The article said we didn’t know much about them because it takes years for a human to gain their confidence enough to observe them. Despite their size, it took a team of four local trackers to find Kingo and his family but it took six years for Diane Doran-Sheehy (responsible for saving this piece of the forest that Kingo and his family live in) to originally find and name them.
Then I came across this sentence, “Even though all gorillas found in zoos around the world are western gorillas, little is known about their behavior in the wild.” I just started weeping, right there on the plane. The image of this complex and incredible animal in a concrete cage, without his family, without his swamp and trees, without his six miles to roam and wander, without the peace and privacy to take his daily nap, just broke my heart. We don't even know enough about his behavior in the wild to even ATTEMPT to replicate his environment. How, I ask myself, how do we justify that? I had to force myself to try to think of something else, anything that would keep me from crying.
A few days later I was reading an article about the natural science museum finally opening this year in Golden Gate park. It's an impressive and beautiful building with a living green roof and solar panels, it's being touted as a highly responsible ecological building and yet, they are going to feature 38,000 animals in their aquariums. Granted they're growing coral and using local seawater but still, a space the size of this building must surely be much smaller than their complex and vast natural habitat, the ocean. I understand that we want to educate people about animals but I just haven't seen the data to support the theory that animals in captivity on display have helped any in the wild. By my count, the wild animals of this world are vanishing at an extremely alarming rate.
Then I was in Berkeley with a friend of mine. We passed an older hippie guy on the street with a clipboard. He was wearing the kind of socks that have toes in different colors, and Birkenstocks. He was collecting signatures for a farm bill; I know the one because I’ve already signed it and because I’m a Humane Society member. I thanked him and walked on. Another guy passed him and I heard the hippie ask him to sign a petition for a bill that would allow farm animals to move around in their cages. The guy just shook his head and moved on.
About an hour later, we were in a furniture store while my friend was looking for a bed. I heard the hippie in my head asking for help so the animals could “move around in their cages.” It made me sick, I thought it’s like asking for less torture, more humane captivity, the irony is ridiculous. I can’t believe we have to fight for this, that we have to try to convince people to care enough to not torture their animals before they kill them. I was overwhelmed with grief and had to leave the store. I couldn’t stop crying and my friend didn’t even believe me when I said it was because of the animals.
A few weekends ago, I almost volunteered to be that person collecting signatures. Can you imagine? What would someone do if they didn’t sign the petition and I started crying? I wonder. So today I was reading an interesting article in The New York Times Magazine about morality. The author says that we are genetically moral creatures. That we universally believe in certain principles that are possibly biologically motivated to keep us alive. Universally, we feel that it is wrong to harm others, we believe in fairness, we value community and loyalty, we respect authority and we revere purity. Where it gets tricky, however, is in the ranking and weight of those morals.
There are instances, for example, where certain cultures allow harm to those who are considered impure. Or where fairness is denied to those who disrespect authority. The upholding of these morals can be wildly divergent even if the basic motivation is the same. Liberals, for example, tend to rank fairness much higher than purity or loyalty. Also very interesting, was the fact that certain behaviors cycle in and out of morality.
Smoking has become morally bad since the emphasis on second-hand smoke whereas getting a divorce is more or less accepted as a fact of life. And certainly we have widened the net of who deserves humane treatment as time goes on. Slavery, once an acceptable economic practice, is now reviled pretty much the world over. I have a dream, in the words of our Martin Luther King, Jr. that someday we’ll consider keeping an animal in a cage as barbaric as selling a man on an auction block.
A McKinsey survey published in The Economist showed that out of 15 major issues of the next five years, the environment is number 1 globally but the top issues after the environment are safer products, retirement benefits, health-care benefits and affordable products. These are pretty much the same things we've always been concerned about. Ethically produced products is near the bottom of the list and I assume that the welfare of animals falls in that category. So we want to protect the environment, meaning that we don't want to die, but aren't really concerned about everything else dying? I think we feel that we can't care about everything, that we have to pick our battles.
So I’ve learned that there isn’t anything wrong with me and there isn’t anything wrong with everyone else for that matter. It’s just that our moral barometers are all set differently. Looking at my five spheres of morality, by far the largest would be harm, followed by purity, which I think is where my love of nature comes from. The spheres of fairness, loyalty and authority are there but much smaller. If I had to choose between having money for retirement and seeing animals roam free, I'm afraid I'd choose the animals over myself.
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