bomb that is about to detonate.
Yes, of course, there is an element of greed and self-centeredness in the way humans go about taking over and then obliterating all life on the planet. But this, in itself, is really not a rational explanation for the obsessive level of destruction that is taking place.
One might posit that there is some underlying, driving, unconscious force which compels us to behave in this immensely self-destructive way. We seem to want to kill ourselves.
Why?
This major isolation and alienation from nature which has taken hold of us is propelling us toward a cliff, a bottomless abyss — and seems to predetermine our will as a species, and our actions.
Yet, although this is, I am aware, profoundly gloomy, there is something else also, a certain light – which lies in the fact that not all of humanity has always behaved in this self-destructive way.
Ancient people saw themselves as part of the earth, as, ultimately being at one with the animals, the trees, the rivers, and all life. Even today, especially among those cultures and countries not altogether swept up in the falsehoods of the modern worldview, there are remnants and in some cases the reawakening of a true realization that we are the earth and the earth is us. We are all one, intertwined and interrelated.
There is, moreover, a dynamic, and growing movement, all over the planet, both east and west, to return to, and go forward with, the knowledge and vision of deep reverence for the world of nature and the sacredness of all life.
Looking ahead
This is the great end battle. Nature, of course – even if it takes several millennia — will recover and will win, in this world or in another. The question that remains is — will we join with nature, protecting her as the earth, our mother, or will we, as a species, self-destruct? We shall see.
In the meantime, each of us can open our eyes and our hearts — and live, as best we can, in harmony and peace with the natural world and its numinous, alive, wild presence – encountered in the wonderful, fiery eyes of the tiger and in all of nature.
Link to Salt Lake Tribune article about cougar hunting:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/09/15/utah-is-putting-more/
Photos:
Top photo:ID 59266198 © Adriana Maria Leenheer | Dreamstime.com
Second photo:ID 39369001 © Belizar | Dreamstime.com
Third photo: ID 50336351 © Sonsam | Dreamstime.com
Fourth photo: ID 63152963 © Wonderful Nature | Dreamstime.com
Fifth photo: ID 102516960 © Avspream | Dreamstime.com
© Sharon St Joan, 2018
And now in California, they are collecting Mountain Lion cubs, orphaned by the fires, sent to rehab facilities, because living wild is no longer possible.
How tragic this is.
WOW! I am heading there soon.
In all native and shamanic beliefs whereever (USA, Canada, South-America, Mongolia, Africa) animals play a leading role, so reducing such special connection to nature just to India does ignore these worldwide ancient and still existing original visions of life. Just one example for clarification: I have quite a lot of artistic contemporary material of the Inuit from North-Canada, and in their art of today this is still very vivid and a very important topic.
P.S. I mean’t Shiva.
Beautiful essay, thank you.
I have two observations. First, and this is just a personal musing, perhaps there is a branch or genetic strain of the human populace for which fear is the dominant and underlying reaction to every situation and relationship, and that particular thread of the populace manifests this fear through an extreme pleasure response to acts of violence, destruction and death. I don’t think of it as necessarily an aberration, but rather an element in which the brain develops differently.
Because they appear, in all other ways, just like everyone else, if these people learn to act in ways that are generally socially acceptable, they may pass through life unnoticed, unless they commit a deviant and deliberate act of violence, and are caught doing so.
Having said that, I’m sure there are legions of psychiatrists who have studied the brains of psychopaths (or would like to) to discover if there is a physical reason for their aberrant conduct, and perhaps they have found some brain chemistry to explain the behavior of which you speak in your essay.
Point is, to me at least, that this element of the human species seems to be in its supremacy at the moment. It has cleverly engineered itself into dominant positions in the world order of finance, politics and power. If this element is allowed by the rest of us, to take their construct to its end, it will indeed be the literal end of society and, by extension, the upheaval and destruction of the balance of nature.
As you say, “a death wish.” It would seem so, but it could also be the inevitable conclusion to this behavior, although it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to reach, and couldn’t be anticipated until the outcome was unavoidable.
Whew!
And second (bet you thought I’d never get there), Bristlecone pine said something about this in its “Reflection” piece. More or less that there was an element of humanity that had elected to be The Destroyer. I interpreted that as being a manifestation of Kali. Not very nice, but part of the greater cycle.
Interesting thoughts! Thank you, Laura.
Reblogged this on Wild Voices.