Fw: In the silence of the wilderness.....

[Guest guest]

The photographs are exquisite, and the message is important. Blessings, Joy

----- Original Message -----

"For in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." Baba Diou

This is going to be a rather LONG post for it seems that today is yet another day when my heart is crying out, my head weary of thinking through the endless babbling of a world leadership gone mad, and my spirit thirsts for some level of hope to quench the parched desert of my existence. I speak these words and share these images here from my heart to yours in hopes that the understanding and compassion of such things can be strengthened by the coming together of like minds. That is always my hope.

My previous posting was about the over turning of a judicial ruling by which the marine mammals had gained protection from the use of sonar that literally explodes their hearing and is proven to cause rupture inside their brains. The beaching of hundreds of whales over time has been a constant "question" in the scientific minds and recently, many are in agreement that the whales are literally running for their lives or have all ready been damaged to the point where they cannot navigate due to sonar blasting and other military war games where massive explosions which also harm the sensitive marine life.

So our President has decided to IGNORE the judges' rulings after all proper manner of legal hearings and allow the continuance of sonar and war games. Ignoring the entire basis upon which our country has been formed, the legal justice system, and regardless of the fact that the court heard from both sides of the case and determined its ruling based on the rule of law, Bush over turned the courts' decisions.

Only in recent years have we begun to truly glimpse the enormous capacity for language, communication and intelligent thought processes that are part of the brains in dolphins and whales. Through extensive research, scientists have seen proof of problem solving skills, higher thought processes and immense communication skills demonstrated by dolphins. Now imagine that a whale, depending upon the species, has a brain that is hundreds of times larger than that of any other creature. The complexity of their communication is beyond what we mere humans can even fathom. Yet, because we "do not understand their language" they are deemed "inferior." I think not.

Let us back up a bit in our history here in the USA. The senseless slaughter of millions of buffalo was the epitome of greed and disrespect for the value of another creature and its place within the web of life. There was another part of this story in history however and that was the ultimate destruction of a race of human beings that were "in the way" of progress. By killing off the buffalo, the U.S. government effectively brought the American Indians to their knees and starvation was the end result. The loss of the buffalo may have been one of the greatest "control methods" employed in the genocide of a race and culture.

Now jump forward several decades and see a new mindset appearing on the horizon.... the mindset of protection of certain wild places and animals was beginning to take shape and garner supporters. The buffalo were saved from entire extinction when a handful of remaining animals were placed inside Yellowstone National Park. They were in a "zoo" but one with invisible boundary lines that forced the wild animals to dwell within HUMAN parameters of survival. The end result? When the buffalo go outside of their boundaries or grow in numbers that the "wildlife management experts" consider "wrong" the destruction of the animal is the resultant solution.

This lovely creature above is a camel. They have an extraordinary ability to survive in ways and in environments that we humans never could. I will confess that over the many decades of my life, I had never really considered the lowly camel as something to be "cared for" or protected. Truly, I can say that I never spent any time admiring photographs of camels or watching documentaries about them. I certainly never wrote about them nor took any stance on protecting them but that all changed last year.

I have many online friends who live in Australia. I had read some news stories about the devastating droughts in their homelands but was not any more aware than that. One morning I read a story and watched a posted video that literally shook me to the core of my existence.

The camels are not native to Australia but were "transplanted" there by the British who gathered wild camels from totally different regions and shipped them over to Australia for use in their exploration and domination of the area. The camels were used by the humans, and then discarded out into the wilderness because their services were no longer needed. The camels survived and multiplied without any kind of management and have overwhelmed the regions with thousands of wild camels.

The Australian drought has been one of the worst in recorded history. Humans trying to survive out in the wild areas of Australia have been precariously perched on the ledge of survival and water has become the all-important factor. Knowing the background of just this small portion of the story happening in Australia would not prepare me for the news story and video that I watched that day. Hundreds of camels that were trying desperately to survive and care for their young had appeared in the outlying villages in search of precious, life-giving water. They tore up water lines, tore down building walls and beat upon anything and everything in their path trying to reach the water they could smell but could not reach.

The solution by the government there? Truck in some water to help the camels and other wildlife that were desperate to survive? Oh heavens no. The camels were machine gunned to death simply because they, like their human counterparts, were desperate for WATER.

I started crying so hard that I could barely breathe. My poor husband returned home from a trip to town to find his wife bawling her eyes out and unable to even speak. He thought for sure that a close friend had died or that some horrible event was about to be laid out before him. He kept asking over and over, "What's wrong? My God, will you just tell me what in the world has you in this crying fit!?"

All I could manage to eeck out of my mouth, between the cascading tears and the gasps for breath was, "I'm crying about camels!"

I remember that moment like it was yesterday! He bit his lip, dropped his gaze, stared at the floor...well, lets just say that the poor man was trying everything humanly possible to not burst into laughter. He tried, but the bizarre statement and the condition of his bawling wife were simply too hilarious for the poor man to contain himself any longer. He started laughing until tears were running down his face though his tears were from total, absolute, dumb-founded laughter!

I realized how outrageous the statement was and started to laugh a bit myself and that aided me in finally being able to tell him the REASON for my "crying about camels." He tried to empathize a bit with me but was still in amazement that a camel could ever play such a role in bringing me to this wailing state. What I finally communicated to him was the bottom line concern that if we showed such reckless disregard for animals dying of thirst, what would our response be to HUMANS? Do you believe that humans would ever kill off others in need of food and water with the same disregard as the Australian government had shown to the camels? If you believe not, then perhaps some reading and investigation into the human treatment of their fellows in Africa is in order.

Just a few days ago, my husband confessed that there had been a television show on a late night wildlife program that he watched. He said that for over an hour, he watched and learned about the amazing survival abilities of camels! He just couldn't turn the channel and "ignore" the camels... and found himself actually coming to admire these rather unattractive and little respected creatures. Then of course he began laughing again and asked me if anyone else on the planet had to deal with a hysterical wife that "cries about camels." I don't have an answer, but I certainly hope there is another human out there who would. For truly, if we cannot find compassion for the least of our fellow inhabitants on planet Earth, then how will we ever care for each other?

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." ~ Albert Einstein, 1950 ~

As with the whales, the human race has LONG overlooked the amazing complexities within the elephant herds. Scientists have marveled at their complex relationships within each herd, the curious connections each elephant has to each other and the seeming lack of complex communication. The scientific community has tracked elephant family units who make pilgrimages back to graveyards where others of their family have died. They assumed that the elephants had no real "language" because they had tape recorded them and found such little human evidence to substantiate the elephants "language."

Along comes a woman who finally "thought outside the box" and took her tape-recorded elephant sounds back into a studio. She sped the tape speed WAY up and realized that we humans, in our arrogance, had assumed that elephants had no complex language because we couldn't hear it! What she discovered was that the elephants had a VERY complex communication but that because it was of such a low frequency, we had not been hearing it!

The destruction of vast species and the total disrespect of certain creatures have been as a result of not "understanding" them. Human kind seems hell-bent to place ourselves at the superior levels of intelligence and development simply because we communicate and have logical thought processes. Really? I wonder how stupid these same humans will feel when eventually we are able to prove the levels of vast intelligence in whales or the keen abilities in other species that we said did not exist simply because we had not figured out how to understand them!

I have lived alongside the moose here for almost a decade now. I have shared my experiences and observations with wildlife biologists and my readers alike. Moose may be in the same boat with the elephants in that they are thought to have no real "language." Perhaps this year I will try that tape recorder with my local moose and just speed it up to see if they too, communicate in tones too low for humans to hear.

One fact I do have proof of in moose is that they also return to the places where their ancestors have died. I have dated pictures and proof of this only because I have lived here amongst several generations of them and have seen the actual behaviors around the place where the grandmother moose died in my meadow 7 years ago.

Along the same lines as the buffalo, the amazing wolf was killed and literally at the point of 100% extinction until some humans decided to "protect" them. All kinds of studies and human interventions were undertaken to aid the wolf packs in regaining their place in the web of life. We have studied these individuals and packs so that we finally have a limited understanding of their relationships to each other and their amazing communication abilities as well.

Now, however, the cattlemen are screaming that they are losing cattle to the wolf packs. Governmental leaders are jumping on the bandwagons of their big-money special interest groups and allowing the killing of wolves... again.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here?

"The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival."

K. Udall

We humans make assumptions about the dangerous large predators. Anything that stands in the way of "progress" is eliminated or its numbers are vastly reduced. I shared an amazing series of photos that included the one above, showing a polar bear that came into a camp and did not EAT the tethered sled dogs. No, instead, the lonely bear played with, slept with and shared time alongside the sled dogs for a number of days. Now, does that mean that is a typical polar bear behavior? Certainly not. I live in an area of the country and show photographs of my home here on the mountain that give proof to the fact that I am the LOW MAN on the food chain here. I have and always will be careful as I wander around here because I am surrounded by bears, mountain lions, moose and other critters that can harm or kill me under certain circumstances. I have done my best to learn and watch them so that I am much more aware of their responses to me being too close or invading their territory. I have never assumed that I was GREATER than they simply because I was "human."

We humans are amused and sometimes shocked at the ability in animals to be accepting of others from a totally different "tribe." I have written for years about some of the amazing companions that some animals choose to be their "companions" whether long or short term. I had a Great Horned Owl decide that I was its "family member" for a couple of months late one Summer here. The silly owl would follow my husband and I around all hours of the day and night and fly in right near us while we did ranch chores here. The feathered friend finally flew off to find its own kind and the only thing any of my wildlife and raptor friends could figure out was that it was the last one to leave the nest and "attached" itself to my husband and I as "family."

When the moose calves are pushed away by their mothers and when sows send their bear cubs on their way, they often "attach" themselves to a totally opposite buddy out of need for companionship. Our now HUGE bull moose named "Sandy" followed a small group of deer around as well as hanging out with me and the horses here when he was kicked out on his own by his mother. Why do we humans always ASSUME that animals are "dumb" and so unlike us simply because we speak differing languages and have different habits?

Are you still seeing a pattern here? Is it more believable to you now when you see that how we treat our wild creatures, the environment and Earth is a direct reflection of how we treat fellow human beings?

Thank you for taking time to read through this long post. I know that I can sometimes be a "difficult" friend because you just never know what to expect from me many times. Who knows!? Maybe you may have to deal with me some day down the road, "crying about camels!"

Perhaps, you will cry with me. For, "We are all related" my friends. We are divinely and intimately connected to all other things in creation. None is more important or less important in the web of life but all things are connected. As we find the compassion for those being tortured, raped and murdered in places like Darfur, may we see that there is also the compassion needed for camels. In my heart and mind, there is the need for compassion towards all things.

You are all dear to me, I am honored to have this time in life to walk together and learn from each other. May your day be blessed in all ways,

Bluejay

"There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community." (M. Peck)