Individual of endangered leatherback sea turtle

In 2007, Minnesota’s Habitat Conservation Partnership announced it reserved “100,000 acres and counting” of wildlife habitat.  What makes this project innovative is that these 100,000 acres are connected land, not isolated, checkered patches that often do more harm to wildlife than good.  Organizations allied in this partnership line the website’s sidebar and share their excitement for this “milestone” event.  These organizations include hunter advocacy groups like National Wild Turkey Federation, Pheasants Forever, and MN Deer Hunters Association.  I had to wonder, where are the animal rights groups in all of this?  Why weren’t they involved? 

Where are the animal rights organizations that rally to promote habitat preservation, corridor ecology, and ecological restoration?  Certainly they care as much about wildlife having space and food to live as hunters do.  I looked up two active animal rights groups in Minnesota, Animal Rights Coalition and Compassionate Action for Animals, and it turns out, when it comes to habitat conservation, they don’t have a stance.  They focus their efforts primarily on farmed animal advocacy and vegan outreach.  While farmed animals need all the help they can get, just because wildlife aren’t “visible” in society, they live and dwell among humans nonetheless and are thus impacted by social, economic, and political forces.

You would think that habitat destruction is a topic animal rights activists would talk about regularly.  But the concern is highly selective.  It’s not just the palm oil industry that destroys habitat.  It’s soy too, a common staple among vegans.  It’s cane sugar, it’s chocolate, it’s bananas, it’s conventional coffee, it’s anything made from fossil fuels, which includes damn near everything we use in the West.  The point I’m trying to make is that habitat is always an animal rights issue.  We can’t feasibly demand animals’ necessities for life without talking about habitat.

But rather than join the efforts for habitat conservation and bring animal rights concerns to the table (as many human rights activists have done in the last decade with environmental conservation), we simply don’t discuss habitat loss at all, and when we do, it’s isolated and reserved for “charismatic, exotic” animal species like gibbons, elephants, and orcas.  When I was a frustrated, confused student of natural resources and animal rights, I sought comfort from my mentor Allan Strong, an avian conservation ecologist and wildlife biology professor.  To my dismay, he told me I could choose habitat concerns or animal rights, but not both.  In his course “Conservation Biology,” he reminds a classroom majority of wildlife and fisheries biology and forestry students that conservation and animal rights do not mix.  I feverishly disagreed with him at the time.  It was preposterous, I thought, to assume that animal rights activists are not concerned with conservation issues and thus don’t have anything to offer.  It’s conservationists, with their attachment to sport hunting culture, that drive the wedge between an otherwise suitable collaboration.  Later did I learn that it wasn’t just conservationists driving the wedge.

The ongoing conflict between animal rights and animal welfare has left the animal rights movement even more isolated from the grand arena of addressing social and ecological problems.  Programs and conferences, like Compassionate Conservation, are emerging around the world now to explore the common ground of animal welfare and wildlife conservation.  Animal rights continue to be in the periphery of discussions concerning animals’ lives.  And the push for vegan lifestyles across the board may perhaps be sealing the deal for animal rights concerns ever having a stake in ecological issues involving animals.

Can we bridge ecological reality with animal legal protection?  Can animal rights ever become relevant to the ecological needs of animal species worldwide?  People like Marc Bekoff and Gay Bradshaw are certainly out there trying to bridge the divide, but two persons are not enough.  I’m challenging activists and scholars across North America working to secure civil protections for animals to become more ecologically literate.  Hunters cannot be the only group with a voice concerning wildlife habitat.  The need for space, place, and lifeways are necessary for all living beings; they are realities we cannot escape.  What use are rights for sea turtles if they no longer have places to live?

A story on wired science most recently shared a study by Csaba Molnar published in Animal Cognition.  Using an algorithm to classify  Hungarian Sheepdog barks, Molnar concluded that humans possibly provided selection pressures necessary to identify context-specific calls, such as alarm calls.  This is because Molnar found less variation between alarm calls than other calls.  Unfortunately, he was unable to confirm the evolutionary aspects of his hypothesis.  With a sample of 6,646 barks from nine dogs, over 50-percent of which came from four, not much you can conclude for the entire species of dogs.  Despite that, the work continues a methodology of analyzing animal communication that shows promise: producing spectrograms of vocalizations and running them through an algorithm originally used for classifying genes (See Melendez et al. 2006).  Too bad Molnar didn’t receive enough funding to continue this work.  I wonder how often groundbreaking scientific work into animal-human relations doesn’t happen because the student can’t receive funding.

It would be nice to see researchers in the near future secure funding to look beyond how human “designed” dog and more into how dog made human.  Let it be a quest for mutual discovery.  Perhaps that is a flaw of embedded anthropocentrism in ethology and behavioral ecology that needs to be recognized and dissolved.  What about human adaptations to understand dogs?  In classical Darwinian speak, wouldn’t that suggest dog selection pressures on humans as well.

Fortunately, we don’t have to depend solely on science to tell us what we already know and experience for ourselves.  I’ve been convinced for four years that Shelly, my adopted cat and dearest friend I’ve written about in earlier posts, meows specially for me.  And for my partner.  And for whoever else provides her with regular meals.  What I’m saying is that when Shelly meows, I know exactly what she’s saying and I know that she’s talking to me.  And she’s not always saying the same thing.  Her talking to me is no different than listening to a human adult speak a foreign language or a baby speak gibberish.  I know what she says because I can feel it, every pitch, every cry, every demand.  It’s because of that I can respond appropriately in a tone to match her own, and she understands me equally.  We may not both be speaking English, but we’re speaking the same language.

From Think Global Green: An example of coral death by bleaching. As reefs fail, so do other marine ecosystems, leading to the mass extinctions occuring around the world in a single human generation.

It pains me to be the purveyor of bad news, but if we don’t stop the destructive cycle we’re on, we’re going to make Earth history by being the shortest lived species before facing extinction, killing many many other species as we go.  Two days ago, Reuters published an article on yahoo sharing the findings of a study by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).  In a nutshell: “Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, over-exploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean.”   We’ve heard this warning before.  In fact, we’ve been hearing it from researchers, scientists, and activists all over the world for the last decade.  And now it seems that grim future prophesied is upon us.

Things Fall Apart

Before the bubonic plague ravaged Asia and Europe in the Middle Ages, it was preceded by war and famine.  In 13th century China, war with the Mongolian conquest eventually took its toll, weakened the population significantly, and led to a disruption in farming and trading that ignited a nation-wide famine.  Shortly afterwards, plague erupted, and before it faded entirely, about half the population was reduced.  The situation was similar for England.   It took hundreds of years and many human generations later to recover.

Now imagine what’s happening right now in the ocean. It’s like the plague except ten times worse.  Instead of war and famine, marine life has to contend with global warming, pollution, acidification, reduction in oxygen levels, and exponential killings by the global fisheries industry.  Global warming is, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all, as it is unlikely to be reversed, only lessened, and it influences the intensity of the other interlocked, death-bringing forces.

Exponential killings from the fisheries industry is, perhaps, the simplest yet most challenging to redirect.  Simple, because all it takes are changes in policy across the world.  Challenging, because commercial interests always supersede ecological demands.  In Canada, fishing regulations are almost nil to where they don’t know whether they’re overfishing or not.  In China, it took significant reduction in the Zhoushan Fishery for the government to respond.  Even with changes in policy, so long as commercial interests drive fishing and whaling for food, delicacy, cosmetics, traditional Chinese medicine, or what have you, marine organisms will always be under stress.

According to the report from IPSO, dead zones are spreading across the oceans

From NASA: Satellite images of dead zones in the deltas of three major rivers.

at a fast rate.  Dead zones are regions of the ocean with low oxygen levels.  They are naturally occurring, formed by an increase in nutrient-rich sediment pockets that congregate, particularly at deltas and on lake shores.  Algae and plankton are attracted to the sediment and thus form colonies that eventually suck up all the oxygen in that space, leaving it to where other organisms can no longer live there.  The problem is not that they exist, but that they are increasing in area and numbers.  Thanks to agricultural run-off (i.e., nitrogen-rich fertilizers, killer microbes, and hormone-disrupting chemicals, to name a few), sewage treatment, and increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, dead zones are more successful than coral reefs, which are on the brink of dying completely.

Credit for writing the death warrant for corals has been given to global warming.  According to Jeremy Hance’s article at mongabay.com,  a carbon sink study published in Nature stated that more than a quarter of carbon emissions have been sequestered by the ocean, but the ocean has reached a tilting point and cannot sequester anymore carbon.  The signs are apparent from coral reefs all around the world as they die from bleaching–a condition brought on by acidification.

Increased acidification has been set in successful motion courtesy of increase in CO2 gasses, according to Marlowe Hood’s AFP article on oceans in distress.  And with the continuous flux of pollution into the ocean, scientists project that marine organisms will be less resilient to global warming.  Sound familiar? (see plague analogy above)

Let’s assume that, like most living systems, marine ecosystems can eventually recover from this.  Over time, they can restore major food webs and continue to harbor the most biodiversity on Earth.  But it wouldn’t be within our species’s lifetime (probably not in any species’s lifetime), and who can say how significantly the Earth would change by then and how terrestrial and aquatic life would have to adapt.  Life would be so altered that Earth could become unrecognizable.

Facing Death, Restoring Life

But I don’t want to end on that daunting note.  It’s painful to witness what’s happening.  We are all contributing to the plight of marine life and yet we are not all equal in power to do much about it.  How can we accept that and still live with ourselves without deafening our healthy emotional responses to this trauma?  Are we truly helpless or is there something that we as voiced citizens can do about it?  What can we do in the face of this trauma?  Major ecosystem destruction and mass extinction are two forces that can be felt around the world.  Just by being part of this world, we are vulnerable to the pain of that tremendous loss.  Rather than ignoring and suppressing it, we have an opportunity to own up to that pain, share the world’s pain for our own, and act to alleviate it.  This makes the plight of marine life both global and personal.

As a systems thinker, I see this travesty as a positive feedback loop and the opportunity for caring humans to intervene.  We may be able to lessen the harm through policy reform and renewable energy, but they are merely bandages to greater problems.  I know this may sound simplistic and overly theoretical, but a change in values, from the humblest individual to bureaucratic governments, can go a long way.  Value the world as if life beyond humans matter.  Value our lives as if responsibility for our actions matter.  Value our utter vulnerable dependence on other living beings as if ecosystems matter.  As long as commercial interests trump the needs of living beings, as long as currency is valued over life, as long as we spend more time creating death around us and avoiding death in ourselves, global civilization will continue this positive feedback loop until it can’t.  But, then again, this may not be so terrible.  Perhaps it takes the death of our global way of life to restore our true selves in the biosphere.

To all of those who have taken the time to peruse my blog, I sincerely give thanks.  It has been a while since I have posted anything.  The reason is simple:  I lost my vision.  Ironic that in my quest for finding vision regarding animals in society that I would lose my vision for this blog completely.  How this happened was correlated to losing sight of what I wanted for life in general.  You could say I had a crisis and went AWOL from cyberspace.

After three months of inactivity in the blogosphere, I have returned with not so much a vision as an idea for how Animal Visions can sustain.  For one, I’m writing what I need to write and not what I should write.  I say this because in the months before, I posted in an effort to act like a journalist and before that I tried to be a scholar.  Neither persona worked, and so I am relinquishing all expectation henceforth and am doing what I should have done in the first place, which is write from where I am.

Additionally, I fell into a funk of bitter commentary on animal news that was either incredibly offensive or incredibly depressing.  I could only take so much of that before I just didn’t want to write anymore.  No more of that, either.

Finally, I didn’t know who I was writing for, even after maintaining the blog for over a year.  So I’ve decided to make matters simple and write what I need to say.  If you knew me personally, you’d know that this conclusion is a milestone for me.  What I need to say will not always follow the form of the way I have posted in the past.  Some of it may be fiction (because, after all, I am a fiction writer!).  Hopefully, current readers will appreciate that and join the conversation.

I appreciate all the comments and views the blog has received so far.  To whoever is reading, I give my warmest gratitude and look forward to seeing more of you in the future.

Sincerely,

Anastasia

“A Dog’s Tale” is still a provocative story because it holds merit today.  Finishing that tragic tale, which offers no justice and no relief and relentless bitter commentary, I thought on the scientific industry (not just biological but physics and chemistry too–they all rely on animal experimentation in some degree) and I realized it hasn’t changed all that much.  I don’t base these assumptions on Twain’s assessment alone, even though he was an outspoken opponent of vivisection; he just inspired the brief reflection.

As recent as the early 1900s, dogs, cats, and street urchins were regularly picked up off the street to become menial experiments for research science pupils in biology, medicine, chemistry, etc. to earn their way and learn the craft of dissection.  It was their rite of passage, so to speak, for to be a real scientist you had to know how to cut somebody open and you had to keep a straight face while you did it and show no remorse after the fact.  If you appeared as though you cared, then you didn’t belong in science.  I hate to admit that this tradition remains, and though street urchins are no longer on the table, dogs and cats still are and many more, embodied with short furs, long furs, snouts, bills, breasts, feathers, fangs, paws, talons, tapetum lucidum, fear, and utter confusion.

And Twain’s scientist replied, in response to the dog saving his child from a fire, prior to gauging out the eyes of her puppy and proclaiming his celebration for being right in his hypothesis: “It’s far above instinct; it’s reason, and many a man, privileged to be saved and go with you and me to a better world by right of its possession, has less of it that this poor silly quadruped that’s foreordained to perish.”  Sure this character is a caricature of the masculinist scientific institution.  But is he so far removed from reality that in science the animal still remains soulless, a body that can never match the awesome grandeur of man?  If it were not for the minority of rogue scientists who dared to call animals kin, to recognize the anima in animal, to admit they care, then we would all be soulless.

Matthew Brown/AP Photo

Remember the story of the Grizzly Mother who was executed for assaulting three campers in Yellowstone National Park?  Remember also in that story her cubs were sent to “a zoo as soon as possible”?  News update: the young bears are now in the Montana Zoo and are reported to be “making their debut.”

An L.A. Times local column reports that the cubs “will never escape their savage backstory, but three young bears whose mother led them on a rampage through a Montana campground embarked on a new career Friday: fuzzy zoo attractions.”  Thank you, Montana Zoo, for subduing the savage beasts within the young bears (or rather the savage beasts that they are) and guaranteeing us that they will never have conflict with people again because they’re never getting out of there alive, or so ZooMontana senior keeper Krystal Whethem says.

Even as I type this short commentary, the bears are apparently relaxing more and more to human presence.  But are they?  Can I trust this article, seeing as there’s no hint of the bears’ perspectives beyond the zoo executives?  I don’t want to assume the worse in imagining their lives as “any other confined wild creature,” but the article reassures me that I should.  As a person who hungers for animal news stories from animals’ true perspectives, filtered through sincere professionals and writers who aren’t politically or economically compromised, can you blame me for being skeptical and even upset about the current and future lives of these bears?

I could postulate at least five reasons why black folks and animal cruelty appear so intimate in the media.  If I took the time to research for this post, I imagine there’s a scholarly article out there picking apart the rampant violence towards animals in the black community.  And there’s likely the article’s counterpart: some critical race media studies essay saying “No, it’s not that black people are more violent toward animals, obviously.  It’s just that the media is racialized toward showing more negative stories about black people, regardless of the topic…because of prevailing whiteness.”

Setting hypothetical scholarly reflections aside, there just seems to be a surge in animal abuse reports in general, just within this country alone.  “Man accused of trying to marinate cat.” “Dog found brutalized.” “Man charged in deaths of 832 hogs.”  That last one is more ironic than shocking because the man was a farmer and would’ve been responsible for their deaths even without the animal cruelty charge.  The weapons of choice? The trunk of a car, a golf club, and absolutely nothing (no food or water) except confinement, respectively.

Maybe I’m just more attentive than I have been in the past, but there’s been way too many stories of black violence on animals this year.  At the same time, heart-warming stories about animals have also been fairly numerous; most of them I have found are about an abused dog getting a second chance to life or some animal bringing joy to some human’s life or the story of a rescuer and her experience with the rescued animal.  Not one of them have I read about a black person doing something right for animals. Sadly, I don’t find this surprising at all–just incredibly disappointing. So I’ve decided, it’s about fine time I write that story of black people living well with, helping, and being just “nice” to animals. I’m sending a shout out to all those average and extraordinary black folks who are interested. Whether you identify as an animal lover, animal rescuer, animal welfare advocate, animal rights activist, or just an off-beat, unidentified radical who gives a shit about the lives of animals and actually does stuff to help animals, I’m interested in your story.

Bjorn Alander, Nordic, Aurora Photos

Marc Bekoff sent three links to me this morning. From the Chronicle of Higher Education, all three op-ed articles talked about “animal research.”  By animal research, the authors meant laboratory experimental research.  By laboratory experimental research, they spoke entirely about research with medical implications.

If you want to read the articles, here are the links: http://chronicle.com/article/Animal-Research-Groupthink-in/125238/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en; http://chronicle.com/article/Animal-Research-Activists/125247/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en; http://chronicle.com/article/Animal-Research-Why-We-Need/125240/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

My interest is not with the content of the articles themselves but rather the lack thereof. Like all articles I read about animal research and vivisection, whether in vehement opposition or in feverish support, the authors of the three articles above neglected major areas of animal research in higher education. Medical research gets too much of the credit for violent, invasive torture and exploitation of animals. What about the rest of the laboratory research that happens just for the sake of it? By the sake of it, I mean the sake of the investigator’s insatiable curiosity, the sake of the student’s need to publish something (considered sound and credible, of course) in order to advance his career in science, the sake of science to produce some kind of knowledge. None of this research needs to have a pending need to justify its usefulness to human welfare. This research can happen more or less without lay-people knowing about it, much of it at taxpayers’ expense.

Now you’re probably thinking this sounds like a conspiracy theory, some gross inaccuracies from a quack animal rights person who knows nothing about scientific research and seeks only to discredit scientific research. I wish I were wrong about this subject matter. I wish the political economy surrounding scientific research did not exist. I wish that so many animal species, so many animal individuals did not disappear, unaccounted for, in the cracks of biology and psychology and animal science professors’ laboratories. Maybe then I could continue my path as a scientist like I dreamed and be able to sleep at night.

When animal rights advocates speak out against animal research and vivisection, we limit the concern primarily to medical research. And the animals sacrificed are almost exclusively mammals. The horrifying pictures of sickly rhesus macaques behind bars and the frantic white transgenic mice with ears on their backs (leaked to the public courtesy of animal rights folks) consume our imagination, and our focus becomes mammal.

At the University of Vermont, laboratory research with medical implications was not just limited to mammals, though the majority were severely inbred and transgenic mice. One professor, who I knew well, performed his experiments on fruit flies. Last time he detailed the experimental methods to me, which was over four years ago, he described the transgenic fruit flies as having their wings flapped and worked until they couldn’t move any longer, after which they were disposed of. The purpose of this experiment was to follow the behavior of specific proteins in muscle tissue, of course with the implications for understanding muscle dystrophy in humans. We never see lab experiments on fruit flies in the media. But they’re everywhere in the classrooms.

Nor do we see examples of the countless number of experiments on animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, addressing questions with concerns that never leave an academic journal and forming dissertations that collect dust on dean’s office bookshelves. The formica ants, the sows, the trout, the guppies, the wolf spiders, the sea horses and sea monkeys, the holstein cows, the jersey cows, the canaries, the zebra finches, the anura frogs, the honeybees–too many animals I’ve seen, too many tragic stories I’ve heard. And their stories don’t get media attention. Their lives, pains, and deaths go unseen, unheard, where they are replenished with more just like them.

So are there really suitable alternatives to animal research that will appease all stakeholders? Not for this kind of research. Non-medical laboratory research, with questions that demand the confinement, bodily manipulation, and often death of the animal subjects, has no alternative….

I call you Raccoon Mother because you were a mother once and I don’t know how else to identify you. You suckled babies at your breasts and maybe witnessed them grow up to maturity. But when I met you, you were alone. Alone and helpless. Helpless and crippled. You bled. You lay still. You could not stand. Your fur was saturated from the rain. And ticks held tight to your skin like barnacles on a rock.

I know you didn’t expect to be hit by an automobile, in the concrete cemetery where many like you find death, and corpses transform like sugar crystals dissolving in water. I found you in the middle of the road. You lay there, forest on both shoulders, in an underworld segmenting the woods in two. I thought you were dead, but as I approached your body, I witnessed your feeble blink and saw that you still lived. At that moment, I reacted like a human with a rupturing heart and an open source pool of charity. I thought I would be kind. I thought I would do the right thing.

Unfortunately, I was not alone when I saw you. I was traveling with a companion, more like a business associate I happened to live with at the time. He saw you in the road too and eagerly wanted to pass you by, alive or not. He pleaded me to ignore you and walk away, but how could I listen to him? He didn’t care about you. And I suspected he didn’t care about me, either.

Staring upon your broken, wet body, eyes barely open, I knew you were dying. But I could not accept it. I said I alone had to save you, even if the journey was just you and me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t take the time to feel what you were feeling. All I saw was death, your death, and it was the worst event that could happen to us.

I lifted you, your shattered limbs dangling in my arms, and I carried you to the edge of the forest. I placed you on your feet to stand. You couldn’t support yourself on your broken legs, so you toppled to your side. You didn’t move. You must have felt so much pain and trauma. You must have been paralyzed, waiting to die. I felt the death threatening to appear at any moment. I couldn’t let that happen. Inexperienced I was, at dealing with a person dying in my arms. I didn’t know what to do, but I know I didn’t want to see you die.

I took off my coat and wrapped it around your body. I picked you up again and, this time, carried you to the car. My associate protested, but his complaints fell on closed ears. My determination overpowered him. You were coming with us; I wasn’t going to have it any other way.

“I’m going to take her back to The Forest and find a rehabilitator,” I proclaimed.

“What?!” he replied in shock. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if that thing has a disease or something?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just drive. I’m going to take care of her.”

He fell silent and lowered his head. But he did as I told him: he drove.

During the ride, I could hardly feel you breathe. What if you died in my arms on the way back? I thought of nothing else–you, the dying one; me, the desperate rescuer.

When we arrived to The Forest and the house in which we resided, I ran with you in my arms to my bedroom, wrapped you in a white towel, and placed you gently on the floor. What could I do next? I needed to find a rehabilitator.

I observed you for a couple of minutes. Your state hadn’t changed–barely alive and severely crippled. I didn’t sit and watch for long. I needed to do something. I couldn’t watch you die. I couldn’t let you die. I convinced myself that I had the power to save you from death, and I didn’t care who stood in my way. I didn’t even think about your feelings and where you wanted to be. I didn’t listen to your feelings. I didn’t realize the further danger I put you in and how I made your remaining life worse. I am so sorry.

I ran downstairs to the computer room and searched the internet for wildlife rehabilitators in the area. The closest one (and most credible given its title): Tufts University’s Wildlife Clinic. I called, asked their female office support if they would admit you to the clinic. She replied, “We don’t take raccoons.”

I paused, experiencing a surge of panic. “Well, do you know any rehabilitators in the area who would?” The searing of my options began to show.

“I don’t know,” she stated bluntly, tone of a working woman with little time to answer foolish questions. “To be honest, you’re probably not going to find anyone who takes raccoons. They’re not worth the risk.”

“What do you mean?” I held my breath so as to suppress my tears.

“Well, in the state of Massachusetts, raccoons are main carriers of rabies, so most don’t take them in. And we certainly don’t.”

After this declaration, there wasn’t much left to say. I said thank you and hung up the phone, distraught and defeated. Now I was really at a lost for what to do. I couldn’t believe what was happening. A mother was dying in my room, and nobody cared. No concern for her, just a condition she may or may not carry.

It didn’t matter at this point. You were dying, and I made the mistake of bringing you into a hostile place. I didn’t listen to your feelings, raccoon mother. Only mine, and I’m so sorry.

I began to tell myself that you should at least die close to home, out of sight from humans in the forest. I had to get you out of my room before people learned of your presence. That was the least I could do. I had to bring you back. I could not escape your death, I realized that. Your death was inevitable, and bringing you to my room made the last moments of your life stressful, to topple your agony and paralysis. So now, I had to smuggle you away from the people of The Forest for fear of what they might do to you if they found out you were there.

I left you in my room and sprinted to the main office building, with the intent to check out a car and drive you back to the forest. Before I could enter the building, management interrupted me. They found out anyway, my associate told them, it was too late. They had already called animal control and ordered me not to return to the house, under penalty of expulsion. I felt so much despair and felt so afraid for what they would do to you. But there was little I could do beyond persecution for both of us. Now I was the helpless one.

Management spoke to me, condescendingly, like a doctor to an inmate in an asylum. They continuously asked me why, why, WHY?? Every question, every response became a blur. I didn’t see them or hear them or smell them. I just thought of you, raccoon mother, and how I had failed you.

“Don’t you know that rabies is a big deal in Massachusetts and that raccoons are the primary carriers?”

“What where you thinking bringing a wild animal here?”

“How could you have such little consideration for your housemates? Do you realize the danger you put them in?”

I told management that I acted out of care. They told me that my care was misplaced, that I should have cared more about the potential threat to my housemates, that I should have cared more to adhere to social boundaries and know that wild animals have no place in The Forest except in a cage or on a dissection table. The aching pain I felt for you, dear raccoon mother, was soon replaced with rage.

The last time I saw you, you were wet and covered in a white towel on my bedroom floor. I didn’t see you when animal control came and took you. The entire house was quarantined for three hours. After management declared the house safe to live in once more, I returned to my room, the floor bare, and the air holding on to the scent of your wet body. Once you were gone, The Forest felt safe again, and I felt a part of my soul die. A week later, I asked management what happened to you.

“I don’t know. It was sent to CDC.”

“Is she dead?”

“Of course, it was euthanized. It was a public health concern, so all carrier species are destroyed and processed.”

Management talked about you like a deactivated bomb–a threat to the people now destroyed and processed. They didn’t care about you. And I hated them for it. I buried my sorrow and transformed it into bitterness and anger. Even during the aftermath, I didn’t bother to reflect on what you may have felt. I felt rage and made it all about me, and I am so sorry.

This is the first time I have spoken aloud of what happened since you died. This is the first time I spoke directly to you. For two years, I didn’t want to face the pain of your passing and how you passed. I didn’t want to face the regret in my actions. How you died forced me to see an ugly side of modern humans and the overbearing presence of my ego.

I wrote this letter on All Souls Day but am now publishing it on Animal Visions because after two and half years, I still have not healed from the wounds your passing left behind. I still don’t forgive the residents and workers of The Forest, even though my bitterness and anger have subsided. I have only recently begun to forgive myself. But I’m still not sure what you would have wanted, because I didn’t take the time to feel and listen.

Later on this month, from November 26-28, University of Western Australia’s Center of Excellence in Biological Arts, otherwise known as SymbioticA, is hosting a symposium to explore the diversity of life “through critical investigations in art, ecology, and action.” More about the symposium includes:

The ecology of biodiversity is based upon an uncertain definition, incomplete statistics and the need to act in a world without balance. While multiple flora and fauna databases have being established and are being coordinated, there is an urgent need to engage even more proactively with complex ecosystems and human responses. Artists, scientists, humanities scholars and conservationists will come together to talk of the ‘matters of concern’ around the potentials and futures of biodiversity.

Confirmed Speakers include Professor Bruce Clarke (Professor of Literature and Science, Department of English, Texas Tech University), Professor Timothy Morton (Professor of English (Literature and the Environment), Department of English, University of California, Davis), Associate Professor Anas Ghadouani (School of Environmental Systems Engineering, The University of Western Australia), Greg Pryor (Artist and Lecturer, School of Communications and Arts, Faculty of Education and the Arts, Edith Cowan University), Dr Lesley Instone (Lecturer, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, Faculty of Science and Information Technology, Newcastle University) and British Artists Dr Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson.

The symposium is free.

SymbioticA is still looking for artwork to display in their biodiversity art online gallery. Within a short amount of time, they seek art that explores the ideas of biodiversity. They’re accepting artwork under one of the four categories:

1. Biodiversity as a concept or idea. This is based primarily on aesthetics in taxonomy and classification trees, artistic renderings of evolution, issues of scale in ecology, and the image of ecological resilience in people’s imaginations.

2. Biodiversity as an issue. This deals with art that displays habitat loss, ecosystem/land degradation, pollution, ecological imperialism and invasions, and climate change.

3. Biodiversity as a way of thinking. This refers to artistic notions of diversity, complexity, adaptive systems, interconnectedness, and resilience.

4. Biodiversity and technoscience: the possibilities and challenges of creating ‘new’ biodiversity. This calls for artist lens in the role of technology and science in creating visions for future biological and cultural diversity.

Those interested in submitting, send your artwork, details of the work, a brief bio, and a link to your website (if available) to Perdita Phillips (perdita.phillips@uwa.edu.au) ASAP or by November 19.

So far, on Animal Visions, I haven’t discussed biodiversity (or cultural diversity) in vivid detail and its various conceptions. But they are concepts that go hand-in-hand with habitat loss and fragmentation (homelessness) and environmental justice, both of which are pertinent to animal rights and animal-human relations. This online gallery is an opportunity to bring concern for animal life (in all its species, ecological, and cultural diversity) and animal-human relations into focus within biodiversity science and conservation. For the scientific artist or the artistic scientist who loves animals, ecosystems, and life, with an eye for ecological justice, this call is for you.