I believe animals connect us to core parts of our soul and our humanity.
I believe that if we taught children to love and protect animals, and if they kept that genuine and pure connection to animals as they grew, that love would not stop at the edge of another species. It would carry. It would transfer. A child who learns that the small and voiceless are worth protecting does not easily grow into an adult who looks away from corruption, or cruelty, or the slow violence we do to each other. An adult who sees themselves as having power with, not power over, animals and ecosystems, is an adult who will help their community to thrive.
The world we live in now, abundant with the killing of innocent people, indifference, and systems that grind whole lives down to nothing, does not happen in a world that values life at every level. It happens in a world that has practiced, from childhood, the art of deciding which lives count.
Loving and protecting animals is cause that, rather than detouring us from human suffering, brings us closer to it with more compassion. It is a practice that reminds us that all life is valuable and worth defending. Animals can teach us how to move away from eyes primed for judgement and hands inclined toward force, and they can move us into such gratitude and awe, that we are left instead with only fierce care, capability, and courage that pours out into the world around us.
This is why I do the work I do. This is why I am in Zimbabwe right now, meeting elephants and hyenas and a twenty-one-year-old pangolin, and telling you their stories. The more I continue to expand my love for the earth and all the creatures in it, the more that love spills over and reaches the human beings around me, too.
Protecting them is also, eventually, how we protect each other.
🐘
