Tannishblog

Of all the news I’ve read this week, the killing of the Toklat wolves makes me the saddest. Not Terri, not the Pope - may they find rest at last - but the wolves; I feel their pain. The crux of irony is that the trappers, while acting fully within our feeble laws, are catching adult wolves. More common would be a trapper finding young, inexperienced animals, but in Denali National Park so many non-threatening tourists have passed through the park, that the adult wolves have become habituated toward their human cousins, only to be preyed upon by those few who make a profit by killing animals. Some would think at this point that the wolves so trapped are just stupid, but these beautiful examples of our planet’s bounty (or God’s skills, if you so desire) are just following their nature; betrayal is a foreign concept.

When will humanity remember that we too are mammals? When will we remember that killing other mammals is the same as killing our brothers?

Wait. We kill other humans, too – by the thousands. If we can’t kill them with superior weaponry, we starve and rape them, stealing their dignity, their livelihoods and their land. Obviously, as a species we have no respect for life. We feign respect for certain lives, perhaps, if there is a perceived political advantage. History evinces our lip service toward the life affirming tenets of religion; yet as a species we are hypocrites.

I, for one, believe in karma, it is nothing more that the law of causality, as in “what comes around goes around.” I watch from the sidelines, sharing in the collective guilt because I have my own family to feed, just like the wolves do. And like the wolves I watch as humanity builds an astronomical karmic debt, much like our current national debt in that the causes are similar and that the payments will occur for generations to come. This assumes that generations will come - if not perhaps then the debt will have been paid in full.