My son-in-law sent through a photo of a bear raiding their rubbish bin one night, and it got me thinking.
The first thought when I saw the images was that, thankfully, everyone (including the cat and dog) was inside. Then I started to think about why the bear raided the rubbish bin in the first place. It was frequenting the neighbours’ bins as well.
It’s not the first time my daughter’s family has had visits from bears, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last. They live in a forest area in Northern California, so it stands to reason they live with wildlife around them.
Thankfully, only the recycling was tipped as they are very careful about what rubbish they put out.
In the grand scheme of things, humans have multiplied exceptionally quickly, and in doing so, we’ve encroached into the wildlife’s home.
We are diminishing their world by destroying forests and laying waste of the land with chemical fertilizers that have excessively polluted the environment.
We’re the only species (to my knowledge) that don’t regulate the number of offspring we produce. In the wild kingdom, the animals reduce their numbers when food is scarce. When food is plentiful, the numbers increase.
There is also a balance in nature when animals, insects and plants, are allowed their freedom to live as they should.
Humans, on the other hand, do not follow nature’s laws.
It doesn’t seem to matter to us that food is scarce. We keep breeding. We also don’t have predators to control our population, and we live a lot longer than we should because of modern medicine, so there are more of us. It doesn’t help the balance.
We are encouraged to have children. Don’t get me wrong, having children is beautiful, and I’m not suggesting we stop altogether. What we need to do is reduce the numbers. Of course, governments don’t want this simply because of capitalism. But what is it doing to our environment?
It’s bad enough that animals must try to adapt to urban sprawl encroaching. But they also have to live with fires and floods destroying their homes, all due to climate change we have exacerbated.
We have to live in harmony with nature. I certainly don’t have the answers, but I’m heartened when I see countries helping to re-establish ecosystems, such as shown recently by India. They are about to introduce Namibian cheetahs into their wildlife reserves as the Indian cheetahs went extinct 70 years ago. It is hoped that these big cats will help to balance the ecosystem. Of course, humans and their cattle will have to be kept out of the area.
Now, just think about what we could achieve with nature if we didn’t have such a massive reliance on animal agriculture.
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