I think I have a better-than-average long-term memory. I can recall things that happened when I was an infant, and I’ve used the sticking power of my mind to study several foreign languages in my life, but when it comes to remembering everyday events that have transpired over the past days or weeks, I often draw a blank. I’ve been playing the card game of concentration in an effort to improve my short term recall, and recently, in the same vein, had my husband prompt me to remember things that had happened recently. I began reeling off a list of what seemed important, and we were somewhat amused to discover that the first ten things I listed were birds and animals we had seen, followed by a list of plants we had sown or tended.

This was a very revealing exercise, as I believe it showed me quite clearly what types of experiences make a lasting impression on me and are regarded by my brain as being most important to retain. I feel most conscious, alive and engaged when I am in the presence of other creatures. When I think back over the past decade, it is the time spent side by side with wildlife that has added the chief helping of wonder and awe to my life, and I don’t believe I will ever forget some of these encounters.

This past week was made absolutely special by a glimpse of a creature I didn’t know if I would ever see – a weasel! More specifically, the Long-tailed Weasel. My husband and I were taking a hike on a back country road. It was a beautiful, clear day, full of warm sunlight and a cooling breeze. We were surrounded by open spaces, including a marshy area, as well as some agricultural fencing. Now that I’ve read up on the Long-tailed Weasel, I’ve discovered that this describes one of his favorite habitats, but I was completely stunned when this sleek, warm brown animal with the bristle brush-tipped tail emerged from the roadside grass not 10 feet in front of us, glided across the road and vanished into the opposite grass.

We were taking an extra fast walk for exercise, but that brought us to a standstill.

“That was a weasel.”

“Yes, that was a weasel!”

My joy expanded as I continued on down the road, the image of the wonderful being captured like a photograph in my mind’s eye. Suddenly, our everyday walk had become an extraordinary event that I knew I would always remember with gratitude.

The things of man continue to push the lives of all other earthlings off the map. Any time I see a wild creature, my heart beats with a kind of relief over the message, “We are still here. We are not all gone yet.” No one can see the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Moa or the Dodo, but I can still stand beside the coyote, the deer, the fox and bobcat, the striking skunk and the pretty monarch, the muskrat and the western bluebird. I hope I never take this for granted.

I have been thinking over the idea of my recall for wildlife, and it occurs to me to wonder about the world’s ancient petroglyphs and the record they provide of animal encounters. Could it be that like me, my ancestors etched and painted and recorded the things that stood out most vividly in their day-to-day lives – meetings with powerful, cunning, charming and beautiful animals? Some researchers ascribe spiritual significance to rock and cave art, and this may well be true, and it could also be true that the spiritual experience being carved on the rock was of the purest kind of wonder at the variety of creation and the sacredness of life.

Do you think about the animals you have seen? Can you remember how you felt when you were near them? I think these things are worth thinking about.

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving on a freeway and saw the corpse of a big, beautiful raccoon, lying in the fast lane. Frankly, as long as there are cars and US speed limits continue to be set so high on freeways, preventing this overwhelmingly sad type of ‘accident’ doesn’t seem possible to me. But we live in the country and do most of our driving on country roads, and I’m reporting on this situation because I can’t stand the fact that we can’t leave our house without seeing dead animals littered across almost every road near home.

I know some of my neighbors and visitors to our region simply don’t care about danger to themselves or others – they tear down the roads like they’re on a race track. But I also know that many people are as hurt as I am by the sight of valuable, natural beings lying maimed and destroyed on America’s roadways. We never fail to say a prayer for blessing and release of the soul of the dead animal back to the Creator, but this isn’t all that we can do. We can go further than mourning by making a few behavioral alterations in the way we drive in semi-rural and country areas. While I can’t guarantee total success with this, I can share that we’ve avoided hitting literally hundreds of deer, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, possums, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, mice and domestic animals by driving the way that we do. We can make some reduction in the well over 100 Million estimated annual roadkill deaths in our lands, and I hope you’ll agree that anything we can do will be worth it.

Work To Prevent Roadkill With These 5 Practices

1. Respect The Dusk
If you drive country roads from dusk onwards, be aware that this is the time of day when the majority of wild animals come out of their resting places in search of food and water. Areas near water are especially likely to be thoroughfares for wildlife. Dusk is also one of the most challenging times for the human eye to see clearly. The mellowing of the light makes it difficult to distinguish objects ahead of you. When driving at dusk, commit to really focusing your attention on your eyesight. Sweep the road back and forth with your eye. It’s optimum to have a companion in the passenger seat to do the same thing so that you’ve got two sets of eyes watching the margins of the road as well as down the road. Don’t drive at dusk if you’re sleepy. This period of the day requires your keenest attentiveness and alertness. If you are a spiritual person, evening driving is a good time to ask for the gift of heightened sensory awareness to the presence of animals around you.

2. Let Them Pass
This isn’t about letting animals pass, of course. It’s about pulling over in designated turnout areas if you’ve got other drivers on your tail. This is especially important if those drivers are bent on driving fast on country roads. I never fail to be baffled by the fact that daytrippers in coastal and forest areas end their visits by speeding away from whatever site they’ve been enjoying that afternoon. It’s as if they can’t escape from nature soon enough and they drive like they are on a freeway. If you are unfortunate enough to be in front of such drivers and an animal should leap into the road, your are not only like to hit the animal, but also to be rear-ended by these unsafe country drivers. Turnouts were made for such situations. And once you’ve pulled over, you’re ready for the most important step towards more animal-friendly driving.

3. Slow Down
Unless you’re actually having an emergency, there is simply no reason to drive fast on an empty country road in the evening. Where rear visibility is good and you’ve rid yourself of impatient drivers behind you, take pleasure in exhaling and slowing down. Chances are, you’re in the country because you live there or you’re visiting to get away from the craziness of urban life. In the country, we have the chance to take things at our ease. It can be very pleasant driving at a leisurely pace in the country in the evening and the slower you’re going, the greater your chances of being able to brake when animals step in front of your car. Imagine that you are on a safari in a wild land and that hidden animals are all around you. By driving safely and slowly, you may not only have the pleasure of seeing these amazing creatures but also the invaluable decreased risk of harming them.

4. Use Your Brights At Night
On the roads we most frequently drive at night, the terrain is such that we can see the light of cars approaching in the far distance long before the actual vehicles come into full view on the road ahead of us. This enables us to use our brights for night driving and turn them off in time for those moments when oncoming drivers would be blinded by them. The brights allow us to see into the distance and to the sides of us with much greater clarity in the dark and they illuminate the eyes of animals almost as well as if the animals were wearing reflective clothing. If you are going slowly and using your brights, your chances of having time to brake are greatly increased.

5. When You See One, Look For More
In the springtime when animals are likely to have their young with them, or when encountering animals that frequently travel in groups such as deer, turkeys and rabbits, be extra aware that any animal attempting to cross a road may have companions just behind him. Just because a mother deer has made it safely across doesn’t mean you should step on the gas. Her family members may be just a few steps behind and walk right into the road as soon as she has gotten across. When you see one animal, always look for more of them on both sides of the road.

With these five tips for preventing the roadkill of valued animals, I hope you will be saved from the terrible guilt and heartache of accidentally killing innocent beings. The pain of this guilt can be very serious, with no obvious way to apologize or make amends. If you’ve mistakenly run into animals in the past, you know the pain I’m talking about and I think it’s all the more important for such drivers to do everything they can to prevent future accidents.

Further Steps You Can Take To Prevent Roadkill

If you live in an area where you have identified a particular wildlife path, consider posting a sign there. Your community may have official signs (such as the deer crossing sign accompanying this article) but I have also seen handmade signs reading ‘baby deer crossing’ in sensitive areas. These signs can alert visitors to your area that slowing down may prevent accidental deaths of both humans and animals.

Additionally, compassionate communities have invested in the construction of wildlife crossings like the one pictured here. Elevating a portion of the road so that animals can safely pass beneath it is a powerful way to give wildlife an alternative to risking their lives on major roads, but these types of projects are most likely to be funded in busy areas rather than on back country roads. Just as communities are unlikely to have crosswalks for human pedestrians in rural areas, they are even less likely to create safety zones for animals, and this is something that I would truly love to see change.

It’s only in the past century that animals have had to contend with man-made objects that move fast enough to kill. The cultures and lifeways of America’s wild animals are incredibly old and these brief decades since the invention of automobiles may simply not have been enough for animals to incorporate cultural warnings about vehicles into their societies. Doubtless, every baby deer is taught to fear and avoid mountain lions, but we simply don’t know if animal parents have developed a way to communicate to their children that the asphalt strands cutting through their homes are deadly. I have observed that many kinds of animals actually seem drawn to roads where a clear view is afforded to the animal, or he may find foraging for seed or carrion especially easy because of the absence of bushes and weeds. Very often, these roadways cut animals off from historic feeding and watering grounds or inhibit their vital migration patterns and they have no choice but to risk death.

The animals suffer from our choice to drive cars. I’m not such an idealist that I find it reasonable to suggest we stop driving – I doubt that will happen. But we could reduce our speed limits drastically if, as an enlightened society, we agreed that getting places a little bit more slowly wouldn’t be the end of our lives and would actually prevent millions of deaths of humans and animals each year. It’s going fast in cars that makes them so deadly. If we were able to give up our fascination with rushing and realize that, even in the days of the horse-drawn wagon, people did manage to get to their destinations, a great American slow down could actually revolutionize many areas of our lives while improving our expectations of what our planet can tolerate. I’m afraid our cars have cut us off from natural law in so many ways, and the animals, and our consciences, are paying the price for this.

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This article on VeganReader.com is dedicated to the baby deer who lived under our plum tree for the first few months of his life. His mother chose our garden as his nursery while she was busy during the day. He was a wonderful, quiet little being and we greatly valued his companionship. Three days ago, he was hit by a driver going fast on our country road – someone who felt their own rush was more important than the worth of this innocent baby animal. With very heavy hearts, we had to call the county road service to have the corpse of our friend removed from the ditch he was knocked into when he was killed and we have prayed for his spirit to be swiftly returned to his Creator. In the spirit of this fawn, we ask drivers to consider implementing our 5 tips for roadkill prevention.

I hope you enjoy this slideshow we’ve put together of what we consider to be one of America’s most endearing tribes of inhabitants – the Chipmunks of California! And, I hope your imaginiation has been sparked just enough so that you can look at our photos and see within them a family of very small, very valuable people. We who live in the Western United States are uniquely privileged to co-exist with the majority of the world’s Chipmunks. 23 of the planet’s 25 recognized species live with us here in the West.

I’ve found it difficult to get a concrete identification of our local Chipmunks. Even the State Park workers are apparently uncertain as to which varieties live in local parks, but I have managed to narrow it down to two possible species – both the Sonoma Chipmunk and the Yellow Cheeked Chipmunk inhabit Northern California and both not only enjoy various types of forests, but they are also vital authors of the woodlands we westerners so cherish.

Chipmunks create stores of nuts and seeds which are responsible for some of our great groves of redwoods and oaks. They also help spread the spores of various fungi which are part of a symbiotic relationship with forest trees. Ever busy, Chipmunks have worked to create some of the green places that bring greatest refreshment to the human spirit. They deserve our gratitude for this.

I dream of a day in which the human species has evolved sufficiently to be able to communicate with other species of animals. We are so far from this dream of mine at present that many people remain locked in a speciesist state of ignorance, erroneously believing that animals have no language or culture and are therefore inferior to humans. Many people are unaware that dolphins have spoken names for one another and keep porpoises as pets, that honeybees have a visual quantam mechanics-based sign language that directs their tribe and that groups of sloths have individual cultural cuisines that are passed on from one generation to the next. These are a few of the facts that human beings have been able to observe about our fellow species because the behaviors of certain kinds of animals are similar enough to the behaviors of humans that we are able to recognize them. There are other cultural traits that we have not yet been smart enough to understand and very few languages we have been able to decipher, although some words of Chickadee have been decoded in recent times.

When you realize that our world isn’t simply made up of different tribes of humans expressing their cultures, communicating in their languages and worshiping in their various ways, but that it is very likely that all other earthly creatures are doing this as well, your wonder over the diversity and complexity of our environment increases immeasurably. If even the tiny Chipmunks are a great tribe of Earth’s people with a lifeway, a culture and a purpose of their own – and I hope you can see that they are – what an amazing world we inhabit, endlessly interesting, incalculably valuable.

What I Know About The Chipmunk People

• Chipmunks are only a few inches long from nose to the tip of their luxuriant little tail. They would easily fit in the palm of your hand.
• Like many people, chipmunks are omnivorous, eating seeds, nuts, berries, insects, amphibians and birds’ eggs.
• Most Chipmunk couples have 3-7 children at once and within a year, the young ones are ready to go out into the world, having learned all they need to know to work at survival.
• In places inhabited by Chipmunks, you may see them in trees or hiding amongst groundcover plants. They are small enough to fit underneath the Redwood Oxalis. They also like to come to the cleared edges of paths – perhaps for a clear view of their surroundings – but they are quick to dart back under cover if something appears dangerous to them.
• In public parks, the Chipmunk people have become rather used to the Human people, and provided that you have ability to sit quietly without making startling movements, Chipmunks will often be comfortable enough to share a space in the forest for you for a time. At such times, you can have the great pleasure of watching them and trying to communicate your goodwill by acting peacefully in their presence.
• Chipmunks are frequently drawn to campsites for forage. In general, non-devastated habitats provide plenty of natural food for Chipmunks, but if you are going to share your provisions with Chipmunks, please stick with organic seeds, nuts and berries. Do not feed Chipmunks processed foods like crackers and potato chips or any substance that has been genetically modified as this could endanger their health.
• Chipmunks are incredibly agile and can move with astonishing speed – leaping and dashing through the forest. Taking photographs as a celebration of Chipmunks is challenging. Wait until they feel comfortable with your presence. Let them see that you have a camera. If this does not bother them and they remain busy eating or resting, you may be able to take some beautiful photographs that you will cherish and that you can share with others in hopes of increasing public education about the vital roles Chipmunks play in the health of our environment.

Protecting The Rights Of Chipmunks
It is vitally important that we people take all possible steps to preserve forest lands intact. Beyond this, we must demand that our State and Federal Parks departments become educated about the deadly harms done to Chipmunks and other forest dwelling tribes by the use of herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately, Western forests are frequently sprayed with these substances as an archaic method of combating bugs or weeds. Dousing our forests with poisons in order to be rid of a grass or a moth is like dropping an atomic bomb on our house because we have a dandelion in our lawn or a spider in our kitchen.

Unfortunately, State and Federal Parks departments are improperly educated about the realities of poisoning the environment with pesticides and herbicides and are often, scandalously, in league with the manufacturers of these poisons because of the monetary wealth available for so-called ‘eradication’ programs. Imbalances in our forests, and in all lands, can be made right through natural, organic methods and ancient forms of ecological wisdom that cause harm to no one. It is only in the past century that people have veered from the time-honored paths of healthy and good stewardship. Turning to pesticides and herbicides as answers dishonors the long traditions of humanity of taking exceptional care of the planet we all call home. If you want to save forests for the many tribes that inhabit them, work toward a zero tolerance policy for pesticide/herbicide/fungicide/rodenticide use in your county and state.

Celebrating The Chipmunk People
We have been honored by repeat visits from various kinds of Chipmunks, including the ultimately tiny Alpine Chipmunks (not pictured here). Each time I meet with them, I am astonished by their smallness, their spirit and their skills. Many people pass through forests every day and are never aware that these little people are watching them from amongst clumps of wildflowers or the ridges of fallen tree branches. I sense a genuinely tolerant, amiable good will from the Chipmunk People towards we humans who are able to enter the forest with respect, quiet and an equal measure of good will. What a blessing!

The Viciousness Of Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin
VeganReader.com is not a political blog, nor do we find it correct to attempt to dictate the political views people should hold. Such choices are very personal. Rather, we speak here out of concern for the safety and well-being of all of Earth’s animal tribes and, at present, we are staring in a sort of pained horror at one of our fellow creatures – Vice Presidential Candidate, Sarah Palin.

As governor of the State of Alaska, Sarah Palin has sincerely frightened both local and national neighbors with her unconcealed bloodthirstiness. Thousands of individual wild wolves and bears will owe their brutal deaths to this misguided woman’s fixation on the execution of animals. This is not the story of an Inuit hunter spearing a Caribou for his family’s dinner. This is the gruesome spectacle of an unhealthy woman seizing power and using it to incite a massive, barabaric slaughter of some of the world’s last wolves and bears who are being gunned down by deranged, wealthy people from airplanes. These people pay for the opportunity to kill. In addition to mother and father wolves and bears being brutally destroyed in this manner, Palin’s followers have been violating the dens of wolves, hauling out 2 week old babies and shooting them dead. Governor Palin also set a paid bounty on wolves in 2007, offering $150 for the foreleg of each butchered wolf hauled in, and spent $400,000 on a marketing campaign intended to indoctrinate the public as to the wisdom of gunning down wildlife from planes.

Media and citizens are linking the adjectives ‘cruel’, ‘insane’, ‘cold’ and ‘psychotic’ to the character of this candidate for the Vice Presidency. She is causing a reaction of both fear and revulsion in observers around the world. What is the matter with Sarah Palin?

A Family History Of Animal Cruelty

The Humane Society of the United States has this to say about the pathology of children who commit acts of animal cruelty:

“If allowed to harm animals, children are more likely to be violent later in life…Cruelty is often associated with children who do poorly in school and have low self-esteem and few friends. Children who are cruel to animals are often characterized as bullies and may have a history of truancy, vandalism, and other antisocial behaviors. Researchers say that a child’s violence against animals often represents displaced hostility and aggression stemming from neglect or abuse of the child or of another family member. Animal cruelty committed by any member of a family, whether parent or child, often means child abuse occurs in that family. Calculated animal cruelty is motivated by a desire to harm…It is particularly important to intervene when a child is insensitive to the obvious distress of an animal, repeats a harmful behavior, or derives pleasure from causing an animal pain.”

I do not know much about the childhood or personal life of Sarah Palin beyond that she frequently killed animals with her father as a child. Could it be that, as a little girl, Palin thought wild creatures were beautiful, but had to deny her own feelings in order to go along with her father’s belief in the worthlessness of animals? Could it be that Palin had to shut something vital off in order to remain functional in her family unit, in order to fit in with the ethics of a family whose home is literally so festooned with the carcasses of slaughtered animals that it looks like some evil morgue out of a black nightmare? As an adult, Palin has also strewn the remains of once-living beings around her home. Could it be that these garish ‘trophies’ are actually the outward symbols of a mind that has grown diseased from having to adopt a shell of callousness around what may once have been a beating heart sensible to the majesty of wild creatures?

As the Humane Society of the United States relates, acts of cruelty against animals indicate a genuine intent to harm. Perhaps the tragedy of Sarah Palin is that the pathology of her rage has become so deep-seated that the thought of any wild creature still running free and un-killed in Alaska is too painful a reminder of the humanity she had to destroy within herself in order to be one-of-the-family. Normal, healthy children respond with joy to animals. Something has gone terribly wrong when an adult can only derive joy from their bloody and agonizing deaths.

When we watch videos like the terribly disturbing one above, created by the Defenders of Wildlife, our natural reaction may be one of outrage, even an impulse to retaliate with like violence. But I am suggesting to you that you give further thought to the disturbed psychology of this woefully violent woman, and realize that what we are witnessing in her is a genuine human tragedy.

Who Are Govenor Palin’s Defenseless Victims?

Climate change is rapidly bringing about disaster in Alaska, known as one of the last habitations of some America’s most beloved large mammals. These animals, the ancient inhabitants of North America, are now facing almost-certain extinction because of the combined realities of global warming and habitat loss. As if they were not already clinging for life to the weakest of final threads, these are the very creatures whom Palin has fixated upon for vicious, mass execution.

It is, in fact, a very lucky thing that Sarah Palin is so far gone in her mania for the killings of wildlife that she has let all the world see the symptoms of her disturbing mental problems. Just as we know that no sane person would willingly kill off the last members of a dwindling species, we know that when we look at Palin, we are not seeing the light of human reason. She has shown herself to be an extremely violent and dangerous woman who should certainly not be holding the office of governor. And, she has failed to hide the bloodbath the country would have to expect were she to become Vice President or the emergency President of the United States of America.

If anyone knows when the ability to respect and cherish life was lost to this poor wreck of a human being, it is only herself, or, perhaps her family. In her gory rage, Sarah Palin has tragically excluded herself from participating in the great thanksgiving many more fortunate people feel for the breathtaking glimpse of a wild wolf or bear, still roaming free in a natural setting. To us, it is a great comfort and spiritual support just to think of the white polar bear traversing his arctic domain, or the solemn song of the wolf families rising up to meet the glory of the northern lights. Only a very pitiable person would fail to respond to such noble images from our planet and want to destroy them with grotesque bloodshed. It is very disturbing to me, and to so many other Americans, to contemplate the state of Sarah Palin’s mind.

I will end with a final quote from the Humane Society of the United States:

How can I teach my child to respect animals?

Teach by example; use real-life situations to instill a sense of respect for all life. Invite your child to help you feed the birds or rescue a bug. With older children, discuss animal-cruelty cases publicized in the news. Encourage children to speak up for animals.

With all my heart, I wish that some kind adult had thought to help Sarah Palin in this way when she was young. I can only hope that there is yet a chance for her to acknowledge that creation was not created for her personal use, and that her place in the grand scheme of things ought to be the very humblest one.

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For more information about the need to keep this unhealthy-minded person out of high office for which she is clearly and unfortunately unfit, you will find very thorough documentation at these websites:

Grizzly Bay This is the best documentation I found of Gov. Palin’s disturbed personal character.

Defenders of Wildlife – This group has leapt to the defense of the helpless animals whom Vice Presidential candidate Palin has determined to kill.

Likely, you think, “no, human beings are people. Animals are not people.”

That is how most humans are raised to think about all species other than their own, but naturalists like John Muir, who spent the majority of his life in the wilderness, came to feel differently about the class of creatures we refer to as ‘animals’. He came to think of his fellow beings as other tribes of people, with lifeways and heritages, with purposes and important places in the story of Earth.

Today, the majority of human problems come from human failure to recognize the humanity in members of their own species. Bigotry, greed, fear, deceitfulness and the hunger for power cause humans to turn against one another once the decision has been made that some other person is of less value than one’s own self, and can therefore be abused or disregarded.

Here in California, millions of humble families have been living under the threat of men who hold jobs with agencies who wish to spray pesticides on their fellows. Despite the fact that this will cause disease and death amongst their own species, the job-holders have managed to overlook the basic rights and value of their neighbors in pursuit of their own goals. If they were to recognize the inviolate worth of each living human, they would never do such a thing, for any offered prize.

It is little wonder, then, that if human men are unable to recognize the fragile humanity in one another, that they would be hard put to see the personhood in a being like the Sloth.

For just a moment, would you try with me to forget the conventions you have been taught about humans and animals, look at the picture below, and tell me if you can see a person in this picture:

Look at this face, these wise and tender eyes, holding secrets we humans have yet to share in because we do not know how to communicate verbally with the Sloth People.

Maybe, someday, human beings will evolve far enough to begin understanding the language spoken by some of the many other tribes who inhabit our planet, but for now, we can only look into the faces of these beings and see if we are un-prejudiced enough to recognize the bond of personhood that unites us.

In the United States, it is illegal to put people in zoos, circuses, theme parks or other entertainment venues. Most humans would be repulsed by the idea of putting toddlers or elders in displays from which they cannot escape so that others can look at them. Since the abolition of slavery, it became illegal to buy and sell other people, or to compel them to work without pay. It is likewise illegal to perform medical experiments on humans, and this is one of the things that families in Santa Cruz and Monterey used to try to defend themselves from corporations and government agencies who sprayed them with untested chemicals in 2007. They pleaded that their human rights be recognized, though they were unable to make their aggressors do so, just as I am pleading with you now to recognize the personal rights of groups like the Sloth People.

What Are Rights?
If I were to ask you to articulate what it means to have human rights, you might answer somewhat like this:

“It means I’m a person who has my own purposes for my life, and no one else has the right to act in ways that prevent me from pursuing my own purposes. That means no one has to right to possess me, control me, harm me, use me or destroy my home. It means I belong to ME.”

You’d be quite right, of course, and the authors of the U.S. constitution felt the same way. They also felt that these kinds of rights can’t be given or taken away. They are something that are inherent to persons, just because they have the gift of life in them. It’s when humans pretend such rights don’t exist that trouble happens.

And this trouble extends to human failure to recognize that our fellow tribes of species are likewise imbued with their own purposes, and their own rights to belong to themselves. No one wants to be accused of being a racist. But racism means classing others as somehow different and less than one’s self, and this is precisely how most American children are raised to think of the beings we have classed as ‘beasts’. We are, without ill-intent, burdened with the hand-me-down of bigotry.

Yesterday, I wrote an article about a Proposition that is trying to decide whether humans should recognize that farm animals have the right to be able to move their limbs, or whether it is perfectly reasonable to keep them in cages so small, they cannot move at all. This is the fruit of the bigotry hand-me-down: humans who are so far gone to the power of recognizing the rights of others that they believe they are authorized to immobilize beings for all of their days spent on Earth before slaughter. This is how unobservant our tribe has become about every other family of beings but our own.

Today, I want to tell you the little I know about the shy Sloth People, in hopes that you will ask yourself whether what this family of creatures does here on the planet should be up to you to dictate.

Facts We Have Learned About Sloths

• 6 different types of Sloths live in Central and South America
• They are leisurely, quiet creatures, living in societies in the treetops of the rainforest
• Each family of Sloths has different eating preferences. The children of each family grow up appreciating the kinds of foods their parents most enjoy. They then pass these gustatory preferences onto the next generations
• Sloths often make a single tree their home for several years at a time
• For sleeping, they seem to prefer coconut trees as they provide a good camouflage for these very furry people
• No humans have ever understood how closely 3-toed and 2-toed Sloths are related to one another. It may be that the Sloths may have legends amongst themselves on this subject, but we do not know what they are.
• They are powerful swimmers, but mainly, they prefer the quiet safety of their treetop villages
• Owing to human destruction of the rainforest, Sloths face the loss of their homes, their lifeways and their lives

Because no human being has ever been able to learn to speak to a Sloth, we remain ignorant of their cultural beliefs or their world views. We can only hope that we may some day be able to communicate with Sloths, who are very ancient beings, and that they might share some of their wisdom about the wonderful rainforest with us, but until that time, our main moral obligation to them is to ensure that our actions do not disrupt their culture or their personal needs.

Learning To Respect The Sloth People’s Rights
Just like your father, you brother, you aunt or your child, Sloths have individual needs. Living in an apartment may suit your sister but your cousin feels depressed living anywhere but the country. Each of your loved ones is free to make their choice of home and activities. Were someone to force one of your dear ones to live in a concrete cage, who would call such an arrangement fair or adequate?

It is a great evil to kidnap and imprison sentient beings like the Sloths. Holding them hostage, with no hope of ransom, in zoos, circuses or amusement parks is truly immoral because it takes away their freedom of choice. Until the day that we learn to communicate with Sloth tribes and they can volunteer to come and show themselves to us, we have no right to enforce them to be seen, either for our amusement or monetary gain. The Sloths have chosen the rainforest as their home, and if Americans would like to go visit them, they must make the long journey south. Perhaps, in such circumstances, a quiet and respectful human might be allowed to take some pictures of the Sloth families in their beautiful home, in order to celebrate the value of this race of beings and to share this with other humans back in their own chosen home.

The second photograph in this article was taken in a national preserve in Costa Rica, where the Sloth families move about freely and live their lives unobstructed. You have only to look at the image to see how right and perfect it is. Sadly, the first photograph was taken at the U.S. Dallas World Aquarium and Zoo, Dallas, Texas – the only U.S. institution which has so utterly failed to recognize the individual rights of this Sloth that they are keeping the being in captivity. Are you able to see, as I believe I can, a person who is homesick when you look at that picture? Imagine what it would mean to this small, furry person to be taken home again, to the green forests where all the family is waiting. Imagine.

The Very Best Thing You Can Do To Honor Sloths
If you could take just one action to assert that you believe in the rights of the Sloth People to go on living their lives in their own way, it would be this: stop eating beef. Grazing cattle is the number 1 cause of the destruction of the land where these people live – the irreplaceable rainforest. Simultaneously, the production of beef for human consumption is one of the key causes of global environmental pollution and world hunger. By refusing to purchase beef, you are making the most powerful statement you can regarding the inherent rights of the Sloth Tribe. No hamburger is worth the loss of so ancient and beautiful a culture.

Honoring All
When I look at the news, I am inundated with examples of humans having lost their ability to recognize the rights of others. Assaults, killings, robberies and deceptions are rife in our own society which appears to have lost its way. I believe that the most meaningful effort you can make to counteract this evil and dismaying force in our society is to extend your generous recognition of rights beyond your own species. Let go of prejudice and look deeper than the labels of ‘human’ and ‘animal’, just as all people of good faith do to get past labels like ‘black’ and ‘white’. Extending your love and care for all of the other peoples, the ones we cannot yet understand, can only result in an expansion of the human heart.

Perhaps, if we taught the young to seek out the value in our fellow species, they would become better able to see the worth in our own.