Quickly! Quickly! Kill Them Before They Die!

When as a result of one of humans’ many reckless, environment- and animal-endangering activities, a disaster* has fallen upon the Gulf of Mexico, and I turn on the news just in time to hear a reporter lament how much money humans are going to lose if their industries don’t rush to kill animals who call the disaster zone home even faster than the oil can – rather than lament, oh, I don’t know, how horrible it is that so many animals are going to suffer and die terribly as a result of this human fuck-up — I feel like my head might explode.

I couldn’t help but grit my teeth as the newscaster described with ominous tone and urgent inflections the horror of what might now befall the industries that make their money killing fishes and shrimps, now that oil has been pouring into the Gulf for days. How the hell do the nonhuman animals who are actual victims of this spill — whose home is being inundated with hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic, poisonous, suffocating oil — get nary a mention in such a report, while the narrative presents as the primary victims-cum-heroes the people who now must rush to scoop them out of the ocean and kill them even more quickly, even more haphazardly, with even less care than usual, in order to ensure profit from their deaths?

Sure, this will be disastrous for the industries that depend on dragging animals out of the ocean and killing them for profit. But the untold numbers of aquatic animals and birds and other coast-dwelling animals whose deaths are resulting and will continue to result from this? That is the disaster here. This is a disaster for habitats, for ecosystems, and for living, breathing, feeling fellow animals. It is a disaster for the ocean and the animals who depend on it, not for money, not for selfish eating habits, not for recreation, but for survival.

And oh, these kinds of disasters are absolutely disasters for us ultimately too, but on much deeper levels and in far more long-lasting ways than financial bottom lines. There is a limit to how much our fellow animals, our ecosystems, and our planet can take from us. And we know that we blew past that limit long ago. But we keep pushing further and digging deeper anyway, continuing and planning to continue policies and practices we know to be dangerous, deadly, and unsustainable, and so on and so on – while we call ourselves the most intelligent species.

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*I’m soooo glad offshore drilling is safe; aren’t you?