Suffering Animals

Abstract

Ecological crisis is an established part of the post-modern condition. It is a crisis so huge that it has led to an apocalyptic numbing, an anaesthetic. The figures describing the loss of species and the parallel explosion in human population are so large, time scales are so pressing, situations so catastrophic, and predictions so complex, that it is difficult for concerned individuals to know how to act to save the animals, to aid in the conservation of nearly extinct species. Palaeontologists and biologists tell us that massive waves of extinction are part of the world’s history, but that in the past these were products of environmental actors such as meteorite collisions, or volcanic explosions, while now humans are the agents that have brought us to the brink of a world disaster. Five major mass extinctions have wiped out in each case between 76 per cent and 95 per cent of the species of the time. The Permian extinction of 245 million years ago wiped out 95 per cent of animal species. The last major extinction, 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs and allowed a platform for mammalian species to develop. Currently, about 10 per cent of life-forms may have been extinguished through human destruction of habitats, but this figure is open to an exponential leap as the human population is still exploding, requiring more and more resources to sustain its immediate growth.KeywordsReligious ExperienceAnimal ImageAnimal SpiritAnimal PresenceBiological AnimalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.