What efforts should we make to maintain wild animals populations Should we maintain or should we not - Essay Example

PROTECTING ANIMALS As the cities that we build grow in size, both geographically and population-wise, we are coming closer and closer to wilderness. We are devouring that wilderness and using it up, as well as the animals within it. Wild animals are increasingly endangered as our suburbs expand and new industrial parks reshape land that animals traditionally used for sustenance. This is a tragedy. Human beings owe a duty to their fellow creatures to help preserve their habitats. We must take this responsibility seriously.

William Stafford in his poem “Travelling Through the Dark,” was right when he used the plural “we” to encompass both humans and animals. We are all of us in this together. People often make a real distinction between humans and animals. They act as if animals are just living machines. That their feelings and actions don't matter, and that only humans are important in this world. They often fail to understand that humans are animals too. They also fail to distinguish between types of animals.

Often humans care less about animals that they do not know. Few people care that a deer was shot in the woods by a hunter, but if a hunter came and shot Fido, a person's pet dog, that person would be very upset. This is generally the way people think: the closer a person is to the animal, the more they care. The truth is that as our cities grow, we are getting close to many wild animals. We need to find a way to take their lives into account. We need to find a way to help protect them from the environmental depredations which we are visiting on much of the world.

Our lives are intertwined, a fact that constitutes the heart of the poem by Stafford. One of the things we need to do to help save wild animal populations is to slow down growth and be considerate of traditional animal migratory patterns. In Stafford's poem a deer is killed by a car. Building highways through places where wild animals live and travel is not a good idea. We need to think more about how these animals live and thrive. If we do not, we will be effectively cutting ourselves off from a large part of our heritage as animals.

We need to be more considerate. When the speaker of Stafford's poem leans down to move the deer, he realizes it is pregnant. Animals, like human, are a part of the cycle of life. They live lives and they die too. We should be kind to them as they are our fellow creatures. The pace of change in our world is very quick. We are taking more and more land from animals. This happens as cities grow in the United States. It also happens as the rainforest is cut down in places like Brazil. We need to consider the consequences of these actions, for they have very severe consequences for the wild animals that play a major role in our world.

When the speaker of the poem is done, he hears the “wilderness listen” to him. The wilderness is waiting for us to do something, to stop the slaughter. Works consulted Anderson, Allen. Rescued: Saving Animals from Disaster. New World Library, 2006. Stafford, William. A Scripture of Leaves. Brethren Press, 1989.