This month, China’s National People’s Congress is soliciting public comments on a draft revision of the Wildlife Protection Law. Ironically, the law, supposedly designed to protect wildlife species, has witnessed the enormous rise of a wildlife exploitation industry unlike anything in China’s past.
“The only way to save our wild birds for future generations to enjoy is to cancel all collecting permits and close the wildlife markets throughout Indonesia – now. If this is not done immediately we risk seeing many birds and animals becoming locally extinct. Can you imagine a forest and sky with no wildlife – because this is a reality facing us all unless our government takes immediate action.”
Hounding the hunters is long overdue, but the fight will never be easy because speciesism cuts deep into the human psyche. Animal rights activists are employing a new set of tactics to thwart hunters from taking down wolves, bears, and other game.
“A fish” – they cried,
“We caught a fish.”
Stocky little cruel faces,
Alive with the excitement
Of the kill…
What is it that drives a person to take pride in being the one who brought about the ultimate extinction of a species?
Animal People executive director Wolf Clifton recently traveled Indonesia visiting animal projects, prior to the Asia for Animals 2015 conference in Kuching, Malaysia. Highlights in this entry include: rescued wildlife, the absence of wilderness, dilemmas of predator and prey, and poisonous red-eyed primates!
Indonesia presently faces an epidemic of wild animals being captured and sold on the black market. This photo gallery exposes the suffering of captive animals in the Jatinegara and Pasty markets of Jakarta and Yogyakarta, as seen September 2015.
A wild animal’s status as endangered or non-endangered is irrelevant from an animal rights perspective. Conservation approaches are not going to be successful in resolving the fundamental problems of how animals and humans can share the earth.
By Denise Fleck n her tell-all memoir, Rebel in High Heels, long-time animal activist, Charlotte…
Blind terror and bewilderment
As the guns crash and echo
Through once virgin forest…
During a January 1999 visit to the Tambopata-Candama Reserved Area in southeastern Peru, we were struck by the contrast between the Amazonian rainforest as it is and the image most people have of it.
…
Swim deep, little seal
Man is here
Here with his nets and his clubs
Your ballet of grace means nothing to him
Dive to the sunless sea and do not return…