Jane Goodall has called for an end to wildlife trafficking and bush meat

Jane Goodall is the world-famous primatologist and anthropologist who lived with apes and understands them. Her voice is a powerful one. Writing on the Slate.com website (APRIL 06, 2020) she said that Covid-19 should make us rethink our destructive relationship with the natural world. Humankind needs to chart another way forward. The pandemic which has stricken the world should make humanity rethink its relationship with the natural world.

Jane Goodall. Collage: PoC. Photos in public domain.

It is long overdue as far as I am concerned. You won't be able to make a change through voluntary action. It will have to be forced upon people and encouraged by offering alternatives to bush meat and to making money out of trafficking while animal parts.

ASSOCIATED: Statement of Jane Goodall about the killing of Cecil the lion

More than half the diseases that have emerged since 1960 were caused by disease spreading from wild animals. As I said, you would have thought that we would have learnt by now but apparently not. Jane Goodall says that the world is interconnected and that what happens in one part of the natural world affects the rest including humans. A weakness of humans is that they feel distanced from the natural world and they are almost invariably self-interested.

Most people hadn't heard of the pangolin until Covid-19 emerged. It is believed that the virus which causes Covid-19 originates in bats and was transferred to people via pangolins. Pangolins are the most persecuted and used animal on the planet because the scales and body parts are used in traditional Chinese medicine and in foods because it is believed they improve health.

Goodall says that people are now feeling the true cost of wildlife trafficking and the destruction of the natural world. I would add bush meat is another major influence in that process. Goodall said that her work informs her that thousands of great apes are stolen from the wild every year and hunted for their body parts and to eat. 

Bush meat in China and Africa is commonplace. That means humans eating apes and monkeys too. Out cousins. They are murdered and eaten. Horrible. I'm concerned about Africa with respect to the spread of Covid-19 because their hospitals are ill-equipped to deal with it. If it expands rapidly in the African continent and it has started in sub-Saharan Africa where there is one doctor of every 5,000 people compared to 300 in Europe it may be catastrophic. The average American hospital has more intensive care beds than most African countries.

Jane Goodall noted that the diseases Sars and Mers are former virus epidemics which had spread from animals.

Every country must do its part to create more comprehensive legislation to protect wildlife, and illegal trafficking and ban sales.

I agree, that China to name one important country, must legislate to dramatically improve animal welfare and wildlife. However, great legislation without enforcement is worse than useless. The truth of the matter is that we can't be too optimistic about the impact of legislation in places like China or Africa. There is far too much corruption. 

Corruption fatally undermines law enforcement. It needs a complete change in attitude and culture to remove corruption and I don't believe it can be done. I know that's incredibly pessimistic but corruption must be dealt with almost initially before enacting fresh legislation.

And there needs to be international enforcement. We have treaties and agreements in place already with CITES to control the movement of animal body parts and live animals across the globe. What happens? Almost nothing has changed. The industry is worth billions and agreements are just walked over and ignored. 

I'm afraid Goodall is too optimistic, almost naive in my opinion but it is also correct that there needs to be dramatic change. She mentions that China implemented a strict ban on wildlife trafficking after the emergence of Covid-19. But has it been enforced? China shut down 20,000 wild animal markets but there are reports that they have reopened as if nothing has happened. Corruption, as I said, undermines everything.

When you protect wildlife and nature you protect humans and their communities. Humans have to reconnect with nature and see the importance of protecting it. Fundamental changes are required which are so profound that they will take many decades to come about.

Leonardo DiCaprio uses his celebrity voice for big cat welfare and animal welfare generally

In a tweet as long ago as April 20, 2012, Leonardo DiCaprio said that: "Big cats like tigers and lions belong in the wild, not in people's backyards and basements. Take action!"

Big cats like tigers & lions belong in the wild, not in people's backyards & basements. Take action! http://t.co/dQngyEEq @action4ifaw

— Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) April 20, 2012

In many American states there are quite lax laws regarding the possession and keeping of big cats as pets. There are more tigers in private zoos in America than there are in the wild on the planet. Texas has the biggest population of captive big cats. The Netflix Tiger King documentary about the man who had the largest private zoo in America, Joe Exotic, helped to highlight the need to change things and regulate the possession of big cats as pets. He's in jail for 22 years but it helped to provide a platform for Carole Baskin, the Big Cat Rescue founder and manager (who he tried to kill) for her campaign to create legislation to restrict big cat ownership in America. You can read about that by clicking on this link if you want to.

But what I'm interested in saying in this article is that people like DiCaprio are so valuable to animal welfare because they can use their voice, their considerable voice to motivate the legislators and the public in general to take action on protecting wildlife, and not only the iconic big cats but so many other species of animal who are in dire straits; quite dramatically endangered in terms of survival because of the destruction of their habitat as a result of the commercialisation of the landscape.

Self-indulgent idiot lion owner gets hurt by his pet lion and he deserves it. Pic: Screenshot.

DiCaprio has set an extraordinary example of what he meant when he asked the nations' leaders to stop procrastinating and take action to mitigate the environmental damage done by humans by raising $43 million (£30.2 million) to help restore wildlife in the Galapagos Islands, one of the most important and fragile ecosystems on Earth.

He has pledged the funds this week in association with the Galapagos National Park Directorate, Island Conservation which "prevents extinctions and restores islands". And also, with Re:wild, a global conservation charity that DiCaprio co-founded with leading conservation scientists.

The large size of the investment will help to make real change and the work will begin in this remote Pacific archipelago which is 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. It is the island where in 1835 Charles Darwin observed wildlife and nature including the local finches which led him to begin formulating the theory of evolution through natural selection leading to his work On the Origin of Species.

They want to re-wild the islands and prevent the extinction of the pink iguana, a marine resources protection scheme to boost ecotourism which is very important to the economy. And they want to restore Floreana Island which is home to 54 threatened species. They want to reintroduce 13 locally extinct species on that island.

In addition, they have a plan to re-wild all of Latin America's Pacific archipelagos, from Mexico to Chile. Big thinking.

DiCaprio is described as an actor and environmentalist on social media. He has visited the Galapagos Islands. He said: "Around the world, the wild is declining. We have degraded three quarters of the wild places and pushed more than 1 million species to the brink of extinction. More than half of the Earth's remaining wild areas would disappear in the next few decades if we don't decisively act."

He wants action now not just for the big cats maltreated in tiny captive environments to please self-indulgent Americans but to do bigger things in conservation. It is brilliant that he is using his voice and status to achieve this.

Are banks doing enough for animal welfare?

The question that I have is whether high street banks, the big banks in any country, are doing enough for animal welfare by donating to, for example, animal shelters or conservationists and campaign groups fighting for improvements in wildlife welfare.

There's lots of options for a bank to donate even a small sum relative to their overall income to improve the plight of persecuted wildlife. It's a topic of major concern nowadays because of the coronavirus pandemic. People have been switched on to the need to respect nature because it is believed that the pandemic originated in a wet market in China where the workers disrespected nature. This allowed the disease to spread from a wild animal to a person and then to many more people.

Corporate giving clipart in the public domain (deemed).

Corporate donations to charity is probably quite a tricky discussion for directors of these big businesses. I have no idea whether they discuss it at all. But I would have thought that it would be good publicity for a cold-hearted big business to get involved in charitable giving particularly on the issue of animal welfare.

I can sense that there is a growing interest in the citizens of many countries in the area of animal welfare. If I am right then a bank giving for the purpose of improving animal welfare would be good publicity. Banks always need good publicity because they project an image of greed in my view and everything they do is about making money for the directors - the fat cats. They provide a very average service in terms of interest rates on savings to the decent citizens who are their customers.

I bank with Lloyds in the UK and there provided me with a terrible service recently after my debit card was stolen. They wouldn't compensate me until I pushed really hard and they provided terrible instructions on how to reset my pin number. The whole experience has been poor and they could do a lot better. I sense that the banks become complacent because we have to rely on them. Complacency breeds contempt which in turn breeds poor customer service.

Unsurprisingly, when I googled for information about banks giving to animal welfare charities I couldn't find anything at all. Absolutely nothing was thrown up by Google. I had hoped to see at least one bank donating a small sum of money by their standards to the advancement of animal welfare either domestic or wild animal but nothing, nada, zilch. That does not mean that some bank somewhere gives money towards animal welfare and it is simply not publicised or Google can't find information, but it looks bleak.

The British government, thanks to Carrie Symonds, is doing more about animal welfare and I can't see why the banks in Britain can't jump on that bandwagon and do more themselves. If they want to present a more caring image to the wider public there's nothing better that they can do than to give to animal welfare charities or charities involved in wildlife conservation. There is a pressing need on both fronts for improvements. Let's see it happen.

Asiatic Cheetahs in Iran are Unique but Neglected by Iranian Authorities

We are told that only a "few dozen" Asiatic cheetahs remain in Iran. A forgotten species of wild cat; sidelined by political confrontations. These are the big issues for humankind -- shame that very late in the day the Iranian authorities are making a last ditch effort to save the Asiatic cheetah in Iran. It is probably too late because the population size is arguably too small to achieve sufficient genetic diversity to ensure that inbreeding is avoided. Inbreeding results in infertility which in turn further diminishes the chances of survival - a downward spiral (see Siberian tiger habitat).

Iran's World Cup football team were involved in cheetah conservation.

There used to be about 400 Asiatic cheetahs in Iran as recently as the 1990s, we are told (I am not sure about that to be honest) but numbers have plunged to an "estimated" (estimates are often optimistic) 50-70 individuals. The cause is the usual suspects: poaching, hunting the cheetah's prey and reducing it to the point where the cheetah can no longer survive together with loss of habitat due to human expansion and activity.

Additional reasons for cheetah loses are: being hit by cars when crossing roads and attacks by sheep dogs (farmers occupy cheetah territory).

Apparently the Iranian government see financial profit in ensuring the survival of the cheetah. Well, yes, but it is a bit late, isn't it?

With United Nations assistance cheetahs are being more carefully monitored by fitting GPS collars so they can be tracked. Also, the authorities seem to adopting a similar approach to conservation to that of the Snow Leopard Trust; getting the local people involved and committed to conservation while compensating farmers for the loss of livestock due to cheetah attacks to avoid retaliation by famers.

Gary Lewis of the U.N. Development Program says:

"There are no other Asiatic cheetahs like the one that you have here in Iran..."

Therefore it is vital to save them form extinction in the wild in Iran. Vice President Masoumeh Ebtekar who is in charge of Iran's Department of the Environment says,

...we are working very seriously with international organizations as well as our national specialists and experts to protect this species."

Iran has used the football World Cup to promote the campaign to save the cheetah in Iran. There are images of the cheetah on their kit.

Source: Fox News