This blog is a continuation to the otter story in Day 222: Who’s the Bad Guy? Who’s to Blame? – Part 1.
What most people will do when they find out they have a ‘predator problem’, is to find the animal and kill, say by trapping it, gunning it or putting out bait with poison. Killings may not occur anymore and it looks like the situation is ‘fixed’. This is however a very limited way of looking at things, where we look at a problem in isolation of its context. We’re in fact not really fixing anything by just ‘killing the animal’, but merely removing a symptom of a bigger problem.
Each animal has a very specific habitat/environment which supports it, which is supposed to provide the animal with its suitable diet. When a disequilibrium takes place in any one of the points that keeps everything going / keeps everything in place in terms of having a functional ecosystem where all are supported, things start going wrong one by one.
If you take the otter for instance, he’s supposed to be eating fish, crabs and frogs. He is living in a ‘humanized’ area where there is not much ‘wild nature’ available for him to thrive. There are limitations like fences and waters which have been polluted due to human activity. Now there are no crabs and fish around, and he doesn’t have much other place to go that would be more suitable in the direct environment. So now he’s eating whatever else he can get his hands on: ducks, geese, chickens, random birds. He does not really want to eat these animals but was forced to because his environment was out of harmony. Now we have for instance a situation where we have no more male ducks left and thus the ducks have no way of making babies (though we can just buy more males, but this is not always possible in every situation). So there, another point of disharmony has been created which will have further consequence. When I put out birdseed for the wild birds in the morning by the river, I also see a lot of his poop lying around. What’s interesting here is that he is not even able to digest the meat he is eating properly. There are lots of undigested pieces of meat present in his poo. So obviously, this diet is not for him. So it’s really kind of a lose-lose situation where ducks and geese are dying and at the same time they are dying so he can sustain himself but it’s not really doing the job.
So it’s easy to go ‘oooh look, there’s the culprit! Damn otter!!’ – but he is also just being a victim of his environment and the conditions he found himself within. We can then keep on pointing at each little point that was out of place somewhere down the line that caused him / drove him to the behaviour he currently adopted for the sake of survival. The thing is that, just like with the money system, we can’t just fix nature and the animals by only changing ‘one point’. Nature and the Animal Kingdom are one whole, one interconnected system. To fix one problem you really have to always go back to the whole and ensure that the whole system is sound and in a state of harmony in all ways. If you look at Nature, it is quite fine working and sustaining itself, by itself, when left alone. Once you bring in the human factor, disharmony starts occurring as we through our ignorance and arrogance start appropriating land that we believe are ‘entitled’ to, which animals then lose. So if we really want to point fingers for these type of events where predators come and eat livestock – it’s really a matter of pointing it at yourself since the human has been the main cause of disrupting harmony in the nature and animal kingdom. We are also the only one’s who are in a position to fix this and to restore balance to the earth.
What most people will do when they find out they have a ‘predator problem’, is to find the animal and kill, say by trapping it, gunning it or putting out bait with poison. Killings may not occur anymore and it looks like the situation is ‘fixed’. This is however a very limited way of looking at things, where we look at a problem in isolation of its context. We’re in fact not really fixing anything by just ‘killing the animal’, but merely removing a symptom of a bigger problem.Each animal has a very specific habitat/environment which supports it, which is supposed to provide the animal with its suitable diet. When a disequilibrium takes place in any one of the points that keeps everything going / keeps everything in place in terms of having a functional ecosystem where all are supported, things start going wrong one by one.
If you take the otter for instance, he’s supposed to be eating fish, crabs and frogs. He is living in a ‘humanized’ area where there is not much ‘wild nature’ available for him to thrive. There are limitations like fences and waters which have been polluted due to human activity. Now there are no crabs and fish around, and he doesn’t have much other place to go that would be more suitable in the direct environment. So now he’s eating whatever else he can get his hands on: ducks, geese, chickens, random birds. He does not really want to eat these animals but was forced to because his environment was out of harmony. Now we have for instance a situation where we have no more male ducks left and thus the ducks have no way of making babies (though we can just buy more males, but this is not always possible in every situation). So there, another point of disharmony has been created which will have further consequence. When I put out birdseed for the wild birds in the morning by the river, I also see a lot of his poop lying around. What’s interesting here is that he is not even able to digest the meat he is eating properly. There are lots of undigested pieces of meat present in his poo. So obviously, this diet is not for him. So it’s really kind of a lose-lose situation where ducks and geese are dying and at the same time they are dying so he can sustain himself but it’s not really doing the job.
So it’s easy to go ‘oooh look, there’s the culprit! Damn otter!!’ – but he is also just being a victim of his environment and the conditions he found himself within. We can then keep on pointing at each little point that was out of place somewhere down the line that caused him / drove him to the behaviour he currently adopted for the sake of survival. The thing is that, just like with the money system, we can’t just fix nature and the animals by only changing ‘one point’. Nature and the Animal Kingdom are one whole, one interconnected system. To fix one problem you really have to always go back to the whole and ensure that the whole system is sound and in a state of harmony in all ways. If you look at Nature, it is quite fine working and sustaining itself, by itself, when left alone. Once you bring in the human factor, disharmony starts occurring as we through our ignorance and arrogance start appropriating land that we believe are ‘entitled’ to, which animals then lose. So if we really want to point fingers for these type of events where predators come and eat livestock – it’s really a matter of pointing it at yourself since the human has been the main cause of disrupting harmony in the nature and animal kingdom. We are also the only one’s who are in a position to fix this and to restore balance to the earth.
