From the current issue of Vanity Fair, a must-read article on elephant poaching:
Another carcass has been found. On the Kuku Group Ranch, one of the sectors allotted to the once nomadic Maasai that surround Amboseli National Park, in southern Kenya. Amboseli is home to some 1,200 elephants who regularly wander into the group ranches, these being part of their original, natural habitat. More than 7,000 Maasai live in scattered fenced-in compounds called bomas with their extended families and their cattle on Kuku’s 280,000 acres. Traditionally, the Maasai coexisted with their wildlife. They rarely killed elephants, because they revered them and regarded them as almost human, as having souls like us. Neighboring tribespeople believe that elephants were once people who were turned into animals because of their vanity and given beautiful, flashy white tusks, which condemned them, in the strangely truthful logic of myth, to be forever hunted and killed in the name of human vanity. And Maasai believe when a young woman is getting married and her groom comes to get her from her village she musn’t look back or she will become an elephant. “But in the last few years, everything has changed,” a member of the tribe told me. “The need for money has changed the hearts of the Maasai.”
Thanks VL for writing about this--I hadn't read the piece and will go find it. One of the things that fascinated me in Freinkel's history of plastic was how important plastic was to saving tortoises, which were being decimated by the demand for their shell...
ReplyDeletefor years i monitored sea turtle nesting on the island in florida where i lived. the major threat to the clutches included racoons who dug up nests,sea gulls who picked off hatchings as they emerged from their clutch, and humans who believed that the eggs were aphrodesiacs. lower case myths such as the belief that the eggs provide such an elixir overrode the Myth that the earth balances on the back of a giant sea turtle,or an even more compelling empathy for their value in the balance of life.
ReplyDeleteBoth of you touch on something I think is very important: our underlying ethic of consumption and attendant waste. I have to admit I feel a little hesitant to credit plastic with saving turtles, since it wasn’t exactly our desperate need for turtle shells that was the problem in the first place. It was simply a presumption of human superiority in the context of a history of great economic and class inequality in which the Superior Human (aka wealthy, powerful) killed animals (or members of another ethnic group) for sport, and retained parts as trophies displaying either wealth or prowess. The desperate poverty of certain nations then opens the way for humans to betray their animal companions (poaching). These animal parts, having become signs of status and class, are then sought out by the middle and lower classes, who of course cannot afford the real thing but are ony too happy to partake of plastic knock-offs. By which time the item has lost its ability to confer status, so a different animal part has to become fashionable, and so it goes. All for some fantasy.
ReplyDeleteEven if I didn't object to the killing for sport, the sheer waste would still be morally appalling: I think of pictures of carcasses left to rot, almost intact except for the desired body part. That level of cruelty is just ...unspeakable. Only those humans who inhabit a world of excess could be so careless; when more "primitive" (or poor) people kill an animal, every last molecule is put to use.
And don’t get me started on the human obsession with sexual performance!
oh VL, am looking forward to your next post and i do want to thank you as well for all your valuable insights and the links to wonderful sidebar provocateurs.....psi
ReplyDelete'VL ,
ReplyDeleteread a comment on SLL that you are out there...but miss you here. hope all is well. psi
a friend sent me links to two articles in Toronto paper....i thought of you:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1048880--marmur-global-revolt-of-the-have-nots
and
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1050093--mallick-the-decade-of-the-hard-american-fall
Dear PSI -- Ack! I can't believe it's been two months....thank you for remembering to visit. I've been completely waylaid with work and taking care of various urgent conditions among friends and neighbors, but continue to think (and feel guilty about) my promised post for you and DB. Trouble is, we're in such a sticky wicket that I keep finding layers to peel back. Will apply myself to this soon, as soon as I can wrap up another deadline.... VL
ReplyDeletejust glad you are fine...will keep checking in ...take care, psi
ReplyDelete