Monday, March 3, 2014

Today Is World Wildlife Day!

Dear Friends!

Today is World Wildlife Day.  I am a very passionate man.  I am passionate about animals and dedicating my entire life to creating awareness ensuring that each animal is afforded the best life possible.  For my entire life, I have had a deep appreciation and empathy for the underdog.  Being a voice for the voiceless is my lifelong commitment.  In tribute to World Wildlife Day, here are videos to briefly outline what setting aside this day means:

Message from the CITES Secretary-General for World Wildlife Day

Kuki Gallmann, CMS Ambassador, on World Wildlife Day 2014

In honor of World Wildlife Day, I would like to discuss how we as humans can make a difference in the lives of animals.  Every single day, I am faced with a serious responsibility, a privilege and a moral dilemma.  As many of you know, I have two beautiful birds as my animal companions.  Dudley is a Yellow-Nape Amazon Parrot I adopted and rescued over 21 years ago and today is around 33 years old.  Sing-Sing is an Umbrella Cockatoo I welcomed into my home when I lived in Southern California in 2006.  At the time, Sing-Sing was only 10-months and now 8 years old.

To make a distinction, I use the word “companion” when I refer to a “pet” parrot because that is what they are and that is how they must be viewed.  Parrots are inherently flock animals and since we have removed them from their native habitat, it is very important that we do our best to replicate what they have lost by living in our homes.  I have become a part of Dudley and Sing-Sing's flock and it is my job to learn how that impacts Dudley and Sing-Sing.  As their flock leader, I also need to remember that parrots are still wild animals. They have been tamed, but they are genetically still wild and function from that point of view.

I have a heightened awareness over the responsibility for wild animals since I have two wild but tamed animals living in my own home.  So, what how should we as humans treat, manage and be responsible for wildlife and wildlife conservation?

What should we protect when managing and conserving wildlife?  There's no single answer. Competing values, and different prioritizations of values create ethical dilemmas and disagreements.

Wild animals have always been a critical resource for human beings. Historically, food, fur, and leather were key to human survival — more recently, wildlife has assumed high economic and cultural significance. Wild animals provide entertainment in circuses, zoos, and wildlife parks, they form a central attraction in international tourism, and they are key members of ecosystems on which humans rely for vital services. Equally, wild animals can be seen as threatening to human beings; for instance, they can be sources of new human diseases (zoonotics), and they can damage or consume human crops. What matters here, whether as resource or threat, is how useful — or otherwise — wildlife is to human beings. Environmental ethicists often call this instrumental value.

In modern debates about wildlife, however, other values have become increasingly important. One focus is on animal welfare — the wellbeing of individual wild animals (e.g., in terms of animals' flourishing, or suffering). There are also concerns about protecting species or populations of wild animals, about protecting the ecosystems of which wild animals form a part, and about protecting wild nature itself. The wellbeing of individual animals matters less where species, ecosystems, or wild nature is emphasized — indeed, painful predation may be understood as promoting ecosystem health, or as applying the right kind of selective pressure on a species as a whole.

In response to pressures on wild animals and their habitats, a nature and wildlife protection movement has grown over the last two centuries.  Often this protection has taken the form of active wildlife management, where some species are controlled as part of a policy to promote the success of other species.  This raises key questions about the responsibilities we have to wild animals. What should we try to protect? How should we balance different, potentially conflicting, values such as nature protection and individual animal welfare?

The management and use of wild animals generates ethical disagreements and dilemmas in which human needs, preferences, and interests, concern for individual animal welfare, and the value of biodiversity, ecosystems, and wild nature are part of the discussion. The way in which these different values are prioritized will determine policy.

In 2008, I established a group at a church called Noah's Ark Animal Lovers Group.  In a perfect world, which this is not, every single human could be a "Noah" -- yet, I realize that this is an imperfect, complicated world in which we live.

Blessings to you and your families for your love and care for animals.

Warmly,

Paul

Paul F. Flotron
Creature Comforts Great & Small, LLC
"Giving your creatures the comfort they deserve"
314-200-8561
Cell:  314-775-7107

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