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DateLine Sunday, 6 July 2008

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The tolerable kind

Come to think of it, a lot of my fellow citizens do not seem to know much about their neighbours -the small creatures which live alongside them. It was just two months ago, when I saw in a national newspaper a photograph of egrets feeding in a canal.

The writer has identified them as swans. Another monthly journal carried a crystal clear photograph of a Water Monitor Lizard sent by a correspondent who described it as a young crocodile.

Closer to home, the other day I was listening to my nephew (an engineer by profession) advising his children to keep off from all snakes and lizards since they are venomous.

This particular situation - the lack of even basic knowledge of the most common aspects of our biodiversity - acts a major deterrence when it comes to raising awareness of environmental issues among the Sri Lankan people.

This lack of awareness is also one of the main reasons for our inability to coexist peacefully with the other living beings who happen to be our neighbours.

That is why countless insects which find their way into our households, from beetles to geckos, end up having their lives needlessly snuffed out.

Spiders of all shapes and sizes, which help prey on unwanted insect pests, get turned into dirty smears on the wall with a rolled-up newspaper in return for their services.

No mercy is given, nothing at all. And if coexisting with the harmless species is already out of question, what more the idea of living with those that may actually cause bodily harm but which would ordinarily go all out to avoid human contact.

What will it take to convince our people that destroying our fellow creatures are not only harmful to humankind, but also morally repugnant, and instinctively insane? How can we give our people a sense of what they’re missing, what they’ve lost, forgotten? I don’t believe any of these could come about from reading books, watching nature documentaries on Discovery channel or trips to sanctuaries.

This knowledge can only come from first-hand experience. The experience that by coexisting with animals, we will be provided a connection with nature and reinforce our respect for all living things.

The knowledge that we can preserve open space and resources to ensure that animal lives are protected and that they may also thrive and when conflicts occur over shared space, we should seek humane solutions. We cannot protect what we cannot love. And we cannot love what we do not know.

Indeed, there are a great many mysteries out there in the natural world, but the root of the problem comes from our self-imposed blindness and myopia.

Personally, I cannot imagine a world without animals. I cannot imagine my life without my companion animals. I cannot imagine a walk in the bush without seeing birds, squirrels, rabbits, and when I am really lucky, the occasional mongoose, skunk or fowl. I dream of a world in which we have learned to coexist with animals and abuse of animals is unacceptable.

The day we can truly understand how animals co-habit with each other, we will begin to realise how much wiser they are than us in the fine art of survival on this resilient but ravaged world. And how much poorer this world becomes when we arrogantly destroy them and their communities to make evermore room for a single, insensitive, homogeneous human culture?

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