Unlimited human licentious deeds

We live on land not owned by us but grabbed. The enactment of handy laws enabled humans to take over the ownership of lands and trade on them. We killed animals and destroyed microorganisms. We made the same land unlivable, offended the ecology and contributed to ecocide. Yet we preach rules, morals and ethics.   

In 2019, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared Bramble Cay Melomys, which belongs to a rare rat family, to become extinct. This is the first officially recorded mammal extinction caused by human-induced climate change. Several such species and organisms might have disappeared from the earth, obviously for one reason that is human intervention. All those were officially unrecorded. There were several cases which scientists couldn’t fathom deep into the wild forests.

Extinction apart, cruelty to animals which are reared for meat is abominable. The most interesting is that those who preach quality nutrients and meat supply for human consumption have a monstrous background of cruelty to farm animals. The Scottish pig farm king, P&G Sleigh Pig Unit drew public wrath last year after disturbing footage of the sufferings of pigs on its farm. Its owner Philip Sleigh was a high-profile personality in the industry. Equally cruel is the butchering of the buffalo calves at their infant stage after culling on-farm in unscientific ways. Lambs are no less than human infants. We butcher this mildest animal for our taste and nutrition.

Insects dominate the earth in terms of numbers. The size of the human population is far less than that of insects and other living organisms. Yet humans consider the earth as the planet solely for them. It seems that humans have forgotten that this bounteous earth is an equal place for all living beings. Our scientists have no true count of how many living organisms and species became extinct due to human domination and transgressions. Besides extinction, we have made the life of millions of other living organisms permanently unsafe, seriously threatening their rightful existence.

We have engineered not only environmental changes that ruined animals’ life but also the cruelty we perpetrated on them to make their life dreadful. We have no account of how massively we have endangered the life of the animals’ which also contributes to ecological stability.

Unlike humans, other living beings live peacefully in their domain without crossing over to others’ realm of life. They are an integral part of nature with a stake in environmental stability. But the aggressive human interference devastated their existence. Now forests also have become a licentious human playground, pushing even wild animals out of their forest abode. Wild animals like the Asian elephant, cheetah, tiger, mountain gorilla, rhinoceros, etc are on the verge of extinction. The reason unequivocally has been the human being’s wanton occupation of animals’ space.

In the pre-industrial era, humans needed a piece of land to make a small home and for finding a living. Domestic animals supported humans. By the order of nature, humans and domestic animals co-existed giving synergy to each other. Humans cared for their animals as their own family, kept them in their homes and loved them. Today, we have pig farms, butcher shops and meat processing complexes, besides R&D trial centres where animals are vivisected and injected with toxic dosages. These animals are not wild. Industrialisation since the early 20th century has changed humans’ attitudes, sentiments and lifestyles. Never in the evolutionary stage, human beings might have attained so big a change that they have attained in the industrial era.

The industrial era saw humans becoming greedier and acquiring more lands by crossing into the other animals’ territory. Domestic animals with whom humans coexisted harmoniously suffered more cruelty. In 100 years, the planet’s surface has changed and it would have taken several million years to see the same degree of changes.

When we expanded our industrial dominion, we made rules to acquire land easily. The law has been so flexible to give us the right to change hands easily as many times as we desire as per our calculation. We made laws reserving sole rights to own and sell forests, the home of wild animals. Piecemeal, we grabbed animal territories to make our property and dug it for mining or building industrial structures. We made laws that enabled us to become easy owners of the land, which was the animal’s home. Our law exposed the sharpness of our cleverness by which we could grab other’s lands.

Scientists have confirmed that all the unnatural practices of humans are the cause of climate crises and so-called economic calamities. The chain of human disgrace to nature and animals is longer. The 20th-century industrialisation and the modern farming system equally endangered our living ecosystem. Farmers in their land burn dry agricultural wastes to clean up their land for the next cultivation. This agricultural burning destroys so many microorganisms and even green shoots denying them their rightful place to contribute to the ecosystem.

Still, we act as if we are the caretakers of the planet. We played no role in the formation of the planet. Yet, we dominate it by employing our shrewdness. Great achievements apart, humans are far less capable of living a natural endowed absolute limit of 150 years because we miserably failed to bring a balance between nature and other living beings. It is necessary for sustaining the stability of the planet and nature. Generations failed miserably, fearfully our next generation more miserably.